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10 Resources That Will Help You Design Accessible Digital Products
By: Amar Desai
Tags: Product Design, Apps, Design, UX, Accessibility

10 Resources That Will Help You Design Accessible Digital Products

Photo by Daniel Ali on Unsplash

With the rise of design thinking, there has been a lot of emphasis on customer experience. Designers conduct customer research, set up focus groups, perform user testing, and pay attention to the tiniest detail of human behavior while coming up with a product. We have seen some great products coming out to the market as a result of this customer obsession.

However, the customer that these product designers are obsessed over is a perfect human being who can read, see, type, speak, or hear. Unfortunately, some of us have physical disabilities who can’t read, type, see, or hear.

Who is obsessing over the customer experience of these users?

Fortunately, the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium has come up with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). They are a set of recommendations for making Web content more accessible, primarily for people with disabilities. Also, governments across the world are making these standards mandatory.

If you are a designer or a developer tasked with building an accessible digital product, the below list will help you build a product that delivers an amazing user experience while keeping it accessible as per WCAG standards.
Designing for different cultures
By: Brendan Tobin
Tags: I18n, User Experience, UX, Accessibility, L10n

For example, the clean lines, absence of decoration, and mathematical layout grids may look good to western eyes, but other cultures have their own design values. In the home of Nintendo, the Japanese have a preference for dense user interfaces.

Designing for other cultures

Designing for cultures goes way beyond the user interface. As we design for other cultures, it’s natural that we’ll bring conscious and unconscious bias with us in the process. We need to work to reduce the impact of this. Avoiding cultural stereotypes is essential. This is best done through research — understanding what people value.

Speaking with people from that culture is a great place to start. Better still, engage with a UX Designer from that culture. A more basic approach is to consume their media and web content.

Cultural dimensions can also give you a strong indication of what a culture values, and then how best to communicate with them. For example, Long- versus Short-term Orientation speaks to whether a culture values effort for immediate results or working for long-term gain. Cultures with a long-term orientation will value credibility and common-sense solutions, whereas those with short-term orientations prefer problem-solving for immediate results. Depending on the culture, a bank may message their users on the benefits of long-term saving or the availability of credit to achieve short-term success.

No matter what, you have to be open to learning and to change your design as you learn. As always in UX design, you should test what you design with the actual people that will use it.

Technical considerations in cross-cultural design

Beyond the message you deliver to a specific culture, there are many design and technical choices you can take to create a successful experience. These are catered for through internationalisation and localisation.

All too often, we focus on the translation or the choice of colour to address cultural needs, but many other areas deserve equal attention. The list is extensive, but it includes;

Choice of photography/illustration

Typography (see stereotypography)

Text direction

Iconography (including responsiveness to text direction)

Vertical and horizontal spacing

Your brand and site designs should be open to flexing to meet the cultural needs of your market.

Why this matters

If a business chooses to enter a specific market and sell across cultures, they need to allow for this in their service offering. A good business aims to give their customers a solution that meets their needs.

This should align with the UX design. A designer should work to create an experience that understands their users’ needs. Applying a design that allows for the user’s culture isn’t just about creating a good experience, it’s a mark of respect.
Love this!!
By: April M. Hamm, She They
Tags: Comment, Hamm, Accessibility, Content Strategy, Illustration

Love this!! Please consider adding alt text so people using screen readers can enjoy your fun illustrations, too. 💻💙
Make your Angular App Accessible: Skip to Main Content
Tags: Typescript, Angular, Front End Development, Accessibility, Web Development

Make your Angular App Accessible: Skip to Main Content

Accessibility plays a vital role in any Single Page Applications. As Angular growing by leaps and bounds, supporting the accessibility in Angular Application becomes quite complex until we know all accessibility concepts.

Here I am coming with the different guidelines to implement accessibility in Angular Applications.

One of the main concepts to support accessibility is Skip to Main Content. When we are dealing with multiple pages it is better to have one place where we can maintain the whole reusable accessibility feature.

Before starting the implementation techniques, Let’s check common rules to follow while implementing accessibility.

You can also checkout how to create reusable functions to implement accessibility in Angular Application.

Let’s move to our main discussion

One of the main features of accessibility is to skip to the main content. Let’s check out how we can implement Skip to Main Content in Angular.

When keyboard-only users interact with the website they use the tab key to jump from one link to another link. If we have a lot of content in our application and user want to move to the main content available on the page, instead of clicking so many tabs it is better to give them access to reach the main content. Providing the skip to the main content solves this purpose.

