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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Have you noticed that contact forms are disappearing? Have you also noticed that many websites are replacing their forms with chatbots? Whether you put a chatbot on your website or direct visitors to one hosted on Facebook Messenger, is that a better solution for capturing leads and other contact information than with a traditional form? In this article, Suzanne Scacca will explore what is happening to forms on the mobile web and why chatbots may or may not be a suitable replacement for them.
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It’s essential to be ready to design for both visual and voice. Since prototyping for voice is new for many designers, it may be unclear as to where to start and what process to follow.
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Not everything that’s round and stands out is considered to be a button. In this article, Vadim explains how you can create a proper interactive button for your users — one that shouldn’t be confused for anything else.
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In this Smashing TV webinar recording, join Léonie Watson (a blind screen reader user) as she explores the web, and find out about some unexpected properties of HTML elements that not only have a huge impact on accessibility, but also turn out to be pretty good for performance, too. We felt that the webinar was so valuable that we would open it up so that it’s free for everybody to use. Hopefully, it will serve as a resource for the whole web development community to understand how — and why — semantic markup matters.
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Web Standards, and the documentation to support them, provide huge insight into ‘the why’ and ‘the what’ of the world wide web. They are a fantastic resource for any web developer and help people build stuff for the web that is functional, accessible and cross-compatible. In this article, we take a look at the history of Web Standards, how to use them in your work and ways you can get involved in making them. In this article, Amy Dickens will give you an introduction to web standards, as well as ways you can get involved in contributing to new and existing standards. Let’s begin!
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A sighted user puts himself in the shoes of a non-sighted user. In this series, Chris Ashton attempts to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. I hope to raise the profile of difficulties faced by real people, which are avoidable if we design and develop in a way that is sympathetic to their needs. Today, Chris experiences first-hand difficulties that visually impaired users face and describes what we can do as web developers to help.
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WordPress has a brand new content editor called “Gutenberg” that is going to shape WordPress for years to come, and it should allow more designers and front-end developers into the ecosystem. This should be welcomed with open arms. Well, if and when it is fully accessible, anyway. In this article, Andy Bell explains why it’s a movement (not just a new editor) and what’s happened and how this sort of situation might be avoided by others in the future.
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When you prepare for your next presentation, use these tips on how to tweak your slides and your talk so that everyone gets the most out of it. In this article, Allison Ravenhall brings you tips that will make a big difference to your whole audience. Your slide content, design, and how you present can all affect how well the crowd gets your message, if at all. This is particularly true for those with physical and cognitive conditions. Making subtle changes to what you show and your script will help all attendees to get the most out of your hard work.
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At SmashingConf Toronto, attendees got to participate in live performance and accessibility audits with our speakers Marcy Sutton and Tim Kadlec. Marcy took two example components, built using React, and walked us through how these components could be made more accessible with some straightforward changes, and Tim demonstrates how to test the performance of a site, and find bottlenecks leading to poor experiences for visitors. Watching an expert assess these critical areas can help you to perform your own audits.
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