a11y with Lindsey, where we want to make our internet, Everyone's internet!
I have a confession to make. While I have been a professional web developer for over 6 years, I didn't feel comfortable with JavaScript until a year and a half ago. I still don't feel like I know a lot of things. There's a lot that still confuses me. But I've grown a lot in my knowledge in the past year and a half. I wanted to share what I've learned. My goal is to get more accessibility folks…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. I’ve wanted to write this blog post ever since I wrote a11y and JS - A Seemingly Unconventional Romance . I love JavaScript, and my job is to code in React. I often observe folks (rightly) critique that React Apps are inaccessible. According to the WebAIM Million report , “the adoption of React corresponded with 5.7% more accessibility errors than the…
I’ve always loved exploring how to make semantic, accessible elements aesthetically pleasing. And yes, it is possible. Challenging myself to do this has improved my CSS skills. Today we are going to talk about input[type="range"] . These inputs where you select a value from a slider that has a thumb on it. You start with HTML that looks like this: NOTE: I use the visually hidden class to ensure…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. Hey friends! Today's writing is going to be a follow up to How Accessibility Taught Me to be Better At JavaScript . If you have read my content, one of my favorite topics is about JavaScript and Accessibility. I speak about how JavaScript is actually necessary to make interactive elements accessible. In my previous article, I talked about how I…
Hey friends! Wedding planning is starting to heat up with five months left to go. I was pretty ambitious about my writing schedule when I started my second year of blogging. I figured I had so much more free time on my hands versus what I had six months ago. But I didn’t account for the timeliness of my wedding and my other goals. Whoops. This blog is a work in progress, just like me. Anyways,…
Hey friends! I got back from Toronto last week after speaking at a11yTO, one of the only conferences where I wanted to speak! I spoke about accessibility and JavaScript. This talk was loosely based on my a11y and JS - A Seemingly Unconventional Romance post . So I'm pretty motivated to do a JavaScript-heavy blog post. One of my favorite posts that I've written was my accessible bar chart post .…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. Hey friends! Hope you’ve had a great week! This tweet I wrote a while back inspired me to write this blog post: One of the responses was “this would be a good blog post.” So here I am. In this post I’m going to go over: Background on my first project as the sole front end developer The requirements of that project that led me to get better at…
Hey friends! Guess what?? It’s my 30th birthday! And because I really love to be poetic, one year ago today, I decided to launch A11y with Lindsey. So my blog’s birthday is on my birthday! A lot has happened in the past year. A lot of opportunities that I’ve come across since I started blogging. A lot of mistakes I made. A lot of veering off course. A lot of personal growth. A new job that made me…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. Hey friends! In this post, I am going to walk you through a newer media query (to me): prefers-reduced-motion . Quick confession: I know CSS fundamentals, but I am pretty behind on all the new stuff that has been coming out. Because my focus is usually on accessibility, I am focusing far more on HTML and JavaScript. When I focus on CSS, it's ensuring…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. Hey friends! Today we'll be creating custom keyboard accessible radio buttons! This blog post is a follow-up post from my accessible checkboxes post . We'll go over: The markup Creating a pseudo-element on the label in CSS Add "selected" styling in CSS Add focus styling Starting out I decided to create a simple group of radio buttons asking what your…
EDIT: I resigned from the podcast in late August 2019. The accessibility lessons I learned are still relevant if you'd like to start a podcast, but in full transparency, this post is technically out of date. If you haven’t noticed, I haven’t been around! It’s been a month since I posted, and there’s been a good reason for that. Kelly Vaughn, Ali Spittel, Emma Bostian, and I started the Ladybug…
Last week, I got a decent amount of folks who found the aria states blog post helpful. This week I wanted to continue with that and go over something that took me a long time to understand: labeling. How do you label things? What needs labeling? What is the difference between all the ways to label things? After this post, you should have a firmer understanding of all things labels. Form Labels…
Hey friends! Today’s blog post comes to you from my Patreon folks' poll. It’s a follow up from one of my previous posts about Demystifying ARIA . ARIA can be utterly mysterious and daunting, but it’s handy. One of my favorite ways to use it is to communicate state to screen readers. I’m seeing a positive trend in the a11y community. Instead of using classes to style elements, a11y folks are…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. This post isn’t going to be a talk about speaking. I wanted to give you a glimpse because if you don’t follow me on Twitter, you would have no idea! Onto blogging! A few weeks ago, I asked people if they had an interest in my blog editing process. I’m very public about my writing process, and the idea popped into my head. I had an overwhelming…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. When I first wrote my post about JavaScript and Accessibility , I promised I would make it a series. I've decided to use my patreon to have votes on what my next blog post is. This topic won, and I'm finally getting more time to write about JavaScript! So this topic I am going to go into a deep dive on how to make accordions accessible! Our focus is:…
Hey y’all! First off, I want to thank people for their patience with this post. I had a very stressful few weeks after I published my last post. Of course, I chose to do a highly technical post in the middle of a stressful deadline at work. That deadline has since past, and I finally finished this post! I asked on Twitter what you’d like for me to write about next. Many people requested they…
Happy Tax day (at least if you're American)! My last post was about my accessibility testing process. However, this week, I wanted to examine automated testing. I have my initial process of what I do while I am working and what I make sure I manually test. I also wrote about all the things I manually test . These days Continuous Integration is essential for large teams. To your surprise, I haven't…
