Chris’ Corner: Accessible Takes

Let’s do some links to accessibility information I’ve saved, recently read, and thought were useful and insightful.

• Accessibility vs emojis by Camryn Manker — It’s not that emojis are inaccessible, it’s that they can be annoying because of their abruptness and verbosity. If you’re writing text to be consumed by unknown people, be sparing, only additive, and use them at the end of text.
• Vision Pro, rabbit r1, LAMs, and accessibility by David Luhr — It’s around the one year anniversary of Apple’s Vision Pro release, so I wonder if any of these issues David brought up have been addressed. Seems like the very low color contrast issues would be low hanging fruit for a team that cared about this. I can’t justify the $3,500 to check.
• Thoughts on embedding alternative text metadata into images by Eric Bailey — Why don’t we just bake alt text right into image formats? I’ve never actually heard that idea before but Eric sees it come up regularly. It’s a decent idea that solves some problems, and unfortunately creates others.
• Considerations for making a tree view component accessible by Eric Bailey — Eric is at GitHub and helps ship important accessibility updates to a very important product in the developer world. There is a lot to consider with the tree view UI discussed here, which feels like an honest reflection of real-world accessibility work. I particularly liked how it was modeled after a tree view in Windows, since that represents the bulk of users and usage of an already very familiar UI.
• On disabled and aria-disabled attributes by Kitty Giraudel — These HTML attributes are not the same. The former literally disables an element from functionality to the look, the later implies the element is disabled to assistive technology.
• Beautiful focus outlines by Thomas Günther — I love the sentiment that accessibility work doesn’t have to be bland or hostile to good design. A focus outline is a great opportunity to do something outstandingly aesthetic, beyond defaults, and be helping make UI’s more accessible.
• Blind SVG by Marco Salsiccia — “This website is a reconstruction of a published Google Doc that was initially built to help teach blind and low-vision folks how to code their own graphics with SVG.”