Here is a demonstration of what keyboard-only users must do to navigate a page without a skip to the main content link. The below approach worked really well for me to implement skip to main content in Angular Applications.

Step 1. Create header HTML and skip to main content link

Step 2. Add CSS and make that link visible only on focus

Step 3. Create a header component and add reusable methods

Step 4. Create common accessibility service and add common methods

Step 5. We are now ready to use our reusable methods

As we can see we added the ngAfterViewInit life cycle to get the currentValue. Once we get the current value unique to the page we are setting focus to a main-content class of the HTML We can access the accessibility service in HTML and can call sendelementId to update our currentValue. When we redirect to another component we can exactly use the same method on the ngAfterViewInit life cycle of the sample component to subscribe to the current message and focus the ‘Main-Content’ Id which we added in HTML.

We will meet again with one more reusable component to support the accessibility in Angular.

Are you preparing for interviews? Here are frequently asked interview questions in Angular. It covers the Latest interview questions for Angular and Frontend development. Let’s check how many of these questions you can answer?
2020 Roundup: Best In Tech
By: Erin Barth-Dwyer
Tags: Accessibility, Technology, Best Of, Web Development, App Design

MEDICINE: A Light At The End Of The Tunnel

Let’s start with arguably the biggest invention of the year: the Coronavirus vaccine. Developed in record time, the vaccine relies on a new technology based on a genetic material called mRNA. By the end of 2020, the US is on track to receive tens of millions of doses, and some cities have already begun administering the shots. Though some of us will need to wait until Spring or Summer of 2021, we’re finally feeling hopeful that there’s alight at the end of the tunnel.

In our opinion, this is the BEST news in tech of the entire year.
Make Your Website Accessible in 2 Minutes
By: Jayme Mitchell
Tags: A11y, Web Accessibility, Accessibility, Web Development, Inclusive Design

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

What is Web Accessibility?

“Web accessibility means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities can use them. More specifically, people can: perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web and contribute to the Web.” — World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility Initiative

Why Should You Implement Inclusive Design?

As mentioned above, inclusive design allows users with different levels of mobility, hearing, and sight to easily navigate your website. Ideally, every user should have an intuitive user experience and having an accessible website ensures this. In addition to helping more users access your site, or have a better experience on your site (for example, making your design colors and contrast color blind friendly), it will improve your website for developers who are reading your website’s code. By implementing inclusive design, a greater number of people will have access to the information that you are providing.

Tutorial: Make Your Website Accessible in 2 Minutes

Now that we are familiar with what web accessibility is and why you should design accessible websites, let me walk you through how to implement it. For those of you who are here for a quick way to create an inclusive and accessible website, let’s jump right into it. I will go into more detail on inclusive design and what it is later on in the article.

First you will want to inspect the web page in Google Chrome. You can open Chrome Dev Tools and inspect the page by right clicking on the web page and selecting inspect or using keyboard commands (Mac: Command + Option + I, Windows: Shift + Control + J)

2. You can then click the icon with two arrows on the top right of the Dev Tools panel and select Lighthouse. Lighthouse is an automated tool for improving the quality of web pages.

3. Click “Generate Report”. This will audit the webpage. Lighthouse can check the page for much more than accessibility; it also has audits for performance, progressive web apps, SEO and more. You can choose to inspect your page for either desktop or mobile.

4. Now we can see our report. Accessibility and performance in this example are green which means they are performing well (90%-100%). If you see orange or red, however, they could definitely be improved. This page’s accessibility is in great shape, but since it isn’t at 100%, let’s scroll down to see how we can improve further.

5. From the picture below, it looks like we can improve our visuals by increasing the level of contrast. This makes the page more accessible for users with color blindness or low-vision.

6. Luckily, Toptal’s Colorblind Web Page Filter is a tool that allows us to test what a website looks like to users with color blindness. Viewing your page with this filter can help you identify what changes need to be made to the page’s CSS.

Thank you for reading this tutorial. Now that we know how to make your website more accessible, let’s get into what makes your website accessible.
how to access the deep web | super easy way to access the dark web
By: Shariyar Ahammed Rabbi
Tags: Hacker, Access Dark Web, Accessibility, Dipweb, Darkweb

how to access the deep web

On the off chance that you’ve seen our shows on the dim web,you’ll know a portion of the things you can discover there. We’ve talked before about criminal operations occurring there, yet there is significantly more to this spot. You may discover informants in obscurity web, maybe unfortunate of their personality being revealed. how to access the deep web

Basic freedoms writers may likewise distribute here, with an agreement that their work can’t be followed back to them.

