Inspired by Chris Coyier' Answers to common (web) design questions, which was inspired by Dan Mall's earlier post, here's list of common accessibility questions.
Should I use links or buttons?#heading-1
Yes.
Links if it takes the user somewhere, buttons if it performs an action. Also buttons if the action is submitting a form (even if the user is then taken somewhere). Trying to avoid nuance in this post, but here's some nuance around buttons and links.
Do we have users with disabilities?#heading-2
Yes.
It's unlikely you know every single one of your users and exactly how they use the web. It's even more unlikely that the the group and the people within it stays exactly the same forever.
What's an accessibility conformance audit?#heading-3
Someone will find out for every of the 56 Success Criteria in WCAG whether your site meets it or not (counting version 2.2, Level A + AA). Ideally, they also explain what the issues are and how to fix them (so that you can do it). This is also called a conformance evaluation.
Who should “do” accessibility in our team?#heading-4
Everyone. Content folks, developers, designers and product managers all have accessibility tasks to do.
What are some quick tests I can do?#heading-5
Use your UI with Tab / Shift Tab on a keyboard (check settings if on a Mac), can you reach everything without a mouse? Does the order make sense?
Click on labels for form fields, they should focus the field they are a label of.
Check if your videos and audio (podcasts?) have captions / transcripts.
Is accessibility ever done?#heading-6
No. It's a continuous process, even if your audit says you meet all Success Criteria today, it's common to stop meeting it. Websites change. You'll want to continuously monitor accessibility, just like with security and privacy.
Do we have legal obligations to make our products accessible?#heading-7
Very likely. Also if you're not government (for instance, see European Accessibility Act).
There are policies and laws all around the world.
Is it all my website's fault?#heading-8
No, some problems can be solved by browsers, assistive technologies and/or authoring tools.
WCAG 3.0 will be released soon, right?#heading-9
Not likely. The goals are good and I've long supported them (still do), but it will be many years for this to be a real thing, WCAG 3.0 is still in a very early phase. The colour algorithm that's being considered for it is interesting to already try and meet as it better meets user needs than current WCAG algo.
Will “AI” improve accessibility?#heading-10
Machine learning can be a great tool for automating part of the captioning process in lots of languages, and various other things.
But it's unlikely LLMs, often called “AI”, will output accessible code. To train such an LLM, an enormous set of very accessible code would need to exist (it doesn't). Component-building and accessibility semantics also require intentionality, which these systems specifically aren't good at.
Is the Axe / Page Insights score all that matters? Or the WCAG audit result?#heading-11
No. Any system that scores your site and returns some number (including WCAG audits) does not fully describe your accessibility situation. Accessibility is, ultimately, about people and whether they can use your site. It's about recognising, then removing barriers. Metrics can help in various ways, but they are not the end goal. And the most easily measureable is not necessarily the most impactful.
More detailed accessibility posts can be found elsewhere on this blog.
List of updates
- 4 November 2023: Changed ‘56’ to ‘55’ in the amount of WCAG 2.2 success criteria in Level A + AA, as most people seem to not count the deprecated (yet listed (with zero SC text)) 4.1.1 (yes I'm a pedant why 😅). Thanks Joost, Eric, Alastair and others.
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@hdv Thoughts on links styled as buttons and buttons styled as links? I personally feel like button styling is for block-level actionable content and link styling is for inline actionable content so it’s OK to mix metaphors as long as it’s clear the content is actionable and what the action might do. But I know people have strong opinions on this and I’m curious to know more.
@scott design system I'm currently involved in allows for it and I think it's ok, there are good UI reasons to want this.
Long discussion I recently read on it (incl suggestion to add role=button to a link whenever it looks like a button and to add button keyboard affordances too) https://github.com/alphagov/govuk_elements/pull/272
Remove button role from start link by colinrotherham · Pull Request #272 · alphagov/govuk_elements@hdv @scott This is something I'm curious about too! I use a common "CTA" style for both buttons and (some) links, with the key difference that links have underlined text and buttons don't. Feels more like me checking off a box of my "good enough" list, though. ????
