I would like browsers to fix accessibility problems automatically
A presentation at View Source Conference 2019 in in Amsterdam, Netherlands by Hidde de Vries
My idea for a better web is that browsers fix some accessibility automatically.
There’s lots of information out there on how to make sites accessible, many people reach out and do online courses, blog posts, workshops and conference talks. But if we’re honest, we will never reach every site owner in the world, which leaves some users of the web with some barriers.
The good news is, we can detect some accessibility problems automatically.
A great project to mention in that regard is ACT rules, a community group in the W3C that takes accessibility standards like WCAG and turns them into testing rules, in an effort to harmonise how automated accessibility testing works.
And that made me think… if we can automatically detect issues, maybe we can also automatically fix them?
I’ll have to be honest though, we can only detect a small subset of issues. And of that subset and even smaller set could potentially be fixed automatically. Let’s dive in, I have four of them, of which some are already in browsers and one is not fixed by any browser that I know. I thought only two were in browsers, but in yesterday’s awesome talk by Melanie I learned about how one more is addressed.
Ok, so the first one is… force readability. What if browsers had this checkbox?
Then, when you’re on a page with lots of text, many words per line, thin letters, bad contrast… you could just press that button and get a better readable version.
Ok, this exists in some browsers as a feature called reader mode. In some of them you can even set font and color preferences. I think it is great and we need it everywhere.
What about zoom? Some users, especially those with visually impairments, have to enlarge parts of their screens in order to use user interfaces. They need zoom.
Yet there’s this meta viewport tag, with which developers can turn zoomability off using the ‘user-scalable=no’ directive. There’s a few use cases like if you’re building an image cropper that has to work on touchscreens… but generally you could make your interface hard to use for some users. What if there’s a ‘always allow zoom’ checkbox that lets users bypass this setting?
This would basically ignore the ‘user-scalable=no’ directive. Admittedly, some browsers already do this, like iOS has ignored this for a couple of years by now. For accessibility reasons.
The third idea I had was to force contrast.
Because sometimes when a designer puts text on a photo, and the photo changes to something that has very little contrast with the text, it becomes hard to read. This is automatically fixable, we know what maximum contrast looks like for white: it’s black!
So what if we draw a black rectangle behind the text when a user wants to? This would fix the problem for at least some people. I was excited to learn yesterday that Edge and Windows High Contrast Mode actually offer something like this and would be delighted to see other browsers and platforms follow suit.
The last one, and this one really doesn’t exist in any browser that I know off… what if we can force focus indication?
Here’s a page with three links, and this is a video of me trying to access the links on this page with a keyboard. Do you see nothing? Yea, that’s not because the video isn’t working, it is because the developer has set the outline property in CSS to none, preventing focus visibility.
The feature I’m proposing would force focus indication, and basically draws something like a 10px black (or white, depending on background) border around whatever has focus, so that someone who doesn’t use a mouse can see where they are.
So here’s me using that, jumping from a link to the next.
And the next…
And the next…
So here’s the four things, in summary, that I think browsers could automatically fix on their own: 1. force zoomability 2. force readability 3. enforce contrast 4. fix focus styles.
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To make the web more accessible, tech educators have been teaching about the importance of things like focus indicators and color contrast. A number of accessibility best practices could be automatically fixed by browsers, and this is what I’d like them to do (maybe under a not-via-script-detectable setting). For instance, lack of focus indication could be fixed by forcing a clear 10px outline, lack of readability because of low contrast text could be detected and fixed by adding a background with extra contrast to text nodes.
Video
Resources
The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.
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ACT Rules
The ACT Rules community.
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