Pundits of abusive governments may air their interests there, while others simply need outright protection when conversing with individuals about their wellbeing. Welcome to this scene of the Infographics Show, How to get to the dim web.

how to access the deep web first way

First we should give you a 101 on the dull web. Sources vary on the amount of the web can be seen utilizing a standard program. In a story, NPR disclosed to us that 96 percent of the Internet isn’t accessible through typical programs.

Consider it the ice sheet hypothesis, which implies the web we see is only the tip. Different assets reveal to us it’s more similar to 90percent, which is as yet enormous anyway, what precisely would we say we are not seeing? Above all else, we ought to comprehend the contrast between the “Profound Web” and “Dull net” locales.

The profound web probably won’t be very as ruffian as the dim web.

The profound web is basically essential for the web thatcan’t be gotten to through ordinary programs. One master let us know, “Notwithstanding numerous portrayals of a terrible underground working far out, the profound web is generally kind private information bases and web assets not intended to be gotten to by the overall population.

read more..........
Is your web app accessible for color blind people? Here’s one way to find out
By: Rafael Henrique De Almeida
Tags: UX, Design, Accessibility, Chrome, Frontend

Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev from Pexels

One feedback received from a user on our website made us realize that we have slipped in considering a specific condition: color blind people.

So the question we had was: Ok, but how do we know how they are feeling?

Google Chrome to rescue

I’ve remembered to be scrolling through Twitter and remember that Chrome had added new functionalities at the time to help developers increase the accessibility check, and after five minutes of research I could try out my self.

How-To

The first thing to do is to open the Chrome Developer tools, you can do that using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl +Shift +J (on Windows) or Ctrl +Option + J (on Mac). Alternatively, you can right-click on the page and select Inspect.

Then, click on the three dots to open the configuration, and select More Tools -> Rendering, you should see a new tab named Rendering near the Console tab, and then you can scroll down to the bottom to see the options to simulate visual impairments.

The first step after open the Developer Tools

The second step, here you can choose which visual deficiency you want to test

Choose one of the visual deficiencies you want to test and then the browser will apply some color styling changes filter to simulate that.

The next question was: which of these options are more common between users?

According to the National Eye Institute, “The most common type of color blindness makes it hard to tell the difference between red and green.” and the “less-common type of color blindness makes it hard to tell the difference between blue and green, and between yellow and red.” (National Eye Institute, 2019).

Here’s an image of the browser simulating Deuteranomaly which is the most common type of red-green color blindness.

Deuteranomaly is the most common type of red-green color blindness. It makes the green look redder. This type is mild and doesn’t usually get in the way of normal activities.

With that in place, we will be able to make plans for the next design meetings to include these scenarios in consideration and make our web app accessible for those which has these conditions.

REFERENCES

Types of Color Blindness. (June 26, 2019), National Eye Institute. Retrieved from https://www.nei.nih.gov/learn-about-eye-health/eye-conditions-and-diseases/color-blindness/types-color-blindness
Can Everyone See My Screen? — How We Choose to Remember 2020
By: Attila Vágó
Tags: Engineering, 2020, Accessibility, Quality Assurance, Software Development

Darragh Grace — director of quality engineering

What a year 2020 was. In the context of HMH we had a major redesign of our Ed Platform, we saw massive increase in usage due to schools closing in the US and the move to distance learning. We switched to remote working and all the challenges that brings. I am incredibly proud of how we, as an organisation, met these challenges head on and delivered our most successful back to school to date.

Our teams found new ways of collaborating and introduced tons of engineering efficiencies to not only speed up our development process’s but to ensure the software we delivered was highly relevant and of amazing quality. We reacted quickly to the Covid situation by introducing new features to our platform such as Virtual conferencing to ensure we continue to drive great outcomes for students and teachers across the US, particularly in remote learning scenarios. We were able to scale our platform to meet the huge increase in demand this year thanks to the many hours put in by teams testing and deeply understanding our systems.

As a quality engineer I was particularly proud of how our teams embraced the idea of building quality in to everything we do, testing early, testing often, and fully embedding quality into our deliver pipelines. Looking back, it was a tough year in a lot of ways, but hugely rewarding to know that our hard work played such an important part in helping teachers do what they do best, giving students the best quality of education possible.
Intercom Accessibility — RTT / TTY
By: Nakul Garg
Tags: Hard Of Hearing, Latch, Accessibility, Intercom, Software Development

Expiring stale allocations could be designed to happen outside of this endpoint, but we prefer to do that here in order to maximize the chances of having a free number available. At the current scale, this is possible without being overly time-consuming. Another potential improvement is instead of returning a 4XX error when there aren’t any numbers available, we could actually buy a number here. Otherwise, the logic is straightforward.

