One of the most memorable cinematic portrayals of a voice recognition system is Hal 9000, the seemingly omniscient computer from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hal captured our collective imaginations and opened our eyes to the possible future of a voice based human-computer interaction. Since the movie’s release in 1966, the landscape of voice recognition systems have changed drastically. According a study done by Adobe Analytics over 32% of US consumers own a smart speaker and that number is expected to increase nearly twofold by the end of the year. The emergence of integrated digital assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Google Home has also meant that voice is now being used beyond just playing music and checking the weather forecast. With the increased reliance on voice as a medium of interacting with the web, designers and developers are now faced with a new challenge: designing interfaces optimized for voice-based interactions. ...

The task of building for accessibility, while worthwhile, can be a rather daunting one. Strategies to incorporate it into a product frequently involve a fair amount of work, much of which tends to be manual and admittedly, tedious. The web accessibility community has made many strides to improving this by making accessibility more accessible for developers. In addition to the best practices and recommendations by WCAG, there are many automated tools that make implementing them a breeze. Recent advances in AI have contributed further improvements to this, such that is it now possible to build for accessibility with minimal effort. In addition to helping streamlining existing tasks like alt-text generation, AI advances in areas such as natural language processing, machine learning and image processing have opened up new possibilities in the world of accessibility online. ...

For most of us, the web is a magical world of media rich content like images, gifs and most importantly, cat videos. Images, however humorous, are the primary means of maintaining user engagement online. Unfortunately, for many users with disabilities and/or other impairments, this rich visual heavy experience of the web remains inaccessible. Assistive devices like screen readers and refreshable braille displays can only interpret text and rely on developers adding alt-text or captions to make sense of images. Though this type of content is hard to parse, low vision users should not be predisposed to a text only web experience. For one, not all low vision users are blind. Many, like sighted users, can benefit from the added semantic meaning that images and video provide. As a result, as developers it is important to account for the range of abilities and adjust our media content appropriately. ...

Earlier this week, we briefly examined the concept of an accessibility tree, which represents the information model—much like the DOM—that assistive devices use to parse and make sense of a webpage. Unlike the DOM tree which can be queried and modified after the fact via JavaScript APIs, the accessibility tree can only be queried but not modified by assistive technologies. In an increasingly JavaScript heavy web ecosystem, input events like click and hover drive interactivity. Interactions are tailor made to suit specific input controls, so a hover event may open up help text, while changing focus states by clicking away may trigger form validation. These specific mappings between input controls and actions add a layer of fine grained control to the overall user experience. While alternate input controls have access to similar interactions, they still have to rely on DOM updates since they is no way to directly access the accessibility tree. ...

With the rise in popularity of client side, JavaScript frameworks like React, Vue and Angular, it is undeniable that JavaScript is eating the web. This increased reliance on JavaScript isn’t necessarily a bad thing. JavaScript enables us to add interactivity to a page and thereby create more engaging user experiences online. It has also helped address many performance issues with its solutions relating to lazy load and client-side routing via the history API. JavaScript however, is also a notorious cause of many accessibility issues. For instance, client side routing while enabling navigation without a full page reload, doesn’t get picked up accurately by screen readers. In addition, click and hover only events make apps virtually unusable for keyboard only users. To better understand the role of JavaScript with regards to these accessibility issues, let’s more closely examine how assistive devices are used to navigate the web. ...

When building for the web and making considerations for accessibility, it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that accessible features only benefit disabled users. While disabled users positively benefit from accessibly designed interfaces, there are many other reasons why a user may similarly leverage keyboard shortcuts or specialized software to navigate websites. For instance, an otherwise able-bodied user may be forced to use assistive technologies as a result of an injury or a recent surgery that make it difficult to navigate a website as they ordinarily would. A user may also choose to use such assistive technologies purely out of personal preference because it allows them to navigate a site quickly and efficiently. It is therefore important for us as developers to build online experiences that don’t discriminate against how a website is accessed. ...

As a user without disabilities, I often take for granted the experience of using the web. Browsing and interacting with the web often involves reading visual cues to decipher the general purpose of a particular element. For one, sighted users of the web know that the (now infamous) hamburger icon that sits at the top left of the screen is representative of a clickable menu item. Such assumptions and relationships that we make between icons and their meaning are largely a result of context clues. We understand that a hamburger icon is a menu item because of its placement in the top navigation bar, which we use to “navigate” a webpage. For visually impaired users, such clues may go completely unnoticed depending on how a screen reader interprets a webpage. This is especially the case when elements are given no additional meaning that can be deciphered and prioritized by a screen reader (i.e. a button is just a button to a screen reader even if it is styled to be a menu button). This is where ARIA comes in. ...

Being a better A11Y It’s almost impossible to think of the world without the web. Compared to other inventions of yore, the web is the single most powerful medium of communication. Through its promise of openness, freedom and independence, the web levelled the playing field. It gave everyone the chance to transcend the limitations of their physical condition regardless of their level of ability. In spite of this promise of inclusivity, the web’s potential as a “global community” was never truly realized. Most of the internet today is a maelstrom of inaccessible iframes, popups and captionless gifs that are near impossible to parse via a screen reader or the tab key. ...

This week, I focused on the many aspects of PWAs and their role in making the web experience more streamlined across browsers and devices. Inherent to PWAs is the concept of progressive enhancement. To the untrained eye, progressive enhancement might seem akin to the concept of “it works without JavaScript”. While this is kinda sorta true (a well built PWA should work with JS turned off 🤞🏾), progressive enhancement is more about using web technologies in a so-called “layered” fashion. This technique of building apps makes them adaptable and allows them to run seamlessly regardless of bandwidth, network connectivity or software. In short, Progressive Enhancement is the deliberate strategy of building apps on the foundation of making it usable everywhere. ...

In the latest stable build of Chrome, came support for desktop progressive web apps (PWAs). Similar to mobile PWAs, desktop PWAs allow users to install apps onto a device’s home screen for quick and easy access. In addition to this, they allow web apps leverage to the numerous capabilities of modern web APIs like authentication, payments and so on, without having to worry about potential security vulnerabilities. After all, a desktop PWA is basically a web browser running in its own app window context. ...