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Discussion on: 101 Digital Accessibility (a11y) tips and tricks

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Timothy Foster • Edited

This makes me so happy! It wasn't enough to just leave a heart and unicorn, I had to comment about it. It's been such a journey for me finding these bits and pieces all over the web, so seeing it all in once place is beyond useful.

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GrahamTheDev

Aww thank you Timothy, I am blushing!

Let me know if you find any blunders or typos as you work your way through it! 😋

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Timothy Foster

Finally made it through the whole thing! Made some tweaks to my website from some of these tips, and will definitely write a post linking to this soon!

Here are some general thoughts I had reading through some of the tips.

12: One h1 per page

One of the things that surprises me about the HTML Spec is the use of <section> and <h1>, where it explicitly allows (and even recommends) each section essentially resetting the heading level. On the one hand it's pretty modular, but in practice it really hurts AT, so I just do headings normally now.

29: alt attributes

I wrote about this recently; thanks for giving it a read! Every once in a while I look to see what alt attributes people are using and shed a tear every time I see "file-name.png" : (

30: Don't add alt text to images

Another technique I've seen recommended is to use CSS background image for decorative imagery. Lately I've been making a distinction between a decorative image in the context of an article (img with empty string alt), and a decorative image enhancing the website's design (div with background-image).

78: Automated testing

Happy to see testing here too! At my last job our web architect highly advocated the use of the Lighthouse Node CLI so that a lighthouse report could be generated on the continuous integration pipeline.

I'll definitely be giving the Accessibility Insights for Web tool a look-over!

79: Manual testing

I learned a whole lot just from manually experimenting with keyboard-only navigation and using screenreaders!

Lately I've been trying to think of ways to utilize journey testing to catch usability issues. For instance, I recently wrote a test for a dialog that, instead of using functions like click('Close'), relied only on keyboard presses to make sure tab trapping worked and so forth.

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GrahamTheDev

I am so glad somebody managed to read the whole thing!

By the way I wrote (and obviously didn't send somehow...) a comment on your article.

You got most of the points spot on! I was just going to make a minor point on how your alt descriptions should be shorter and to use things like <figcaption> and aria-labelledby if you want to add details such as "large swirls", "magenta bands" etc.

Overall your article was excellent, I enjoyed reading it and "Purpiter" is now my new favourite planet!

I am glad a few points in this article jumped out at you and I am really looking forward to seeing your post on the improvements you made to your site because of it (that is the biggest compliment you could have given me!).