Over the past seven (?!) years at Microsoft, high contrast styles have been a surprisingly consistent source of accessibility issues from partner teams. The surprise is because other common sources of bugs that bubble up to me tend to be either technically complex (e.g. live regions, focus management, assistive tech behavior), or theoretically complex (understanding semantics, assistive tech…
For anyone who has not found themselves wading waist-deep through the nigh-unintelligible morass of accessible combobox patterns , aria-activedescendant might seem like yet another esoteric line item in the ARIA spec, or might be wholly unfamiliar. For those unfortunate souls who have peered into the vortex of combobox accessibility long enough for their eyes to bleed and their ears to echo with…
This is a guide for anyone who, like me, is casting about for alternatives to Twitter and would like an absolute minimum, bare-bones walkthrough for getting started with Mastodon. No evangelizing or attempted explanations of the "fediverse" will be involved. Disclaimer: although I made an account years ago, I never used it until now. I'm not interested in convincing anyone to use Mastodon, or to…
This is part 2 in a series about ARIA grids (not at all related to CSS grids 🙃) In the first post of this grids series , I wrote that the defining feature of grids and tables is that they present two-dimensional relationships in a set of data. Or, put another way, they are designed to make it easy to skim both row and column relationships. Row and column relationships are handled visually by…
In my day-to-day work, I find myself talking to a lot of people who have a lot of accessibility problems with different tables and grids. Grids are right up there with combobox woes and tooltip mishaps in causing an outsize amount of pain to developers who are trying to get accessibility right. Part of this flood of grid accessibility questions might be caused by a quirk of where I happen to work,…
Windows High Contrast Mode behavior can be a bit of a surprise if you haven't already spent time studying its ways. Unlike other operating system display modes that invert colors or set a dark mode flag, Windows High Contrast Mode (WHCM) completely overrides authored colors with user-set colors. A mode like invert colors will take author-set colors and transform them, which allows something like…
Often when we talk about accessibility problems, we end up talking about a number of different errors that all boil down to a missing accessible name: form fields without labels, images without alt s, icon buttons without readable text, and many more. A missing or incorrect accessible name in some form or other is right up there with poor color contrast in the list of most common accessibility…
The most difficult challenges in programming are: Debating framework choices with a dogmatic fan, and Naming things There is seemingly no solution for the first problem; you must accept it, adopt a zen-like calm when faced with invocations of bundle sizes and performance benchmarks, and silently plan your backup career doing literally anything else. For the second problem, naming things, it's…
Sometimes after dabbling in gateway ARIA semantics like aria-current , landmark roles, and link-button hybrids, a budding accessibility practitioner might find themselves experimenting with more serious roles like menu , listbox , or even treegrid . These are tantalizing, powerful patterns that allow you to create experiences that are not supported by only vanilla HTML. Unfortunately, they are…
I've been thinking, testing, and talking about custom select components and comboboxes a lot over the past year, and finally condensed all of it into a two-part series of articles written for 24 Accessibility . It covers both why this whole mess is so difficult and what patterns are out there, including the new ARIA 1.2 pattern in part 1, and then goes into the results of usability testing and…
In an effort to convince everyone (who reads these blog posts) that I don't only obsess over tooltips, let's talk about another seemingly simple concept and make it unexpectedly complex. This time, we're tackling the play/pause toggle button. By a play/pause toggle, I mean this thing: i.e. that thing you click on (or key press/touch/switch/etc) to get your daily cute cat fix. You press it, it…
Earlier this week when filling out an expense report -- a tedious chore that nearly everyone wishes would be over roughly five minutes before starting -- I got about halfway through before inadvertently deleting all my progress and forcing myself to start over. Why? I had used the escape key to collapse a select menu, and ended up closing the modal dialog containing the entire expense form…
TL;DR recommendation: Narrow down your definition of "tooltip," and jump to the last section . Tooltips have been a reliable source of web accessibility woes from the very beginning; or at least from the beginning of graphical web browsers. They have gone by many names: "tooltip," "infotip," "toggle tip," "hint text," "balloon help," "info bubble," "inaccessible overlay of shame"... the list goes…