Assistive Technology posts

In this post, we explore how to use the <fieldset> and <legend> elements to group and label form elements effectively, creating a more accessible and well-structured experience.

Meet Andre, a music producer and blind screen reader user who is not afraid to take his custom elsewhere if your site is not accessible.

Andre shares his experience using the web including his love of headings and consistent design to help him navigate, and his dislike of accessibility overlays and poorly implemented page updates using live regions.

As well as labelling text fields with input and labels, and grouping forms with the <fieldset> and <legend> elements, form validation and error messages are also essential to making forms accessible to everyone.

Meet Hasmukh, a talented blind cricketer with lots of patience and determination.

Hasmukh shares his experience using the web with a screen reader and highlights the importance of accessible emails, forms, language, and prioritising content within a web page.

In this post about forms, we explore how to effectively label text fields using <input> and <label> elements to create form inputs that are both accessible and user-friendly.

Live regions have a reputation for being "flaky" and inconsistent. While this can be attributed in part to shortcomings in current implementations, the problem can also be caused by developers misunderstanding how live regions are intended to work.

When tabindex="0" is applied to an HTML element, the content marked up using that element will become keyboard focusable, and is therefore a good starting point for supporting keyboard accessibility. However, applying this attribute haphazardly or unnecessarily can reduce the experience for people who use a keyboard or an equivalent input device to navigate web content.

Like many inventions before it, Generative AI is changing the way we do things. Like those inventions that went before it, Generative AI is capable of great good and great harm, and like the humans that used those inventions before us, we need to be smart about the way we use Generative AI.

An element's name, or accessible name, is how it's identified. An accessible description provides additional information, about the element, that complements the accessible name.

In this post we explore assigning accessible names and descriptions using HTML and WAI-ARIA.

The Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification 1.2, or WAI-ARIA or ARIA for short, is a technical specification written by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

In this post we explore what WAI-ARIA is, and how it can enhance the user experience for people using screen readers.