Language and accessibility on the internet.

Posted by Floris Claassens on February 17, 2022

A gathering of research, bad opinions and some extra curiosities

Screen readers are a great piece of software that help people with a visual impairment navigate the digital world. Though screen readers can interpret a lot of web content without any help, from time to time they do need some cues from developers on how to interpret the content. One of those cues is the language of the page. Many people will consume multilingual content at some point in their life. Screen readers need a way to find out which language to use for their pronunciation.

On the internet screen readers use the “lang” attribute (short for language) which can be set on the html element of the page. As the value of this attribute developers can use a (usually) two to four letter code to designate the main language of the page. The first two letters depict the language, and the last two letters depict the dialect. For example, fr-fr is the code for metropolitan French while fr-ca is the code for Canadian French. If you are familiar with SEO (search engine optimization) you might also have heard about the “hreflang” attribute, which uses the same language codes. Though they might seem very similar, they serve a very different purpose.

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How Screen reader users read the web

Posted by Anna Maier on December 14, 2020

When making a web site accessible, you inadvertently run into the topic of screen readers. Screen readers help people with visual impairments understand what is on the screen.

Few people think about the implications of having visual content translated into an auditory representation. In this article, I want to explain how screen reader users “hear” the web, what strategies they apply when confronted with a new web site and how you can make their life a bit easier.

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Testing Accessibility with Accessibility Insights

Posted by Anna Maier on December 9, 2019

There are many tools out there that help you check if your website or webapp is accessible. Most of them do an automatic check based on some accessibility guidelines. Some also provide functionality to do checks yourself, for example, to check the color contrast. The open source tool Accessibility Insights takes a different approach: on top of the usual automated checks there is a set of guided manual checks. This makes it a great tool to learn about accessibility testing and programming.

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Success Criteria of WCAG 2.1 Summarized

Posted by Joppe Kroon on July 15, 2019

The WCAG 2.1 update published in 2018 was a backwards compatible, additions only version. It adds 12 new A and AA (and 2 AAA) level success criteria focused on mobile accessibility, people with low vision, and people with cognitive and learning disabilities.

Reading through all the documentation can be intimidating, whereas a checklist can be too brief. Inspired by the session on WCAG 2.1 at NCDT of 2019, this post summarizes each success criterion; hopefully creating a middle ground between the full specifications and a checklist.

At the end of each section you’ll find a link to the “Understanding” document of the success criterion. Here you’ll find all exemptions, recommended techniques, and more.

If you are in fact looking for a checklist, WebAIM has created a checklist of all 2.x success criteria. Alternatively, the How to Meet WCAG (Quick Reference) is always a good place to start.

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Raising awareness about Accessibility

Posted by Anna Maier on May 24, 2019

“Software programs should be usable by everyone.”

I think everyone can agree with that statement. Unfortunately, there is some extra work needed to make a program truly accessible. Even worse, this is often only thought of in the last bit of a project. This leads to accessibility often being cut out because of time and budget constraints. If accessibility would be considered from the start, it could be built in more easily. But how can we make us as developers more aware so that we actively think about accessibility when building the software?

Our answer: let’s experience first hand how (in)accessible our software is!

We decided to host an accessibility challenge for our colleagues. Read below how this turned out…

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