Six ways to make your site more accessible

At the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London, the Brits showcased all sorts of great British inventions and ideas… (Brexit hadn't happened yet). They also invited sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web and he made these words appear in the stadium: this is for everyone. This resonated a lot with me as there are many ways this applies to the web. First, everyone can get on the web. You don't need an invite or pass a test. Second, everyone can have a website, you don't need to be a government or a bank or anything official, if you like the Vengaboys, you can start a fansite. Third: it works for everyone, at least the technology allows for lots of accessibility. Berners-Lee is the director of the W3C, the body that creates web standards, and I'm confident he assures web standards are made to work for everyone.

I have two tips around focus that I want to leave you with. The first is, make sure you don't lose focus. This is what happens when an element that has focus, or its parent, gets removed or hidden. At that point, always be concerned with where the focus goes. In this case, the focus is in the address field in the personal details section. When we close that section, the focused element is hidden and it will lose focus. So what should we do with the focus? In this case it is fairly easy, it can go to the button that closed the section, as that is an interactive element. You won't even need to move it yourself as the browser will focus it when it is clicked.

When you have a modal overlay, upon closing it, it would make sense to move focus back to the element that initially opened the overlay. So yes, you'd need to keep track of what that element is.