Mitch11's Celebration Blog

I'm working on a passion project, tentatively called "Barriers of Babel: How Languages and Accessibility Intersect." Today I had a minor breakthrough. I had spent a few days trying to understand which human languages Windows and Android support. I thought it was a matter of matching the language name, and sometimes the region and script, to the IANA language subtags . Then I looked at the NVDA screen reader. It's more transparent than other software, telling us the IANA language subtags of its UI languages. Yet even here it's still hard to know "which languages it supports," because several of these are in fact macrolanguages which contain more than one language. When the IANA language registry says two things are distinct languages, it's based on a measure of intelligibility between them. So for example, what do the macrolanguages "Chinese" and "Albanian" mean in NVDA's list of UI languages ? "Chinese (Simplified, Ch...

I was trying to make sense of these issues, reported in 2020 against ARIA in HTML : Incorrect or confusing description of aria-required usage #225 Other aria-* attributes which should not be allowed on HTML elements #241 My understanding of strong native semantics was hand-wavy, so I scrutinized the ARIA spec . It gives us an interlocking set of requirements for web authors, ARIA conformance checkers, user agents, and the host language itself (usually HTML, but could be SVG or MathML). To help myself understand the subtleties, I reorganized and rephrased these requirements in more formal language. Words in [square brackets] are my additions, but otherwise these are direct quotes from  ARIA spec 1.2 (Working Draft 18 December 2019), section 8.5, Conflicts with Host Language Semantics . How ARIA handles conflicts with a host language The ARIA spec's requirements for a host language spec (e.g, ARIA in HTML) [8.5.1 Attribute Conflicts:] Host languages MUST explicitly declare where the...

It's been a month now since we moved from the San Francisco Bay Area to Berlin. It's easy to read the news and compare the vastly different per capita COVID statistics by city or region or country, but it's taking me a while to get a handle on what's really going on here. Obviously Germany is mostly open. Business and schools and many organizations have been busy. I've seen this at street level both in Berlin and in Saxony. Now I'm trying to reconcile my contradictory impressions. Sometimes it seems people are following the rules quite closely, yet at other times people's safety behaviors vary rather widely. My insight today is that people aren't actually following the rules -- they're following leaders' interpretations of the rules. Whoever is in charge of a restaurant, a family gathering, or a church sets the norms and everybody else mostly follows suit. Role models are more important than signage. Meanwhile, as far as I can tell tracking and t...

Today after breakfast I took a walk in my Berlin neighborhood. I saw many homes, some businesses, and some public gathering places. I saw two glass collection locations, and I wondered if they would appear on a map. My first search result was Glas entsorgen – Entsorgen.org . The first commenter was a person with a disability seeking a pickup service for his glass recycling. This story so far portrays the tangential tendencies of my ADHD brain. Others have told this story before! Here's a fun version: Hal replacing a lightbulb (YouTube autoplay, 42 seconds) . Fortunately, before I went to bed last night, I chose my goal for today: to categorize and prioritize the whole world of unsolved accessibility problems, with a focus on technology. Does that sound unrealistic? Well, I believe I can harness my creativity to tame this complexity. In fact, I can use this morning's tangential topic for my ambitious goal today. The commenter's need for a recycling pickup service is ...

We visited the Lutheran church on Müllerstraße today in Zehlendorf. Today is the Sunday commemorating baptism. We sat in singles in pairs with social distance. The congregation is older than we are and equally white. A few people had evident disabilities. The pastor is engaging. His speech and movement convey energy. The sermon started with the idea of Erwaehlung — I tried to look it up in Google Translate, then I got Silke's help. "Gott liebt mich grundlos." The pastor connects the traditional Lutheran message to our contemporary world. Examples: it's a mistake to play on a computer to avoid feeling pain. He said something about #BlackLivesMatter but as a language learner I didn't understand the context. I went in with low expectations of understanding everything, then the experience beat my expectations — I understood 75% of everything spoken. Du oder Sie? I know we say Du to God. Does God say Du to me? The organist today played the hymns clearly an...

