Web Design for Accessibility

Leroy Anderson
The Typewriter (Composed 1950 – 1st performance 1953)

The Typewriter Performance · Image of man typing, really gets into it.

Posted on YouTube by
Aleksandr Trofimov

I’ve been setting up the site for keyboard accessibility and ran into a problem on Safari. Using the tab button on the keyboard, the sidebar was being skipped. Turns out in Safari Settings in the Advanced Tab you have to check the box “Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage”. The navigation works fine in Firefox, Chrome and Edge by default.
Safari Settings>Advanced Tab>Check Box – “Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage”

As I was going through sources to add to this list of links it became a rabbit hole. I’m scoring 94-100 on Google PageSpeed insights for accessibility, which is a good start for basic settings. On some of the sites I looked at though (which had paid services coincidentally) I scored pretty bad – one of them even said my site was breaking the law, WTF.

I’ve tried to list the most helpful free sites.
— David

Resources
Microsoft – Accessibility/Disability Support
Apple Accessibility Features
AbilityNet – Digital Accessibility Free Resources
ADA – Fact Sheet – Web Content and Mobile Apps

Tools
Google PageSpeed Insights
Wave – Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool
W3 -Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List
A11Y – Checklist

axe DevTools Browser Extensions
Firefox
Chrome
Edge

We Have the Technology

We have the technology
Not available before
We have the technology

But thinkers and poets of the past
Oh, no
They had to leap into the dark so blindly
— David Thomas

Pere Ubu
We Have The Technology (1988)

Man pushing button, looks serious

Posted on YouTube by
Dzhakhar 96

Changes to the site (other than style):
On the Desktop, Tablet/iPad (landscape mode) will pretty much be the same.

On a phone, the Home Page is just the sidebar without the center content.
The sidebar has a list of the Recent Posts now so they can be accessed from there. Anything else will be on the Archives Page.

The main thinking behind the changes was trying to make it easier on mobile phones to just listen to the station and see what’s playing. I’ve cleaned it up too, works a lot better.

Still working on a few quirks, but it’s more or less back to normal.


— David

Hello world! V3

The Beatles
Get Back (January 30, 1969)

Beatles Performing Get Back on Rooftop

Posted on YouTube by
jose navea

Under Construction – I’ve been having issues with a few things on the site. Add-ons were conflicting with each other and I need to move away from proprietary page builders that lock you in. Their support is generally substandard.

I’ll name and blame – Elementor – For any ticket you send in they want your login info or it won’t be submitted, I had a question over the file system and in the ticket I explained that I had a backup on my computer that I was working with so I didn’t need anything done on the site. Just an answer to my question.

Their response was that they were unable to log in and asked for my info again (I put fake login info in the ticket). I’m reluctant to let anyone poke around to begin with and this was back when I was working on syncing with eBay and had customers names and addresses, I’m not giving that out.

As far as locking you in, to rebuild your site it’s a huge pain in the ass. It uses its own proprietary markup and database entries which can break the site and leave content and metadata after uninstalling. I nuked the site and am doing a fresh install.

I’m currently using the basic WordPress with Gutenberg blocks and it uses HTML markup, and can be moved to other platforms without a hitch. It can be easily converted to basic markup, plain text, rich text and so on.

— David

ETA – The Now Playing and Previously Played Archives are a priority.