The Best Of The Internets

Interesting study of ~2 million Dutch smartphone users reveals how many people are using accessibility features on their phones (and which ones). It’s more than you think.

Another deep dive into details and summary, courtesy of Scott. He’s tested so many permutations and edge cases that this is really required reading if you’re considering using this element pairing for progressive disclosure.

<details> and <summary> elements are complicated. Saying don’t use them isn’t really practical and there’s a lot of good things about them. But they do have bugs. … It really just all comes down to what sort of experience you want to provide to people, and how OK you might be knowing that the native elements are going to be exposed differently, have different gaps but also different features to them.

A deep dive into color contrast ratios in relation to the A-AAA compliance levels. Why should you care?

Around the world, about 70% of individuals that have a diagnosed disability experience blurred vision. But working towards full compliance doesn’t just help individuals with visual impairments and disorders—it actually creates a better user experience for everyone.

I began turning on subtitles when my kiddo was born. I spent a lot of time with him sleeping in my arms and wanted to be able to watch programs without waking him. That translated to watching videos with the sound lower and the captions/subtitles on. Six years later, it’s become a fixture of how we watch as individuals and as a family.

Seeing how many other rely on captions/subtitles gives me hope that we’ll continue to see improvements in how the text is presented (and accessed… I’m looking at you Discovery+).

The way we discuss people’s capabilities and disabilities is rife with ableist language and concepts. This piece from NPR offers a starting point for talking about disability without being offensive.

For users relying on assistive technology such as screen readers, it’s … critically important to have programmatically determined names identifying various UI elements. … Doing so consistently with all interactive page elements will help ensure users using assistive technologies will be able to navigate through a site and complete a purchase successfully.

Could not have said it better myself. This article is chock full of excellent advice, not only on why names are important, but how to ensure your interactive components are properly named.

As you’d expect, Vitaly’s deep dive into error message UX is a treasure trove of excellent, practical advice to make data entry better for your customers.

This article contains so much excellent advice. It focuses on social media, but the lessons it shares are applicable well beyond social media.

You can now use webmentions in Eleventy via a plugin rather than rolling the whole thing yourself.

This is an important insight from the Microsoft design research team regarding boosting the signal from historically excluded communities:

The trick is… the system is built on inequity, so finding customers who have been historically excluded means that you can’t expect to find them in the system itself.