Accessibility Roundup

A handful of a11y-related links I found this week that I thought were useful and thoughtful...

• Overlay Fact Sheet
  Great breakdown of why those accessibility overlays generally create more problems than they're worth, and why you should just put some time into building your site for accessibility in the first place.

• Common misconceptions about screen readers
  If I had a nickel for every time I had an exec tell me, "we don't need to worry about screen readers; we don't have any blind users," I wouldn't have to worry about how I'm going to pay my bills while I'm unemployed. But if nothing else, at least now I've got some good rebuttals to their "arguments" when (if?) I start working again.

• Understanding Focus Indicators for Web Accessibility
  One of the most common issues I've seen in my career is the way people keep nuking focus rings to make their pages look "cleaner" or something. But especially now that we've got :focus-visible to help us handle keyboard interactions, there's no excuse not to do it right. This is an excellent tutorial (and a reminder that color contrast is for more than just text, too).

• Screen Reader HTML Support – Lookup
  So glad I stumbled onto this one! Maybe now I'll finally learn the right way to use screen readers for testing, instead of just opening the software and hoping it passively reads the page the way I expect it to.

• Focus on the people that make things happen
  This is a really insightful point, and I've actually seen this lesson work in practice without really noticing it, too. Pushing uphill is hard work, but if you and the people around you resolve to do the right thing for yourselves, you can still build the accessibility culture you want.