We also expose an endpoint where intercoms can explicitly free numbers themselves. The intercom hits this endpoint if Accessibility mode expires or is canceled without a call. The logic here is just the freeing of any number that is allocated to the intercom thus no flow chart is necessary. On top of this, for any call termination events, we check if the Intercom has an Accessibility number allocated. If it does, we end that allocation thus freeing the number. That sums up how our dynamic number allocation works, but we still need to discuss how all the actors are placed into a group call.

Web-Hooks

At Latch, we use a web-hook model with our calling partner in order to dictate the flow of all calls. This model seems standard across many communication APIs. We leverage this framework to place the Guest, Latch Intercom, and Resident all in the same call. We have two web-hooks with our calling partner: the answer-hook and the events-hook. The answer-hook provides our partner with all the control information necessary at the time the Latch Intercom places a call or a Latch-owned virtual number is called. The events-hook is where our partner sends informative events about the status of the call. This second hook is necessary to determine when we stream RTT messages into the conversation in order to guide our Guest and Resident. Let’s get into the general logic for each:

Answer Hook — POST /answer

Request Body:

Source: Who is calling?

Target: Who is being called?

Flow Chart:
The easiest way to build a Dark Mode
By: Dom Habersack
Tags: Design, Accessibility, CSS

Most operating systems natively support dark mode now. I have become so used to it that anything without a dark theme becomes painful in the evening.

As I gave my website a minor visual refresh this week, I often coded into the evening. When everything else switched to dark mode, my website stayed in its light theme. A dark mode would be nice, but that sounded like a lot of work.

Little did I know that browsers and CSS have caught up. Adding a dark mode to websites is not hard anymore. The easiest way to build one is with our good old friend, the media query.

Detecting browser widths with media queries is essential for building responsive designs. They can also check for other media features, like a display’s pixel density or a device’s orientation.

The feature `prefers-color-scheme` detects if the system is set to a light or dark color scheme. In the same way we’d do progressive enhancement, we can add styles for a dark mode with this.

The un-queried version is our light theme. In a media query that checks for a dark mode preference, we override some styles as necessary.

Want to copy this code? Get the text-version on my website.

We mostly need to change colors to turn a light theme into a dark theme. Many other styles can stay as they are, which makes it pretty easy to add a dark mode to an existing website. By using the media query, we can switch back and forth by changing which mode our operating system is set to.

I’m about an hour into experimenting with this on my own website, and it looks like I’m almost done. I would release it, but I’m too busy switching back and forth between light and dark mode. It’s too fun to see everything update instantly.

There is another, more complicated way to do the theme switch that does not rely on the media query. We could add a toggle that allows people to pick the theme. I’m not sure it’s worth the extra effort if the media query works so well.

What do you think? Is the media query “good enough” or do you prefer the sites you visit to have a theme toggle somewhere?

– Dom
Some quick tips for an ADA-compliant website
By: Mickey Mellen
Tags: Ada, Accessibility, WCAG

While a website can’t technically be “ADA-compliant”, as they have no specific rules for websites, following the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) will get you a long way toward it. I’m certainly not a lawyer, and you can dig much deeper than what I present here, but these tips will easily put you in the top 1% of websites in terms of accessibility.

With website accessibility-related lawsuits on a rapid rise, here are some quick things you can do to help.

Use a solid theme. Picking some fancy theme with 10,000 built-in features is just asking for trouble.

Use alt text. If you add an image to your page, put proper alt text on it.

Don’t set links to open in new tabs. That’s a good thing for you, not for your users.

Add labels to form fields. Most form plugins will do this for you, but make sure.

Use headings. I don’t have many on this post, but I use H2, H3, etc as appropriate when writing.

Use text, not pictures of text. Include photos if you want, but don’t bury text in them.

Add an accessibility statement. If lawyers do come sniffing around, this will help deter them to search for easier prey. If you don’t know where to start, just steal and tweak mine.

It’s beyond time to have any excuse to have a website that isn’t friendly to all of your visitors.

Bonus: All of these things are great for your search engine rankings too.
Technologies for People With a Disability That Are About to Change Forever
By: David Banes
Tags: Accessibility, Disruption, Technologyforall, Innovation, Disability

Technologies for People With a Disability That Are About to Change Forever

Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash

Over the past 10 years, many assistive technology products and services have experienced rapid disruption. This has led both to wider access to technologies at a lower cost, and the demise of traditional products.

