Category: Accessibility

The Visual-only icon problem

June 30, 2014

8 Comments

Topics: Accessibility, Web Development.

This is something I’ve been seeing a lot lately, and it’s got to stop. This illustrates the use of icon only controls. In this case, using an icon font. (Similar problems show up using any form of icon-only control, however!) Now, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with icon fonts; but there’s often a problem with how they’re used. In this particular case, these are two links, used to toggle a particular preference. You can tab to them and activate them from […]

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WordPress Accessibility Plug-in: Who needs it?

May 12, 2014

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Topics: Accessibility, WordPress.

TL;DR: The WP Accessibility plug-in contains features that will be useful to all WordPress sites, such as support for the longdesc attribute. Even if your theme was designed with accessibility in mind, there’s a place for the WP Accessibility plug-in on your site. The most common question I get about the WP Accessibility plug-in is “When do I need this plug-in?” Fact is, most people don’t know whether their themes are accessible. Further, it’s hard to pin down which aspects […]

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It’s all in the timing

April 17, 2014

3 Comments

Topics: Accessibility, WordPress.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about the crucial nature of timing in what I do. Like everything, when you engage on a particular step can have a profound impact on what you can accomplish. In any web project, engaging on web accessibility from the beginning can make the difference between a nominal percentage of the budget dedicated to ensuring accessibility and massive budget bloat caused by the need for extensive review of complex systems that gave no thought to the subject […]

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My Calendar 2.3.0: It’s been a long time coming

April 10, 2014

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Topics: Accessibility, WordPress.

I released the last version of My Calendar – a minor bug fix release for the 2.2 version cycle – on October 29th, 2013. The first release in the 2.2 code base was April 17th, 2013. So, I’ve been sitting on this code base for just under a year. It’s time for an update. But I hope it’ll be worth it — this new release has a lot of great updates. I’ve re-worked a number of back-end operations, and hopefully […]

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Update to WP Accessibility: longdesc

March 25, 2014

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Topics: Accessibility, WordPress.

Having just returned from the premiere conference on accessibility and technology, it was inevitable that I would find myself brimming with new ideas. This year, it started quite early, when John Foliot caught me and told me he had something he’d like for me to do. John being who he is, I was already quaking in my comfortable shoes. The history of longdesc in HTML5 is complicated: the decision to keep the attribute required many long arguments and defense of […]

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