Are companies using WCAG for non-web software? Short answer: Yes! This is important for standards education. The question came up because I recommended that the WCAG-EM Report Tool  not hard-code the words "websites" and "web pages" into its reports. I said the tool should also include suitable language for non-web software, such as mobile apps. Personally I've written a lot of WCAG reports in VPAT format for non-web software, but I wondered... Is this my weird specialty, or is it common? So I asked the Internet. I looked at the ten biggest digital companies because I had a hunch they might publish their VPAT reports online for all to see. I was right — after a few simple web searches, I found six out of ten of these large companies publishing their VPAT reports online. A few clicks later, I had the data I was looking for. Five out of six  large technology companies have published at least one VPAT report for non-web software. I was disappointe...

Thank you to Irfan Ali and Janina Sajka for starting the Spoken Pronunciation Task Force in the W3C Accessible Platform Architectures (APA) Working Group. As an accessibility professional, amateur linguist, and person with a cognitive disability , I'm offering this blog post as a perspective and a starting point for discussion. What would happen if we use lexical markup in HTML for improving pronunciation in text to speech (TTS)? Lexical markup specifies the lexeme of a word or phrase, not its phonemes. Lexical markup can help language learners as a basis for more efficient translation. Lexical markup can help end users with cognitive disabilities through more accurate presentation of lexical synonyms (PDF) or conversion to simplified language . Existing W3C standards already offer lexical markup as a basis for pronunciation. In the Pronunciation Lexicon Specification (PLS) and Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) , the role attribute and token element provide this capa...

As an accessibility subject matter expert (SME) watching another Global Accessibility Awareness Day come and go, sometimes I feel like a manure shoveler. No matter how carefully I shovel (or test), it will always stink. Instead, as SMEs we must remember to be farmers. With patient perseverance, we sow the seeds and nurture the cycles of life – or the lifecycles of digital products. Actually, many analogies are apt... the accessibility job most days :: the accessibility job as it should be manure shoveler :: farmer cop (traditionally gaining respect through fear) :: firefighter (traditionally gaining respect through protection) factory worker :: global logistics consultant number cruncher :: polymath heart surgeon :: nutritionist No analogy is perfect. In reality the manure will always need shoveling, the factory will need greasing, numbers will need crunching, and digital products will need auditing. The power of these analogies is to remind us that the left side is just a ...

As we started driving out of Cancún, I couldn't help looking for patterns. How is this place the same or different from the parts of the U.S. and Germany that I know? After a week with my family in Valladolid, Tulum, and Playa del Carmen, I still have more questions than answers. In Puerto Morelos yesterday, I bought a book called "Mañana Forever? Mexico and the Mexicans" from a lovely bookstore called Alma Libre. I'll see if I can put together some answers. I'm not looking for the "national character" of Mexico or of any place, just patterns of prevailing beliefs of the people who live there. Before diving into that book, here are my initial observations and hypotheses. More people smile back to me in Mexico than in San Francisco. People spend more time face to face with friends and acquaintances. They share a vehicle, sit together without devices, talk and laugh. I saw three young women in the Tulum library doing crafts together. People ...

It's time. In recognition of World Mental Health Day and ADHD Awareness Month , I've decided to start telling everybody about my ADHD brain. For people who know me, the revelation that I go off on mental tangents might be the least surprising news of the day. Yet I struggled with the decision to say "I have ADHD" out loud in a public forum, and I won't claim that disclosure is for everybody. According to a 2015 survey of ADHD disclosure , respondents were evenly split on whether outcomes in the workplace were positive or negative. "The severity of negative outcomes varied. Some were fired, passed over for promotion, ridiculed, or the ADHD disclosure was ignored by the employer and no attempts were made to implement or offer accommodations." On the other hand, it's easier and safer for me to talk about my ADHD than it is for a lot of other people. As a white male in the United States, I started at a spot near the front of the line which I never...

