Ghost Gatsby Starter - Marco's Accessibility Blog

Rethinking Web Accessibility On Windows

For the past 18 years, screen readers on Windows have had a particular way of presenting web content to their users. This model no longer scopes well in light of modern web applications and dynamically changing web sites. The model, therefore, needs to be reimagined and modernized.<!— more —> A little bit of history In 1999, the two major screen reader vendors on the market, JAWS and Window-Eyes, released new versions of their software that introduced a new way of web browsing for blind and vis

footer, header, HTML5, section, WAI-ARIA

Firefox 57 will be less chatty to screen readers in some situations

Over the last few days, I landed two changes to Firefox which change how we expose implicit landmarks of some HTML5 elements. This is to make screen readers a bit less chatty in certain situations. For many years, Firefox has exposed certain new HTML5 elements like <header>, <footer>, <nav>, <main>, or <aside> with their corresponding WAI-ARIA landmark semantics. This way, when authors used these elements, screen readers that already knew about WAI-ARIA landmarks would just expose these transpa

JavaScript is not an enemy of accessibility!

When I started making my social media rounds this morning, I came across Jeffrey Zeldman’s call to action [http://www.zeldman.com/2016/11/22/year-ever-blue-beanie-day-matters/] for this year’s Blue Beany Day on November 30th. But I respectfully disagree with a number of points he is making in his post about JavaScript frameworks and their accessibility implications. Frameworks aren’t inaccessible because they’re frameworks First, I agree that the spreading of new JS frameworks is a temporary p

details, HTML5, summary

Firefox 49 supports the HTML5 and elements

As you may or may not have heard, Firefox 49 [https://developer.mozilla.org/de/Firefox/Releases/49] supports the HTML5 < details [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/details]> and <summary [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/summary]> elements. Both full keyboard support and support for assistive technologies is also available right from the start. What are they? <details> and <summary> allow to dynamically show and hide blocks of content. For exampl

The Firefox developer tools Inspector Panel is becoming accessible

A few months ago, I wrote about the efforts to make the built-in Firefox developer tools more accessible. That work started in January and is now carrying first far-reaching fruits. Here’s an update! Until now, the Firefox developer tools are, except for the web console, largely unusable for people with visual impairments, who rely on assistive technologies etc. In January of 2016, part of the accessibility team at Mozilla started an effort to change that. I wrote more about it in this blog pos

AltText, ImageDescription, Twitter

How to: Add image descriptions to pictures you tweet

On March 29, 2016, Twitter announced that description of images is now available [https://blog.twitter.com/2016/accessible-images-for-everyone] when tweeting photos. This helps first and foremost the blind and visually impaired who cannot see images, but may also help people with certain cognitive disabilities who cannot interpret photos, but can make use of descriptions. Here’s how describing your tweeted images works! Tweeting images with descriptions Right now, this feature is available in T

Microsoft are stepping up their accessibility efforts considerably

Have you also noticed an increased buzz around Microsoft’s accessibility efforts lately? You probably have if you, like me, are on Twitter and other social media channels and are following the MSFTEnable [https://twitter.com/msftenable] Twitter account. But in case you haven’t, here are some exciting pointers for you to keep an eye on. When Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella took on his current role in 2014, one of the things he immediately brought into focus, was accessibility. He took it to a hig

Making the Firefox developer tools accessible

In the first quarter of 2016, Yura, who is part of the accessibility team at Mozilla, and I are starting on a journey to make the firefox developer tools accessible. The majority of the tools are currently a very mouse-driven environment, and our goal is to make them equally accessible for keyboard users and those using assistive technologies such as screen readers. This blog post marks the beginning of that journey. The reasons The main reason of course is: It’s the right thing to do. Firefox

Status Of The Accessibility Of Slack

After my report on the accessibility of the IRCCloud IRC client [https://www.marcozehe.de/2015/12/07/looking-at-the-accessibility-of-the-irccloud-service/] , but also in general, the question of how accessible the Slack team communication service [https://www.slack.com] is, has come up time and again. Here’s my observation after trying it out. This article was last updated in May 2019. What is Slack? Slack is an instant messaging service for teams. Primarily targeted at companies initially, it

AltText, ColorContrast, FormLabeling, Graphics, HTML, HTMLAccessibility, WCAG, WebSemantics, WebStandards

The web accessibility basics

I’ve been asked again and again over the years what the absolute basics of web accessibility are. And while I always thought that it is not so difficult to find resources about these basics, the recurrence of that question prompted me to finally write my own take on this topic. So here it is, my list of absolute web accessibility basics every web developer should know about. Alternative text for images One of the questions I get asked the most is “which graphics require alternative text”? The a

Gitter, IRC, IRCCloud, Slack

Looking at the accessibility of the IRCCloud service

In recent months, I’ve started using the IRCCloud [https://irccloud.com/] service for all my communication via Internet Relay Chat (IRC) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat]. We use IRC at Mozilla, and many other open source projects as well as the W3C use IRC for their instant communication needs. Previously, I had been using typical IRC clients such as Adium for OS X or ChatZilla as an add-on to Firefox. But that caused a lot of problems when working from multiple machines, li

Accessibility features in Firefox for iOS

After ten months in development, Mozilla today released Firefox for iOS [https://blog.mozilla.org/press/2015/11/firefox-users-can-now-choose-their-favorite-browser-on-ios/] worldwide. Firefox for iOS is bringing your synchronized bookmarks, history and other information associated with your Firefox account to the iOS platform. Moreover, it is also going to record pages you visit in your history and sync these back to your Firefox on Windows, Linux, Mac, and even Android devices. From the start