The context in which accessible technology is delivered is rapidly evolving. Driven by shifts in technology design, public policy, changing aspirations of the market, and a public funding crisis leading to a widespread desire for a reduction in public spending.

Here are three examples of AT which have experienced this scale of disruption:

1. Handheld Magnifiers

Handheld magnifiers are popular with those with low vision. They are portable, easy to use, offer high-definition magnification, and clear views of enlarged text.

When this became possible on a smartphone, for a fraction of the cost, customers rapidly began to migrate.

2. Communication Aids

Dedicated devices that spoke out text and pictures to create sentences, with a touch screen and long battery life have been crucial to many people with communication impairments.

They are literally their voice and their means of communicating with the world. Users were incredibly loyal to a device, and professionals valued the opportunity created. Until the iPad arrived. Suddenly the functionality that was needed no longer required thousands of dollars, but instead could be purchased as an iPad and app for a few hundred. The world changed.

3. Navigation Aids for the Blind

The excitement of the world's first speaking GPS based navigation for blind people was shortlived. In less than a year, apps on mobile phones, including the free Google Maps, began to offer speech output narrating turn by turn directions.

Those early dedicated GPS systems were also the last dedicated navigation aids.
Accessibility from the Start:
By: Rachel Mctavish
Tags: Austin Coding Academy, Accessibility, Web Development, Women In Tech, Programming

Learning to use Wireframing and Pseudo-Selectors

The other night, I worked with my fellow coding students to learn wireframing. It sounds obvious… that you need to build or think about the framework upon which all the amazing things you intend to build (or style) are organized. But for my first steps into coding, it is sometimes difficult for me to not dive right into trying to demonstrate or practice/play with what I have been learning and watching.

My new mantra, at least for this week, is to not to code ahead of myself!

Image from: student-849822_1920 at pixabay

I found for myself that some sketches with pen and paper helped me to think out my layout. Once I had it sketched out on paper, then it was much easier to use CSS and Flexbox to create an efficient (and more professional looking) webpage.

On the professional development side, proper planning, thinking and even some sketching helps to make the coding more efficient.

Honestly, wireframing is an important aspect to not only code efficiently, but it allows me to really incorporate ideas for the user experience and interaction (UX & UI). Also, with learning proper wireframing habits, I am continuing my mission to learn how to best address accessibility issues or anticipate where ARIA or other avenues need to be integrated to my code. Proper UX & UI design are integral for creating websites, platforms, browsers and apps that are able to be used and enjoyed by everyone.

So, bring on the paper, pens, post-its and design apps!
Mobile App Design: Keeping the Thumb Zone in Mind
By: Phil Wijs, Weiss
Tags: UX Design, UI Design, Accessibility, Mobile App Development, Usability

As the years go by, companies like Samsung and Apple keep touting that they have the largest mobile screen in the market. Phones have become “phablets” with their 6"+ screen sizes. Some phones even fold out into a full tablet experience. Larger screens are fantastic for media consumption, but we have to reach further and further with our thumbs.

Thankfully, there are plenty of guides out there for designing within the “Thumb Zone”. Keeping the thumb zone in mind is a great place to start, especially if you’re used to doing web design.

What is the “Thumb Zone”?

Image Source: Luke W — Designing for Large Screen Phones

The thumb zone (pictured above) demonstrates the range of reachability for a user’s thumb while they’re interacting with their phone with one hand. It give you an idea of whether or not your primary interactions are going to cause frustration for your users.

How to use the “Thumb Zone” in your designs

Step 1: Download Smashing Magazine’s Thumb Zone reference and insert it into your design file.

Image Source: Smashing Magazine — The Thumb Zone: Designing For Mobile Users

Step 2: Once you have the image file in your workspace, you can crop the phone template around the thumb zone colors, if you’d like.

Step 3: Set your transparency to around 40–50%, so that you can use the thumb zone as an overlay.

Step 4: Now you can place the overlay over your designs to see if your interactions are within reach of your users.

You can now see if your actions will cause reachability issues with your users.

Make sure to use the left and right handed overlays to accommodate all of your users or use the “combined” overlay to see how both are impacted simultaneously.

Helpful tips to keep in mind

Make sure that your frequently used primary actions aren’t out of reach. Depending on your secondary or tertiary actions, it may be okay if they’re a bit out of reach.

