Group items tagged

Another issue is that the messages are temporary. As soon as you put focus on the input with mouse, keyboard or touch, the message disappears. People with cognitive impairments will find it difficult to use these, and I think anyone trying to fill in the form while they’re distracted will have trouble as well. People who rely on the keyboard for navigation (which includes both sighted users and screen reader users) will also lose these messages as they move around the form.

If you’re confident of your error messages, you can remove the browser validation by adding the novalidate attribute to the wrapping form element, like this: <form novalidate>...</form>

We've only begun using and testing this technique, so even this may not be perfect. Any feedback and suggestions are quite welcome.

I recently heard a heartbreaking story about a blind girl trying to apply for college and the form had missing labels so she had no idea what to put in what fields.

@media queries Turning on Voice Over in OS X and using Safari is a screen reader. Now imagine that Safari window was open to a very narrow width and the page had some @media queries for handling smaller viewports. And say that @media query hides some things with display: none in order to better visually accomodate the space. This could be good or bad for accessibility. Are you hiding a bunch of crap that isn't important to the page? Or are you hiding useful things that a person using a screen reader should have access to like they normally would.

/* * Hide from both screenreaders and browsers: h5bp.com/u */.hidden {    display: none !important;    visibility: hidden;}/* * Hide only visually, but have it available for screenreaders: h5bp.com/v */.visuallyhidden {    border: 0;    clip: rect(0 0 0 0);    height: 1px;    margin: -1px;    overflow: hidden;    padding: 0;    position: absolute;    width: 1px;}/* * Extends the .visuallyhidden class to allow the element to be focusable * when navigated to via the keyboard: h5bp.com/p */.visuallyhidden.focusable:active,.visuallyhidden.focusable:focus {    clip: auto;    height: auto;    margin: 0;    overflow: visible;    position: static;    width: auto;}/* * Hide visually and from screenreaders, but maintain layout */.invisible {    visibility: hidden;}

Add post titles to standard "read more" links

This technique inserts new content into the DOM immediately following the element that was activated to trigger the script. The triggering element must be a link or a button, and the script must be called from its onclick event. These elements are natively focusable, and their onclick event is device independent. Focus remains on the activated element and the new content, inserted after it, becomes the next thing in both the tab order and screen-reader reading order. Note that this technique works for synchronous updates. For asynchronous updates (sometimes called AJAX), an additional technique is needed to inform the assistive technology that the asynchronous content has been inserted.

While there is no official length restriction on the length of alt text, many experts recommend 125 characters or fewer because of restrictions within the JAWS screen reader.

Another example is implied headings. Sighted users can understand quickly from images that a data set title should be “gender” but if the heading doesn’t appear in the design, it should be added and visually hidden using CSS.