Accessibility Weekly

In an ideal world where clients have unlimited budgets and everything is custom, every website would have perfect accessibility. The reality of WordPress projects is a broad range of budgets, with many …

Creating websites that prioritize accessibility is no longer just a best practice—it’s a business must, especially if you’re building websites for clients in the US, Europe, or parts of Canada that have …

As we near the end of the year, many of us are thinking about how we can add more value (and profit!) to our care plans in 2024. Accessibility services are a …

Tooltips are small floating boxes that appear near words, icons, or images and display short explanatory text on hover or keyboard focus. They can be a good way to provide additional information …

E-commerce has revolutionized how we shop, providing unparalleled convenience and access to products and services without ever stepping foot into a physical store. Think about how many things you have purchased online …

When I asked in The Admin Bar Facebook group what accessibility questions people have, there were questions about mobile nav and hamburger menu accessibility. I’ve previously written about navigation menu accessibility in …

Forms are one of the most important parts of a website to get right from an accessibility perspective because forms are a big way that we measure the success of a website. …

Smooth scroll is a website feature that enhances the way users navigate through a website’s content. It refers to the visual effect of gradually and smoothly moving from one part of a …

When I asked in The Admin Bar Facebook Group what accessibility topics people wanted to hear about in Accessibility Weekly, there were questions about secondary or other navigation menus. Last week, we …

This week’s Accessibility Weekly post is all about a small but impactful way of helping users navigate websites: breadcrumbs. Website “breadcrumbs” are the digital equivalent of Hansel and Gretel leaving – no, …

Audio Description is an accessibility feature that started in live theater, moved to movies, and is increasingly relevant to websites with video content. Never heard of audio description? Read on to learn …

You may have noticed “Accessibility Statements” popping up on more and more websites. Not sure if you or your clients need an accessibility statement? This article is for you. What is an …

From testimonials to sentences highlighted in a blog post for more visual interest, most websites we build include quotes. Typically, quotes on websites are styled in a unique way to make them …

We often discuss that accessibility begins during the design phase of a website project before even a single line of code is written. We’ve previously discussed color selection and the importance of …

The readability of text on websites is significantly impacted by how that text is laid out on the page and the alignment used. As you design or build websites, it’s important to …

Color contrast failures are the most common accessibility problem found on websites during automated tests. Ensuring the websites you design have good color contrast means the text on those sites will be …

✋Raise your hand if you include accordions on almost every website you build. Accordions are helpful for shortening long pages and allowing people to scan headings quickly, then expand them to get …

This Accessibility Weekly is all about navigation menus. Can people with disabilities use the nav menus on the websites you build? Navigation menus are arguably one of the most essential parts of …

Whether restaurant menus, newsletters, e-books, whitepapers, reports, or presentation slides, clients frequently want to include PDFs on their websites. Sometimes, they want PDFs because they want to preserve print design – like …

Tab panels are a great way to conserve space and reduce scrolling when there is a lot of content on the page. Tabs can keep a web page free of clutter and …

Have you ever started filling out a form that asks for your name and address, only to have the browser suggest the information to you so that you could quickly select the …

As web developers, we have a responsibility to ensure that our websites are accessible to all users, regardless of their abilities. One key aspect of website accessibility is ensuring that the reading …

We’ve previously discussed the differences between buttons and links and when to use one or the other. This week’s post is about one of the most significant accessibility problems that I see …

Formatting content into lists is an easy and under-utilized way of improving accessibility on websites. If we were creating a food blog, we would all get it right: ingredients go in an …

What do background videos, carousels, animated GIFs, and the dreaded background music all have in common? Besides the fact that clients love them despite our effort to convince them otherwise, these are …

Infinite scroll is a technique used in websites and applications to provide continuous content loading without explicit pagination or clicking on “next” or “load more” buttons. It allows users to scroll through …

For Global Accessibility Awareness Day this year, I participated in a panel discussion with several colleagues, including Nick Corbett, Accessibility Training and Research Coordinator at The Carroll Center for the Blind. In …

When building websites, it is crucial to declare the language used on the page or for any parts of pages when the language changes throughout the content. This declaration, using a lang …

Most of us realize the importance of captions – not just for people who are deaf, but also for language learners or people who’re situationally unable to play the sound on videos. …

Did you know that movement on websites can literally make people sick? How Websites Can Make People Sick Movement on websites can cause discomfort and motion sickness for people with vestibular disorders …

In several past Accessibility Weekly posts, we’ve included an HTML attribute, aria-hidden=”true”, in code examples and mentioned that aria-hidden can be used to hide elements on a web page from screen readers. …

Target=”_blank”: it’s so easy to add this to HTML code or to toggle the checkbox in the WordPress editor to set links to open in new tabs, and we frequently do it …

In our Accessibility Checker plugin, we have a warning that flags if an animated GIF is inserted into a page. Many people don’t realize that animated GIFs can cause problems for people …

Welcome to another installment of Accessibility Weekly! This week we’re going to talk about best practices and techniques to make sure that popups or modals are usable by everyone. Elements of Accessible …

The title of this Accessibility Weekly is clear enough that you could almost stop just with the title, “Underline Your Links,” and know what you’re supposed to do. Want to know more? …

Have you ever visited a website and tried to use only your tab key to move around? If not, take a break from reading this and go try it right now on …

Last week, as I was auditing a website for accessibility, I came across a table that was completely coded in divs. ???? This was a pricing table that was styled quite nicely, …

Despite our attempts to persuade them that website users don’t interact with sliders, clients frequently want sliders and carousels on their websites, and, invariably, they make it into final designs. Sliders or …

This Accessibility Weekly is a deceptively simple rule that many designers forget or don’t like. When creating a form – whether it’s a multi-field contact form or a single-field search form – …

Captions are an important tool for making video content more accessible, inclusive, and understandable to a wider audience. Recently, there was a post about captions in TAB’s Facebook group, and most comments …

Imagine this scenario: you found an excellent resource for your next article. You want to thank the author and tag them when you share it, so you look for their Twitter account. …

In web design, it’s not uncommon to see links styled as buttons if we want those links to stand out and look more like a call-to-action. In WordPress, it’s also not uncommon …

We all know that adding alternative text to images is good for SEO because it helps Google know what those images are about. But alt text is about more than search engine …

Last week we talked about ensuring that links are meaningful and how adding hidden text that is only visible to screen readers can help with this. Quick Recap: Screen Reader Text in …

What would you think if you encountered a list of links like this? Out of these eight links, only one of them has any real meaning: “Contact Us.” The other seven are …