Heydon Pickering’s new book “Inclusive Components” is here, and it’s shipping worldwide. The book explores accessible, robust solutions for the interface patterns we use every day. Jump to table of contents or get your book right away.
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In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about inclusive components. What does it mean to be inclusive, or let alone a component? And what has that got to do with accessibility? Drew McLellan talks to Smashing author Heydon Pickering to find out.
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Our products become slower, clunkier and more painful to use — often simply unbearable for keyboard- and screen reader users, and as such fragile and vulnerable for legal disputes. Let’s fix it. IToday, we bring you Heydon Pickering’s new book Inclusive Components, which explores more accessible and robust solutions for the UI patterns we author, plug in, and use every day. Jump to table of contents or pre-order the book right away.Read more…
Today, Heydon will talk about the relationship between accessibility and design systems, and introduce his brand new book: Inclusive Components. During the session, he will explore how to create an accessible accordion using progressive enhancement, and answer your questions about inclusive interaction design.
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A significant part of the Internet-using population is aged 50 or older — including the people who invented it. Even though we’re as tech-savvy as anyone else, older users have some specific needs that web designers and programmers should consider. None of them are particularly difficult to accommodate, but they can be critical for our use and enjoyment of the Internet. In this article, Barry Rueger will show you why designers need to understand what older users need and why it’s not enough to just say, “I can read it, so what’s the problem?”
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Speech-to-text promises to save time transcribing long audio sources like podcasts and interviews. However, the poor quality of the resulting transcription severely limits the technology’s present use cases. We attempt various methods to improve transcription quality, but ultimately the technology fails to accurately represent human speech. That said, its speed and low cost compared to manual transcription still leaves us with some interesting use cases. In this article, Philip Kiely will use speech-to-text to draft transcripts of podcasts and interviews for publication. He ’ll also evaluate the overall accuracy of these format-transformation technologies by running a few samples through round-trip transcriptions.
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Text-to-speech can help you create more versatile, accessible content. You could purchase recording equipment and spend hours recording and editing each narration, but if you want most of the benefit for only a couple of minutes and a few pennies per post, consider using AWS instead. In this article, Philip Kiely will demonstrate how to use Amazon Polly to narrate your content. In the next article, he will embark on the return journey, from speech-to-text, and consider the accuracy of these transcriptions by sending various samples through a round-trip translation.
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In this series Chris Ashton attempts to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. Data can be prohibitively expensive, especially in developing countries. Reducing the data footprint of your website goes hand in hand with improving frontend performance. It is the single most reliable thing you can do to speed up your site. In this article, Chris puts himself in the shoes of someone on a tight data budget and offers practical tips for reducing our websites’ data footprint.
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How can we improve our keyboard-only (KO) and Assistive Technology (AT) user experiences without affecting the experience for anyone else? In this article, we’ll dig into some specific, practical examples including skip links, navigation menus, modal focusing, and user education components. In this article, Aaron Pearlman is going to go over a few of those affordances that can make your KO/AT user experiences better without really changing the experience for anyone else.
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How do browsers and HTML support screen readers today? In this article, Be Birchall explains why it’s so important to prioritize accessibility among teams and why there needs to be more awareness raised among developers. Lack of awareness and prioritization, rather than any technical limitation, is currently the main barrier to an accessible web. We hope to shift your perspective closer to Haben Girma’s by showing how web accessibility fits into the broader areas of technology, disability, and design.
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