Dark times, my friends. Dark times. It's up to all of us to pull together. And that means making vital health information accessible. One of the easiest things you can do is make your Twitter content accessible is by adding descriptions to your images. Go to twitter.com/settings/accessibility and turn on "Compose image descriptions". Here's why. This is a screenshot of a Tweet I recently saw. The images weren't loading because my area's 3G signal is overloaded. So I got the same experience…
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I was in need of a new laptop, so I bought a cheap ChromeBook - mostly because Amazon could deliver it the same day. Sadly, the trackpad was broken. Before I sent it back, I thought I'd try using a mouse with it. That's when I discovered that accessibility is very much a second thought for all the young and healthy people Google employ. I have RSI and use a vertical mouse. After decades of regular left-clicking, my index finger is worn out. So I use a thumb button to click. Changing the…
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Regular readers will know about my recent court visit. I was grumpy about the lack of connected digital services within the court. As I left court, I asked if there was anything they needed me to fill in or sign. They said there wasn't. I just sort of assumed that I wouldn't get any expenses back - my travel was mostly within my regular season ticket anyway. Then this dropped on my doorstep. A hand written envelope. Let's ignore the fact they've misspelled my name (I won't ignore this). …
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When I'm bored, I like to search websites for the "Lorem Ipsum" placeholder text. It's a quick way to find discarded pages and test content. I was particularly confused that the UK's Post Office had a dozen pages containing that little Latin phrase. A quick dive into one of the pages, found this enlightening snippet of code: This is a monumentally inconsiderate thing to do. I can guess exactly why it happened - a developer got a warning from an HTML validator that alt-text was required. …
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My mate Laura has written a book! She has very kindly sent me a review copy ahead of its release. The first thing to mention is that this is not a technical manual. There's the odd smattering of HTML in there - but this book is much more focussed on why accessibility matters and how to implement an accessibility positive culture - rather than which specific tags to use in your code. This is a book for managers, designers, and programmers. As she points out, Accessibility is… a team e…
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Twitter has recently improved the accessibility of its site. When uploading an image, a user can add alt text - a short description of the image for people with visual impairments. Here's an example: Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentThis is a test to see if alt-text in images is searchable on Twitter.alpaca omnithorp pic.x.com/jhgcsaxpkd❤️ 1💬 0🔁 010:37 - Sun 19 February 2017 If you take a look at the HTML source, you can see that I've added a unique string as the alt text. That should make …
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