📯 letter@marcus.io Issue #4: A11y links, learnings and an idea

Hello dear subscribers,

without further ado (e.g. complaining about the current heatwave here in Germany), let's get going:

Accessibility

The by far most interesting link I discovered this week was the accessibility audit Heydon Pickering did for Bulb, a British green gas and electricity supplier. Although the website has changed since (incorporating Heydon's findings and ironing them out), it still is very fascinating to read. Because it shows you at least two things:

1. What areas/user stories to consider in such an audit

2. How such an audit is formally structured

After all, it is as Accessabilly on twitter puts it aptly, "a comprehensive real life example". Thanks, Bulb and Heydon for releasing this resource!

What has also made waves in recent days and is guaranteed to develop into a valuable resource is Dave Rupert's project "A11Y Nutrition Cards". You are also invited to read his introductory blog post where he writes about his intention to launch the site:

Even as someone who is somewhat accessibility savvy, I’ve struggled with understanding the a11y expectations when I’m building out components. [...] When I see good content that isn’t very compelling or easily understandable, I start to wonder if some design could help.

In his article "Web Accessibility: What You Say vs. What I Hear" Mikey Ilagan advocates a mind shift towards digital accessibility shortcomings - instead of treating them as bugs and putting them (sometimes with only low priority) in a backlog, he sees accessibility issues in a grander scale: as missing project requirements.

The last topic in this issue's accessibility section is not really a link, but a shower thought: Making web apps accessible - and making documenting accessible web apps also accessible - why not build a http://todomvc.com, but for building inclusive web apps: showing typical web app use cases and how to solve them accessibly in various frameworks (or vanilla JS). Of course open source and well documented. I shared this idea on twitter, and got some positive feedback. What do you, dear readers, think of this idea? Feel free to reach out to me on twitter or, as always, via mail: letter@marcus.io.

Since the last newsletter I learned

• There is a great way to "cache" already sanitized or in any other way processed input data in ProcessWire: $input→whitelist() (see my tweet).
• Using Content Security Policy and SVG sprites together? Won't work right off the bat, because of inline styles. April King wrote about this two years ago (see my tweet).

Internal stuff

Since the last newsletter issue, I added webmentions (here's a primer on the topic) to my blog. This offers another option for newsletter feedback (because I re-post every newsletter issue as a blog post). As always, feel free to play around with it.

This ends this issue. Read you next time, hopefully under some cooler circumstances 😎

Best,
Marcus