This is a follow-up from my last blog post . Should a web author be able to explicitly set a Sequential Focus Navigation Starting Point using JavaScript? There are several reasons why the answer should be "yes." It can improve user experience in some cases Today, for accessibility it's often necessary to set focus on a div or static text. If browsers and assistive technologies will provide a consistent experience for anchor links, then instead of setting focus on non-actionable content, it would be more like native browser behavior to set a Sequential Focus Navigation Starting Point. In such cases users would expect to see the element in the viewport, so the author should also use Element.scrollIntoView() . Less often, this same technique can solve a usability problem when JavaScript sets focus on a text input. In devices with virtual keyboards (iOS Safari at least), input.focus() causes the virtual keyboard to appear. This is appropriate in some cases, where th...

Both from a user perspective and from a technical perspective, I like the way Chromium is formalizing the "sequential focus navigation starting point" . A few highlights of this change: If a navigation to a url with fragment identifier happened, an element pointed by the fragment is set as sequential focus navigation starting point. In other words, anchor links like #skip_to_main will now work for keyboard users, without any JavaScript. We've only been  waiting for this since 1990 ! If the element pointed by sequential focus navigation starting point is removed from the document tree, a point where there was the element at would be the starting point. This is good for accessibility in modern web sites, such as single-page apps. We'll first need to see some follow-on improvements in browsers and assistive technologies, but eventually this might allow web authors to simplify focus management, as DOM elements are removed and changed. Implementation: Sequential ...

Here's some decidedly gray literature: my raw notes about Paul Saint-Amour's new book. Reaching page 6, I was struck by a hypothesis: people's tendency to underestimate the likelihood of unlikely negative events, although irrational, is nevertheless adaptive. Reaching page 9: What about Carthage? What about Vietnam? In the more recent modern era, have people found new strength from being targeted by total war or by a merciless or indiscriminate enemy with massive destructive capability? Namely, the clarity of the choice to fight when flight is no option. Or is there nothing recent about that response, other than new technological means of responding -- the tools of what we call terrorism? Back to page 8, footnote: maybe later I’ll look up "perdure" and "sequelae" (earlier I looked up "frisson", and "index" as a verb) noting his use of scare quotes: "conventional" wars transgenerational injury -- are the long-term e...

Tonight I played the three-words-at-a-time story game with Silke, Moxie, and Hannah. I promise, we weren't even eating sugar. We must simply be this twisted... Once upon a time there was a girl. Her name was Alex. She always wanted to play with her neighbors' kids. It was creepy because the neighbors were skeletons. They had died 200 milleniums ago. Alex dug up some skeletons and put them in a body bag, then offered them to stay with her while her aunt moved out. Unfortunately the skeletons started after her and she ran into a demon. The Queen of England tried to stop this nonsense. However the demon ate the queen, and then the demons had a party. The good news was that they were near a cemetery. So they unearthed King Arthur to rescue them. And it worked! The demon was cordially invited to a grand ball. Arthur and Lancelot were there too. The skeletons all posted pictures of the party on Instagram. They got Alex and Arthur. Then they were satisfied and died. Dead on dancefl...

Sunday 5/18/2014: I went into my Planet Fitness in Richmond, California, and said I'd like to cancel my membership. The staff person said I could cancel there in person, but not at that moment, because it was 15 minutes before closing on a Sunday. (This location closes at 7:00 PM on a Sunday.) I asked him whether actually I need to send a certified letter, which I had heard was necessary. The staff person said yes that works too, but the easier way is to put it into the computer right there in the franchise. He said I'm already being billed for May; if I cancel by June 10 them I avoid the June 19 bill. Next day, Monday 5/19/2014: I successfully cancelled, 9:45 p.m. They have a standard process with a paper form which they then entered into the computer. It was so fast, I asked the guy if we were all done. He turned his computer screen around and showed me the word "Cancelled" on my record. I wouldn't expect every cancellation experience to go just as smoothly ...

