The Paciello Group Blog

I've worked with people from Level Access[1] and Deque[2], there is also TPG[3]. I'm not sure how much money they cost, but they are the real experts in the industry. Some people on Fivver offer services, but I don't know how qualified they are. [1] https://www.levelaccess.com/ [2] https://www.deque.com/ [3] https://www.paciellogroup.com/

"Because this attribute is typically implemented using CSS, it’s also possible to override it using CSS. For instance, a rule that applies 'display: block' to all elements will cancel the effects of the hidden attribute. Authors therefore have to take care when writing their style sheets to make sure that the attribute is still styled as expected." -- HTML 5.1 - W3C Recommendation, 1 November 2016 So, as you can see, this is by design. If this attribute behaved only in the manner the author assumes it would be essentially useless. Instead, we have an option to have it act as "display:none", "visibility:hidden", etc. Also, it has accessibility benefits beyond "aria-hidden": https://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2012/05/html5-accessibility-chops-h…

Doesn't seem great for accessibility the fact that all the 'Sign In' links also have the same link title; “title="Link opens in a new window"” http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2012/01/html5-accessibility-chops-ti…

Since my job is mostly Mainframe programming I don't have much experience with accessibility from a developers point of view. You might want to try and get in contact with people at http://www.paciellogroup.com/ though, I've read there blog and it looks like they know what there talking about.

I'm intrigued that everyone testing websites for colorblind accessibility is using the colorblind page filter. It's very awkward when you have more than just websites to test (think everything from applications to documentation), and when you want to do it on your own without submitting anything to another site. There's a few apps I do recommend in lieu of the website: Color Oracle (http://colororacle.cartography.ch/) for all platforms Sim Daltonism (http://michelf.com/projects/sim-daltonism/) for OS X General color accessibility tool: http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrast-analyser.html A whole slew of other tools: http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200709/10_colour_contrast_checki…

There are so many great tools out there now. Lighthouse in Chrome Devtools has an Access audit built in which will give you a few hints. There's also a very useful auditor that just came out from Paciello Group called the Arc toolkit: https://www.paciellogroup.com/toolkit/. Chromevox and Voiceover can be turned on to get quick screenreader-ish feedback. No Coffee: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nocoffee/jjeeggmbnhckmgdhmgd… is quite useful to get a non-scientific empathy hit for graphic decisions and how that interacts with common sight problems (98% of people by age 51 have presbyopia) and Sim Daltonism: https://michelf.ca/projects/sim-daltonism/ will give you a more accurate representation of all the most common colour blindnesses (1 in 12 men). I also urge everyone to turn ON tabbing on their Mac (System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts tab > All Controls) and tab into their sites (unplug your mouse). I also often do a run through with Vimium: https://vimium.github.io/ which gives me some aspects of a voice interaction type system. These tools will get you some of the way there, though there are established ways to build components which will solve 90% of all known access problems. The main solution is simply to write native HTML. A major issue is how hard it is to style native form elements (like datalist) -- it means developers can't get it past design/clients.

There's recently been a round of debate about whether the alt attribute for media (eg, <img alt="Foo">) should remain required or could become optional. As I understand it, some web page creators say "some of our images don't have good logical, human-readable alt text, so why make us put in alt attributes with crappy made-up values", and other people argue that it is worth the extra effort to improve accessibility. (No doubt I've butchered both sides of the argument, but that's what I was able to take away from it.) See http://blog.whatwg.org/omit-alt for an argument in favor of making it optional, and http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/articles/altinhtml5.html for it being required, or http://juicystudio.com/article/requiring-alt-attribute-html5.php for a list of pros and cons. The two standards groups hosting the draft HTML specs appear to have different centers of gravity with regard to this issue, and to be making increasingly snippy comments back and forth about the other's handling of the dispute.

And, in addition to those JAWS tools, there is also JAWS Inspect (https://www.paciellogroup.com/products/jaws-inspect/)

I didn't actually look at the site that's being complained about but SVG charts are actually the way to go in terms of accessibility, and they can certainly be rendered client side (but maybe shouldn't be, as you say, if the data is static). Charts made this way definitely beat out an image with a description svg accessibility stuff (not my blog, just one I found after a quick search): http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2013/12/using-aria-enhance-svg-acces…

Design tip: you might want to increase the color contrast. White text on a light grey background isn't very legible. A useful tool to check color contrast is Paciello's Contrast Analyser [1] [1]http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrastAnalyser

Unfortunately `title` implementations are broken for pretty much everybody except mouse users on desktop: http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2013/01/using-the-html-title-attribu…

Validating the colors contrast/luminosity/readability should be done using this: http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/accessibility/webaccessibility/color_… or http://www.paciellogroup.com/resources/contrast-analyser.html

Actually, probably better, aria-label: https://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2013/01/using-the-html-title-attrib… Edit: FWIW I as a blind user didn't notice the bar. Glad this story pointed it out. Kind of wish HN would update its layout to be more accessible. There are a ton of aspects of HN that are entirely unusable or painful--no easy way to navigate comments by thread, no accessible indication of downvote status, no easy accessible way to scan the front page other than pressing tab 6-7 times to navigate between entry titles... I suppose some of that isn't a huge deal--I just don't notice or care about downvotes and speak my mind (within reason) as a result--but the whole tabbing half a dozen times to hear each new headline is a bit ridiculous. Anyhow, sorry to derail the black bar discussion. Respects to the deceased, but I'd still like to see HN become more accessible and inclusive. When you literally can't notice things like this then they become aspects of a community you aren't included in.