Scott O'Hara is a designer and developer based outside of Boston MA. He writes code and cares a ton about building great, accessible user experiences for everyone.
I wrote much of this back in 2023 and 2024 while popover was still being implemented / was newly released. Since I began digitally scribbling my thoughts down, others ended up writing about the attribute - which was one of the reasons I didn’t feel any urgency in publishing my own post. Though, I did co-author one of Hidde de Vries’s articles about popover.
Consider the following:
The topic of how to make an accessible spoiler component, or ‘should there be a spoiler element?’ has recently (re)-caught my attention. (I wrote most of this back in February and then forgot about it… as I seem to do these days. But then people necro’d a GitHub issue on the topic, so here we go again)
I wrote this article on the default accessibilty properties (some might say ‘semantics’) of the popover attribute with Hidde de Vries.
Today, March 24th 2023, the HTML specification added a new grouping content element. The search element.
This will retread and extend on my previous Inclusively Hidden post. Specifically the parts about “visually hidden” content. But in lieu of reading that, the reasons one would visually hide content in the development of a website or web application is generally to include extra content for accessibility. For instance, to mitigate against specific design choices, where visually something may be…
I’ve already talked about Setting expectations for asking ChatGPT web accessibility questions. So you should probably go read that first.
You may be familiar with ChatGPT. But if you’re not, it’s a very cool chat interface using artificial intelligence to provide human-like responses to the questions you ask it. It is, however, still rather new and depending on what you ask it… well… As the FAQ for ChatGPT explains:
Today, the HTML specification landed a very important change to the dialog element. One that resolves a multi-year discussion on how the dialog element should handle initial focus.
Like it or not, even though content can be made to adapt to different viewport sizes and zoom levels by use of CSS media queries, sometimes the end result can be a bit awkward without further adjustments that go beyond visual presentation.