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Marco's Accessibility Blog

Helping to make accessibility accessible.

BestPractices, HamburgerMenus

Do's and don'ts on Hamburger menus

Today, just a quick reading tip for you. Michael Scharnagl posted a great article on Wednesday [https://justmarkup.com/articles/2019-12-04-hamburger-menu/] about when to use Hamburger menus, when not to use them, and what to consider for each decision. And that includes accessibility. Thank you, Michael!
Marco Zehe
Marco Zehe
1 min read
contextMenus, iOS, VoiceOver

Quickly bringing up context menus in VoiceOver in iOS 13.2

Since the release of iOS 13, Apple and app developers have put more emphasis on context menus in apps such as Files, Mail, or on home screen icons. in iOS 13, Apple made it a lot easier for VoiceOver users to get to these. Before iOS 13.2, what VoiceOver users had to do to simulate a long-press of an item was to double-tap and hold, wait for a tone that signaled that the gesture was being passed through, and hope the finger wouldn’t break while doing so. 😉 Keyboard users had it easier: They co
Marco Zehe
Marco Zehe
1 min read
WebDev

A good read: How to make ads responsive

A friend of mine published his very first blog post on Monday. Congratulations, Schepp, and welcome to the world of blogging! His post is not related to web accessibility, but I found it a fascinating read, so am sharing it with you. He describes how he wrangled ads [https://schepp.dev/posts/ad-integration-in-2020/] into the responsive (and accessible) relaunch of the media company’s web site he is working on. But be warned, it’s not for the faint of heart, and very technical. And fascinating.
Marco Zehe
Marco Zehe
1 min read
Disability, Work

12 years at Mozilla

Today marks my 12th anniversary working for Mozilla. I started on December 3, 2007, as a contractor, and moved to a full employment 13 months later, in January 2009. So in January this year, I was employed there 10 years. I wrote about my work anniversary once before [https://marcozehe.de/2012/12/03/five-years-at-mozilla/]. Some things have changed since then, some have not. I am still working on Firefox accessibility, doing, unfortunately, less blogging than I used to (current series excepted)
Marco Zehe
Marco Zehe
2 min read
AI

Why AI will never replace human picture descriptions

Yes, a bold statement, I know, but this piece by Dr. Elizabeth Fernandez [https://www.forbes.com/sites/fernandezelizabeth/2019/11/30/ai-is-not-similar-to-human-intelligence-thinking-so-could-be-dangerous/] made my conviction even stronger. For some years now, there have been advancements in computer-generated image recognition. That recognition nowadays goes far beyond optical character recognition. Face recognition, objects, some scenes are things that software such as the Facebook algorithms
Marco Zehe
Marco Zehe
3 min read

Sentimental Me

This year, I am noticing an increased number of sentimental waves, as well as an unusually strong afinity towards the Christmas holiday season. As it is now the first Advent Sunday [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advent_Sunday], I feel it is time to share a little personal bit about how this year has been going so far. It has been a rather eventful year in terms of family matters, health conditions, and some other events that were emotionally challenging in one form or another. As a result, I ha
Marco Zehe
Marco Zehe
3 min read
BlueBeanieDay, WebStandards

A curious web standards celebration

Have you heard of Blue Beanie Day before? Well, I have, but only because I have been involved with web standards and accessibility for so long. The Cute Calendar has all information [https://www.cute-calendar.com/event/blue-beanie-day/35785.html]. And you know what? I even know a few people who celebrate it. This year, I’ve heard of Deborah [https://www.lireo.com/web-standards-blue-beanie-day-returns/] and Jeffrey [https://twitter.com/zeldman/status/1199694645795676162] celebrating it. Do you
Marco Zehe
Marco Zehe
1 min read
AccessibilityInspector, ColorBlindness, ColorContrast, DeveloperTools, DevTools

Auditing For Accessibility Problems With Firefox Developer Tools

Since its debut in Firefox 61, the Accessibility Inspector [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Accessibility_inspector] in the Firefox Developer Tools has evolved from a low-level tool showing the accessibility structure of a page. In Firefox 70, the Inspector has become an auditing facility to help identify and fix many common mistakes and practices that reduce site accessibility. In this post, I will offer an overview of what is available in this latest release. Inspecting the Acc
Marco Zehe
Marco Zehe
6 min read
Keyboard

Navigating in the Firefox toolbars using the keyboard

Firefox toolbars got a significant improvement to keyboard navigability in version 67. It was once again enhanced in Firefox 70. Here’s how. For a long time, Firefox toolbars were not keyboard accessible. You could put focus in the address bar, and tab to the search box when it was still enabled by default. But the next press of the tab key would take you to the document. Shift-tabbing from the address bar would take you to the Site Identity button, AKA the Lock icon, and another Shift+Tab woul
Marco Zehe
Marco Zehe
1 min read
Gutenberg

My thoughts on Gutenberg Accessibility

I have, for the most part, remained silent about the whole WordPress Gutenberg accessibility topic. Others who are closer to the project have been very vocal about it, and continue to do so. However, after a period of sickness, and now returning to more regular blogging, I feel the time has come to break that silence. What is Gutenberg? Gutenberg, or the new WordPress block editor [https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/], is the next generation writing and site building interface in the WordPress blo
Marco Zehe
Marco Zehe
6 min read
Federation, Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, SocialNetworking

A few tips on Mastodon

In recent months, you may have come across the name Mastodon here and there. Especially two weeks ago, when Twitter again made headlines with some, possibly politically motivated, account suspensions that resulted in an influx of users from India [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-50343054] to the federated network. Time to look at it a bit, also with regards to accessibility. Mastodon [https://joinmastodon.org/] itself is merely the name of an application that, like many others, uses a
Marco Zehe
Marco Zehe
6 min read
graph, ProtectionReport, table, WAIARIA

How I made the Firefox Protection report screen reader accessible

Firefox 70, released in October, contains a new feature called the Protection Report. It contains a graph of all the things Firefox protected you from in the last seven days. Here’s how I made that screen reader accessible. Originally, the data shown in the protection report was only presented visually. Well, for sighted people, that is still the case. However, if you’re a screen reader user, you get a nice tabular representation of the data, so you also get the full picture. 😉 Let’s start wi
Marco Zehe
Marco Zehe
4 min read