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I’ve been asked again and again over the years what the absolute basics of web accessibility are. And while I always thought that it is not so difficult to find resources about these basics, the recurrence of that question prompted me to finally write my own take on this topic. So here it is, my list of absolute web accessibility basics every web developer should know about. Alternative text for i

What is WAI-ARIA, what does it do for me, and what not? On March 20, 2014, the W3C finally published the WAI-ARIA standard version 1.0. After many years of development, refinement and testing, it is now a web standard. But I am often asked again and again: What is it exactly? What can it do for me as a web developer? And what can it not do? I often find that there are assumptions made about WAI-AR

This morning, Victor from payPal and I got into an exchange on Twitter regarding the ChromeVox extension. ChromeVox is a Chrome extension which provides screen reading functionality for blind users. Through keyboard commands, the user can navigate page content by different levels like object by object, heading by heading, form control by form control, etc. Wait, you might say, but this is screen r

A few weeks ago, I decided to conduct an experiment. I wanted to determine if Android 4.2.2 “Jelly Bean” was finally ready for me to switch to full-time, away from an iPhone. Background 🔗 I’ve been an iPhone user for four years, ever since the original iPhone 3G S came out with VoiceOver support in June 2009. What Apple did back then was revolutionary, completely opening up a wealth of apps and s

I know, reflections on things usually happen at years-end time, but to be honest, this blog post has been in my head for the last two-and-a-half years, and has thus “seen” a number of year-ends, so I felt that it’s now finally time to put it in writing. I’ve been with Mozilla since December of 2007 and have seen quite a number of things happening since I started. I was there when Firefox 3 came ou

Firefox 3.5 has been released, and now it’s time to take a look at what features of WAI-ARIA are being supported by which Windows screen reader. Competition is healthy in this market, and two new screen readers have started supporting Firefox during the 3.5 development cycle: Dolphin’s Hal/SuperNova and Serotek’s System Access (including the free SAToGo offering). So to document the current state

Firefox 3.5 is fast approaching, and it’s time to list all the user-visible changes to the accessibility support in this new version! Support for text attributes, formatting and spell checking Firefox 3.5 exposes text attributes such as bold, underlined, and color information through the AT-SPI and IAccessible2 attributes properties of their respective AccessibleText interfaces. Information about

This post continues a series on the implementation of ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) in Gmail. On July 30, Orca team lead Willie Walker forwarded a message to the Orca mailing list titled Orca & gmail. The message is originally by Srinivas Annam, an accessibility web developer at Google. He describes a couple of enhancements that had been made to the Gmail user interface and were pus

I know, I know, it’s been a while since I posted my last Easy ARIA tip. But I’m hoping that this one will find you all excited and willing to play with it some more! The problem: You have a form, a contact form, for example, that you want to put some accessible error checking into. Common problems are e-mail addresses that are not valid, or a name that does not contain at least a first and a surna

Sorry it took me so long to get back to it, but here it is, my second tip on the usage of some easy ARIA markup to make your sites more accessible. Imagine this: You have a form where you ask your user a question, but the answer is actually part of the sentence the question is made of. A classic example we all know from our browser settings is the setting “Delete history after x days”. “Delete his