Hi friends! It’s been a hot minute since I wrote a blog post. If you follow me on Twitter , you know that I took a very strategic break in March to work on getting ahead of things. So now I am up and running, and I asked some followers what they wanted me to write next. It sounded like people were curious about my web accessibility testing approach! So I’m going to walk you through my thought…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. I wrote a tweet thread a while back where I started talking about ways to keep accessibility in mind on the platforms we use such as Twitter. Sometimes we don’t have control over the platforms we use, and the best we can do is ensure our content is accessible. This tweet thread got a decent amount of attention, but unfortunately, it’s easy for things…
Back in October, I wrote a post about 10 things I've learned from working remotely , and it was a big hit. It actually made the top 7 posts that week on dev.to ! I had been working remotely for about 16 months at that point, and I shared a bunch of things that I had learned. A few months ago, I got an incredible offer. It was approximately 32% more than I was making - but there was a catch. I had…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. If you didn’t know this already, I usually cross post all these on DEV . When I cross-posted about why accessibility isn’t an edge case, I got a comment wishing accessibility was more straightforward to implement. I didn’t find learning to make accessible solutions to be that challenging once I was up to date on HTML and CSS best practices, so I was…
This post was inspired by a few things. First, a few months ago Rian Rietveld announced she was resigning as the WordPress accessibility lead . I read through the post, and the reason seemed to be mainly about Gutenberg. It seemed that despite all the wpa11y’s team’s warnings, they were pushing to release it while it was almost unusable for those who need assistive devices. I found there to be a…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. When I was a Drupal developer, a great deal of interest went into Automated Accessibility Testing. I very much loved working on automation especially when it was incorporated into our Continuous Integration. This would fail builds that introduced accessibility errors, which was a great way to ensure that we were thinking about accessibility from the…
The primary question I get from developers is “How do I get my clients on board” or sometimes “How do I convince my boss that it’s worth investing in?” I was asked this once at a panel, and my response was “I don’t, I just do it.” Because I understand accessibility pretty well and build with accessibility in mind from the start, I am usually able to solve accessibility problems relatively quickly…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. After cross-posting my last accessibility post about dropdowns on dev.to , I was reading through the comments and someone posted about :focus-within . The best thing about sharing my knowledge on the internet is learning how other people are approaching things. Quite frankly, I have never used :focus-within before, so this is me learning and testing…
It's that time of year where I utter the same predictable phrase: "This year feels like it's been so long and yet so short!" As some may have noticed, I took a bit of a break from blogging in December. However, the positive of that is I've had a lot of time to reflect on the year and my goals for the upcoming year. Blog This blog is something I wanted to start since April this year. I worked with…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. Want to see this in action? I created a 6 minute video collection! Go To My Free Egghead Collection Hover navigations are pretty simple to do without JavaScript, which is how I usually see them implemented. The HTML and CSS are pretty simple. HTML: CSS: Note: I have used the visually-hidden styling instead of display: none . This is important for…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. I've seen a ton of designers make these GORGEOUS checkbox styles, but then you see them implemented and you can't even select it using your keyboard. Let's say we got this in our style guide from our designer. I've seen this implemented before and it looks gorgeous. However, when I press the tab key, it zips right past it. If this field is required,…
Happy Thanksgiving to those of us in the United States! I've been in this industry now for about 4 and a half years. In the spirit of Thanksgiving (in the US), I wanted to make a specific list of what I am thankful for in my journey as a developer. Community I am very thankful for the tech communities to which I belong. I know that meeting people on the Internet was taboo at one point, but I've…
Content Warning: This blog post contains gifs. As I started this blog, I began to follow specific hashtags on Twitter. I learned that last month was Dyslexia Awareness Month after following the a11y hashtags on Twitter. I’ve always said that disability isn’t always visible, mainly learning disabilities. However, this is something that Web Accessibility doesn’t cover often. I’ve found very few…
I soft-launched my blog the day before my birthday, announced it on my birthday (October 3rd), and now it's 4 weeks later. It's been a very intense and rewarding process thus far, and I've taken this week to reflect on it. I wanted to share what I have learned thus far for those of you who wanted to get started but also wanted someone to keep it real. To keep it transparent, these are my…
Back in fall of 2016, I spoke for the first time about accessibility. While planning my presentation and looking for a relevant case study, I stumbled upon something that was quite relevant for the time - the presidential candidates’ donation sites. Considering Section 508 applies to government agencies, I figured that their sites would be super accessible. Boy, was I wrong. The biggest issue on…
I wanted to write a blog post about one of my favorite accessibility topics - keyboard accessibility! I test this so much without even trying because as a developer I use my keyboard so much. I use it to navigate around apps, within a web page, and scrolling through my millions of tabs on my browser (who else is guilty of that haha). What is Keyboard Accessibility Keyboard accessibility is…
If I ask anyone what accessibility means to them, usually the first thing that they can identify is “Adding alt text!” All you have to do is add alt tags to your images makes your site way more accessible, right? I love the enthusiasm to reduce accessibility errors, but I am about to give you an infuriating response. It depends . Adding alt text may mean that you don’t get pesky errors about…
This topic has the potential to be a touchy one for marketing departments and designers. There have been plenty of approved designs I have received, just to find their new branding's color scheme is not accessible. Sometimes our clients or organizations fall in love with their new brand and design, and asking them to change on the branding or the design is actually like asking them to change the…