There's a Web A11y Slack group and it's super useful!

My favorite accessibility resource is the web-a11y Slack group, which I came across by accident earlier this year. It's a great place to ask questions, and you can search through years of messages to dive deep on specific topics. Since Slack communities can be hard to discover, I thought I'd share some highlights from the past day to show what you might be missing out on.

Thoughts on adding a high contrast toggle switch and dealing with brand colors¹

It's okay to not use your brand colors everywhere on your website if they don't end up working. Brand colors might not have a high enough contrast ratio for people with low vision to see, or they might be confusing if those colors are typically used to indicate other things like success or failure.

How to deal with screen readers and awkward pronunciation²

There are cases where you'll write valid code, but a screen reader will read it out in a strange way. For example:

<a href="tel:+18005555555">1.800.555.5555</a>

NVDA will pronounce this as "One, eight hundred, five hundred and fifty five, five thousand five hundred and fifty five".

It's considered bad practice to try to change how screen readers pronounce things especially because screen readers can also be used with braille displays, where you might want to be able to read each character as it's written on the screen.

CPACC study resources³

CPACC stands for Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies, which is a certification you can get through IAAP. Here's their info on how to prepare for the CPACC exam.

This includes:

• IAAP CPACC Body of Knowledge (opens a Word document)
• Deque's CPACC prep course (free for people with disabilities) make sure to read through linked articles as well

Is it okay to show a tooltip when you hover or focus on an element that isn't interactive?⁴

Not really. If it's not interactive, it doesn't make sense for it to be focusable. Relying on focus and hover alone also probably won't work via touch or voice control. It'd be okay to use a button instead, which you could click to toggle the tooltip on and off (see https://inclusive-components.design/tooltips-toggletips/). Using focus, hover, and click all together would be an awkward experience for keyboard users.

How can people join the web-a11y Slack group?⁵

You used to be able to sign up at http://web-a11y.herokuapp.com/, but this was shut down to prevent spam. If you'd like to join, feel free to DM me your email address and I'll send you an invite!

1. https://web-a11y.slack.com/archives/C042TSFGN/p1565344196364600

2. https://web-a11y.slack.com/archives/C042TSFGN/p1565353182369600

3. https://web-a11y.slack.com/archives/C042TSFGN/p1565360784375300

4. https://web-a11y.slack.com/archives/C042TSFGN/p1565385808417400

5. https://web-a11y.slack.com/archives/C042TSFGN/p1565390460432700