Eric is a Boston-based designer who helps create straightforward solutions that address a person’s practical, physical, cognitive, and emotional needs.
As LLM chat patterns become more widespread, making them accessible is essential to ensuring everyone can access the information, tools, and opportunities they offer. Drawing on his work improving these interfaces, Eric Bailey shares practical ways to make chat-based experiences on the web more accessible and usable for people who rely on assistive technology.
Read more…
WCAG provides guidance for making interactive elements more accessible by specifying minimum size requirements. In this article, Eric Bailey discusses the nuances of interactive element sizes and clarifies what it looks like to provide accessible interactive experiences using WCAG-compliant target sizes.
Read more…
Overcorrecting for one form of disability may unintentionally negatively impact the experience for other forms of disability. For example, partially visually hidden link names may work great for people who use screen readers, but this approach can be problematic for people who rely on voice control software. Because of this, your designs need to be flexible and adaptable, as well as accommodate the many different ways people can interact with them.
Read more…
CSS Custom Properties can be used for far more than just color, and their values update in realtime, both via display mode updates and JavaScript logic. This is powerful stuff. Eric explains how modern CSS is a powerful piece of assistive technology that can thread into it to create flexible, maintainable and adaptive digital experiences.
Read more…
You can find Markdown in many places on the Internet. In this article, Eric Bailey covers different aspects of Markdown and how it interacts with other technology. At first, it may seem daunting since there is a lot of content to cover across a few different subject areas, but keep in mind that each tweak and update will have a direct impact on someone’s quality of life when using the web.
Read more…
Image placement on the modern web is highly intentional, helping to communicate the overall purpose of a page or view. This means that nearly every image you declare needs to have an alternate description. Nulling an image indicates that it is for decorative purposes only. In this context, decorative means that the image does not visually communicate information that is important to understanding the purpose of the page or view, and why the image is included as a part of that.
Read more…
Constructing an equivalent experience may mean changing the way you think about development and design, and potentially reevaluating your existing work. In this article, Eric Bailey will discuss learning how to embrace an equivalent, inclusive mindset. He will also provide practical, robust ways to improve your websites and web apps by providing solutions to common, everyday barriers cited by the people he interviewed.
Read more…
Our industry tends to place a lot of focus on how, often at the expense of why. An equivalent experience is one that has been deliberately conceived of and built to be able to be used by the widest possible range of people. To create an equivalent experience, you must understand all the different ways people interact with technology, as well as common barriers they experience. Once you have a common understanding established, Eric Bailey will then discuss how to go about implementing equivalent experiences for common accessibility-related issues.
Read more…
Automated accessibility testing is a process where you use a series of scripts to test for the presence, or lack of certain conditions in code. These conditions are dictated by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), a standard by the W3C that outlines how to make digital experiences accessible. Automated accessibility tests are a great resource to have, but they can’t automatically make your site accessible. Use them as one step of a larger testing process. Today, Eric Bailey will take a deep look into accessibility testing.
Read more…
The placeholder attribute contains a surprising amount of issues that prevent it from delivering on what it promises. The presence of a placeholder attribute won’t be flagged by automated accessibility checking software. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean it’s usable. Ultimately, accessibility is about people, not standards, so it is important to think about your interface in terms beyond running through a checklist. In this article, Eric Bailey will clarify why you need to stop using it.
Read more…