My "start here" list for web accessibility is a short list, but the drilldown is deep. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 - Level AA is a de facto standard for a solid level of web accessibility. The Paciello Group (TPG) - I like Steve Faulkner's focus on standards-based development, tempered with a disciplined testing approach. WebAIM mailing list archives - I often search the discussions, to make sure I'm not reinventing the wheel. It can be up-to-the-minute but you must test and validate whatever you read. I'm a big believer in testing everything. If you don't have a test that shows that it works, then you must assume it does not work. Even for stuff that Steve says works, or I do. Prove me wrong, make the Internet better.   I typically test on: Keyboard-only in one Windows browser. JAWS and NVDA IE8 and latest Firefox. I call this my "bookend strategy." If something works on both a modern standards-compliant browser a...

Last week I attended the W3C symposium on Text Customization for Readability . That's a mouthful... We explored ways that a reader can change the way text looks, to make it easier to read. If you have low vision, how do you read online? David Sloan says people like himself with low vision can have great difficulty reading text with subpixel rendering , e.g. ClearType which is no longer configurable in Internet Explorer 9. Eileen Rivera enlarges text significantly in order to read it. Her wish list item is to allow all text to wrap so she does not have to scroll horizontally. She added that content authors should watch the "gymnastics" that low vision readers go through, which should inspire content authors to work on improving the experience. Suzette is dealing with the effects of cataract surgery. For her, increased font size is necessary, but makes it difficult to skim. Increased line spacing makes reading more comfortable for her. Anthony Lee says web browers ne...

2024 Update: I no longer think it's a good idea to detect assistive technology usage, even for an ostensibly good cause. The slippery slope is too morally hazardous. —Mitchell If you use a screen reader, please fill out the 2012 WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey . The survey closes on May 25. Sharing for the accessibility nerds out there... At the end of the survey, I added these comments... Let's see if I get a response! When you report the results, I would be curious to know how you solicited people to fill in this survey. Was it just through the WebAIM email list, or did you take steps to get some kind of broad cross-section of users worldwide? In you report, will you analyze possible effects of selection bias in the results? I'm not complaining (all questionnaires have some selection bias) but I would like to hear your perspective on how much the respondents represent the whole world of web users. Also, in a future survey, it would be interesting to use Adobe Flash...

This Contra Costa Times article was the first time I have heard of a "Walmart Grocery" store. http://www.contracostatimes.com/breaking-news/ci_20487002/richmond-plans-vacant-grocery-raise-neighboring-concerns A chain store wouldn't be my first choice for our neighborhood, but on the other hand it does seem to be a real grocery store... We need more information. At the Planning Commission meeting we can scrutinize the proposal, demand transparency, and speak out on the issues we care about. Our attendance could really make a difference! The same story played out with a Walmart Grocery in Austin, Texas. As a result of citizen pressure, the over-large plan was modified, but not cancelled... http://austin.ynn.com/content/top_stories/284412/locals-warming-up-to-northcross-walmart The Planning Commission will meet May 3, 6:30pm, in Richmond City Hall, 450 Civic Center Plaza. Cross streets are 25th and Barrett. It is appropriate for both Richmond and El Cerrito residents to atte...

When I was a kid, we sometimes went to the Unitarian church in Yakima. I don't remember it very much, but there was a church hall, and a sermon, and songs I think. It felt good to go and listen. I laugh now when I hear Garrison Keillor's caricature of Unitarians as vague and noncommittal. He's absolutely right, but I would say it another way. The Unitarians I know are highly committed: they are committed to questioning everything, committed to seeking. So that's me in a nutshell - one part of me. I attended York School , a private Episcopal high school in Monterey. I needed and appreciated the rich connectedness at York: connections between people, the tapestries of ideas. At the time if you asked me whether I believed in God, I would say that I always get a glimpse of God through music. This is where I became a singer. We held occasional services in the chapel, but there were no efforts to convert the diverse student body to any religion. Now when I look back, I realiz...