@chriskirknielsen @hdv @scott I used to be really opinionated on this, but am more relaxed now. I surmised a tiny bit a few months back when I added some action button links to my weblog: https://weblog.anniegreens.lol/2023/02/action-buttons-link-style
Apple Annie’s Weblog · Action Buttons Link Style@chriskirknielsen @hdv @scott Nothing ground-breaking in my thoughts, it's just good to know others are thinking and writing about it too. When I was the only front-end dev on a project and I'd bring this up to back-end devs I'd sometimes get collective eye-rolls. And a lot of times I'd find it came straight from the designers not realizing there is a semantic difference.
Wait, what, it's only a week until 2024? Time for what has become a yearly tradition… in this post, I'll review some of my 2023 in work, conferences, reading, writing, listening, music and learnings.
Note: like my posts about 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017, this post is mostly ‘highlights’, lowlights left out intentionally.
Work
The work year was different than usual: my full time job (first in 10 years or so) ceased to exist and I switched back to freelancing.
Freelancing
In July I joined the NL Design System team (almost) full time. We support a community of web specialists from across the Dutch government to create open-source components and guidelines for all. I joined as an accessibility and developer relations specialist. Now I'm PR/communications lead, with still some time for accessibility (but none for devrel). The project is very much up my ally. I really like the colleagues. I also feel fortunate to bring my experience into this team. And, of course, just as fortunate to have made it once again into a team where I get to learn lots from the others (and all of the design system, government, accessibility and development experience between them).
Outside of NL Design System, I did some in-house workshops, talks about the web and web accessibility, and the occasional WCAG audit.
Volunteering
I continued in Open UI CG, mostly scribing, learning and then conveying some of the work to developer audiences in blog posts and talks. It's still one of my favourite meetings of the week.
Other volunteering didn't work so well. I joined the marketing team of my local solar energy community, made plans but found no time to properly work on them and left. I also joined the CSS WG as an Invited Expert, a long time dream come true. But so far, I only managed to join one meeting and only marginally kept up with emails and issues. Let's say between when I said yes and when it was official, a lot changed at work and I wanted to spend more time with family. I hope they don't revoke my status just yet and hope to start prioritising my WG involvement sometime in 2024.
Conferences
Last year, as the popover attribute started to make its way into browsers, I hoped I would do a talk about the nitty gritty of building popovers (repeating the phrasing I used last year). That happened. I wrote that talk and took it to a number of events. In addition, I made a new talk called “ARIA, The Good Parts” and did a 10 minute rant for the IAAP-EU called “Will tools save us?”.
All my talks in 2023:
I also attended Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf and State of the Browser in London.
Reading
I read a bit less than in the last year, most of them while on holiday or travel (see: full reading list if you like book covers). These are some books I can recommend:
Music
Saw more live music than in the year before (yay, thanks to babysitters and being more ready for their help as a family). I got lucky that the artists I listened to also toured near me on the right dates, so I got to see:
I also listened a lot to De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig, Sault, Sef, WIES, Massive Attack and Typhoon.
I made a live music log to track concerts publicly (inspired by Vasilis).
Writing
Including this one, I wrote 15 posts this year, some lengthier than others. Less than usual. There's a bunch of drafts that I'm looking forward to finish!
Of this year's posts, most shared were an FAQ on accessibility and one on ableism in the Vercel community.
Most sceptical were a few posts I wrote about ‘AI’, where I said that opt-out is rude, ‘AI’ content isn't user centered and LLMs are not artificial, nor intelligent.
Cities
I stayed in Taipei, Kaohsiung, Düsseldorf, Porto (2x), Berlin, Zurich, Vienna, Paris, Brussels, London (3x), Bristol and Porto.
I wanted and was able to do a lot of this year's conference travel by trains, twice by night train. The latter aren't cheap if you want some comfort (I went for beds), but very pleasant and lower in emissions than flights would have been.
Learnings
Some random things I learned this year, in no particular order.
Wrapping up
Thanks for reading, hope there's useful recommendations in this post. If you're still reading let me end with my best wishes to you for the new year, see you in the next!