Design and development posts
Foundations: visible focus styles
Visible focus styles help us to understand which part of a web page we're interacting with. You may have seen visible focus styles appear as an outline around a link or a button for example.
For people who only use a keyboard to navigate the web, visible focus styles may be one of the few ways to understand where they are in a page and what it is that they are interacting with.
Foundations: target sizes
A target size is the area that can be activated in order to interact with an element. For people who have dexterity issues, the smaller a target size is, the more difficult it may be to use the website.
This post explores how to create usable, consistent, and well-spaced target sizes.
Foundations: native versus custom components
Deciding whether to use native or custom components for a website or web application can have implications in terms of development effort, user experience, and accessibility. This post considers the pros and cons of each approach with a focus on accessibility, and provides guidance on how to choose one.
Foundations: HTML semantics
HTML semantics provide accessibility information about page structure and an element's role, name, and state, helping to convey the nature and purpose of content on web pages.
In this post we explore what HTML semantics are, and how they're experienced by people using assistive technologies like screen readers and speech recognition software.
Accessibility and QR codes
Quick Response (QR) codes are graphics that can be scanned to direct people online to complete an action or find content. This blog post explores considerations and provides guidance for creating accessible experiences with QR codes.
Android accessibility: roles and TalkBack
TalkBack only announces role information for a relatively small number of user interface (UI) elements within native apps. When comparing this behaviour against web content, this can often give the (false) impression that these elements must have been coded incorrectly and therefore need to be "fixed".
This blog post looks at when it is acceptable for a role not to be announced, the roles that TalkBack does announce, and what this means for conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
Accessible design systems
A design system is a library of styles, components, and patterns used by product teams to consistently and efficiently launch new pages and features. A good system has accessibility embedded throughout and includes documentation, guidelines and implementation notes for accessibility.
Foundations: lists
A list is generally agreed to be a series of words or phrases that are grouped together for a reason. That reason might be to remember the items we want from the store, to share our top five favourite movies, or to write down the steps needed to complete a task.
Foundations: landmarks
Most websites have common areas of content like a header and footer, a main content area, and one or more navigation blocks. Sighted people can identify these areas based on the way they're styled and the content they contain, but people who are blind cannot do that quite as efficiently. Landmarks, like headings and lists, offer screen reader users a more comparable experience for identifying and navigating between different areas of content.
Foundations: session timeouts
Session timeouts are designed to protect privacy and security, but if they’re implemented incorrectly, they can prevent people from completing tasks on a website.
