The required set of radio buttons. The white whale to many a developer who is trying their darnedest to ensure they are conveyed accessibly while not also making it sound like every individual radio button must be toggled. 1961 Cadillac Wonderbar dashboard radio by Nicholas Lucien (cropped). CC BY 2.0.…
Data tables need column headers. Monolitten, a granite column of humans (each with a head) at Vigelandsanlegget, a sculpture park in Frognerparken in Oslo, Norway. What they probably do not need is a new set of column headers every few rows, particularly not when they change the meaning of the…
The online holiday shopping coupled with my need to make a new invoice template got me looking at a common table structure that is harder to expose to screen readers than it seems at first glance. One I first coded in, checks watch, 1997 when I was an ecommerce developer…
Google has an extensive history of releasing products and tools that fail basic accessibility. This is not a function of individuals — Google has some very talented and capable accessibility practitioners. Instead, this is an organizational failure. Failure to require accessibility in its products or services. Failure to support teams…
Others in this sorta-series: Under-Engineered Custom Radio Buttons and Checkboxen Under-Engineered Toggles Under-Engineered Toggles Too Under-Engineered Text Boxen Under-Engineered Select Menus A common interface pattern allows users to choose one item from a pre-defined set of choices, while still allowing them to add a custom selection if nothing else fits.…
Got myself one of those Bonne Maman jelly/jam advent calendars and am very much looking forward to opening the first day and all subsequent days. Web developers around the world have given a nod to Saturnalia solstice Isaac Newton’s birthday Christmas with advent calendars covering web-related topics. As a result,…
Automated accessibility testing tools are rightly wary of giving false positives. You don’t want to flag something as an error in a test only to have the team rebuild an entire thing for no reason (never mind the risk of introducing errors). We know automated accessibility testing tools can really…
Whether you call them sentence forms, narrative forms, fill-in-the-blank forms, or Mad Libs forms, you are probably describing a form where the fields are interspersed within words in a sentence. Unlike more traditional forms, laid out with simple pairings of labels and fields, these forms are meant to be read…
TL;DR: Stop using the word pop-up. Instead choose a term that accurately describes the control you want. I encourage you to read my post Stop Using ‘Drop-down’, which provides the set-up for this post. Along with another term I would prefer everyone stopped using. As you embark on a design,…
Both Chrome and Firefox support XPath searches when in the DOM view of their dev tools. Because the browser cleans whatever HTML it encounters (closing tags, correcting nesting), XPath can operate on the code as XML. Simple checks like finding a unique ID value can result in multiple hits in…
Others in this sorta-series: Under-Engineered Custom Radio Buttons and Checkboxen Under-Engineered Toggles Under-Engineered Toggles Too Under-Engineered Text Boxen I am still confounded how many developers and designers see a <select> and immediately reach for a library or framework to re-create the features from the ground up. Though, frankly, I am…
Thanks to a tweet from UCL Department of Mathematics, I am one of the many people who stumbled across Cistercian numerals and fell down the rabbit hole. To over-simplify, they are single glyphs that can each represent a number from 1 to 9,999 that were developed by Cistercian monks to…