You may want to put destructive actions a bit out of reach, if they’re used sparingly and you want users to have a bit of friction before making that decision. Be cautious and listen to your users.

Speaking of users, try to get your design off of your screen and into your own hands to see if you run into any reachability issues. Even better, make sure to test your designs with your users and listen to their feedback.
Street Art, Money Distribution, and Resource Accessibility
By: Keira Waters
Tags: Accessibility, Reasources, Homeless, Street Art, Distribution

Street Art, Money Distribution, and Resource Accessibility

As a young person, I feel like I have been to a lot of places. My family went on road trips when I was a kid, and it has gotten me to fall in love with the idea of living on the road.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

When I come to a new city I am always fascinated by differences in culture, architecture, and the environment. Peoples’ accents change and they eat different foods. I begin to not recognize restaurants, grocery stores, even gas stations. However, freeways always look the same.

My favorite part of going to a new city is exploring places that are flooded with art.

Art is found everywhere in the world, and art can be anything you want it to be. It’s a raw expression from one human soul to the rest of the world. It is beautiful.

I am particularly interested in street art.

Photo by James Garman on Unsplash

There is something awing about finding beauty in a place that is said to not possess it. I have thought about graffiti for some time now, and I have a lot of different hypothesizes.

See there is meaning in everything. We must ask ourselves, who is this person with the spray can? What motivates them to do this, and what are they getting in return? What does it make them feel? What is the content that they are creating? How is affecting others? What methods are they using to accomplish their task? Where are they painting?

For every single person, there is a different answer to each of these questions. I have a friend who is into tagging abandoned buildings. I feel like they got into street art as a way of coping with the world around them. They are in a society that has abandoned them, similarly to how these buildings have been abandoned. And my friend has been able to build up and be apart of a community of like-minded individuals. Plus, art and exploring new areas is exciting and fun.

Photo by Ilse Orsel on Unsplash

Street art for me is magical. It brings hope, love, and color to a world that can sometimes be scary and overwhelming.
Function over visual aesthetics: It’s for the birds
By: Dustin Dooling
Tags: UX Design, Funtion, Visual Design, UX, Accessibility

Five years ago I was sitting in my audiologist’s office with my then-girlfriend/now-wife. I’d made the decision to forgo visual aesthetics for function and accessibility. I was trading my tiny inner-canal hearing aids for a bigger, less concealable behind-the-ear set.

<<Flashback<<

The choice to get inner-canal hearing aids was a vain one. I worried about the visual aesthetics of my disability. Having those big obtuse listening boxes behind my ears wasn’t for me. Oh, the judgments people would cast… Vanity, Al Pacino’s favorite sin, had the opposite impact on my life I’d expected. My quality of life was actually lessened, not improved. People had an even more difficult time deciphering I was deaf. They even challenged the legitimacy of my impairment, accusing me of not paying attention. But, people will be people. What’s even worse is I had no idea what I was missing.

>>Flash Forward>>

My audiologist places the hearing aids on the back of my ear. I fit the earpiece into my canal and flip the on-switch. There were a few little doo-ditty-doo audible tones letting me know it was “go-time” and then something remarkable.

Birds chirping. Birds chirping?

My then-girlfriend/now-wife and audiologist looked at me with big Disney doe eyes waiting for a response.

“I hear birds. Outside.”

Then it hit me: I’d allowed the vanity of visual aesthetics to steal the sounds of the world from me and I didn’t even know it. I had stopped hearing the choir of birds completely. You see, inner-ear canal hearing aids don’t work for my hearing loss. But, they sure did look better…

Moral: Don’t allow vanity aesthetics in your design to overrule functionality & accessibility. Looking pretty is nice, but being able to function is so much nicer.
Designing accessible charts
By: Fiona Baudner
Tags: Data Visualization, Heatmap, Accessibility, Accessible Charts, Charts

Challenges

Not all versions of the heat map I necessarily considered to be useable, but it was a good way to test out different options, receive feedback and it helped me re-iterate.

While working on this task, I encountered a couple of different challenges:

Colours

To make the chart work for colour blind and low sighted users, the colours need a colour contrast of minimum 3:1 to each other as well as to the background. This is a guideline for graphics and user interfaces set by the Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) organisation.

​Trying to make this work for my heat map, I realised, that our existing styleguide did not include 7 different colours which have a high enough colour contrast to each other.

I first tried to come up with a new colour scale that could be used for our charts, but it seemed almost impossible to find 7 colours from the same colour theme which are in high contrast to each other.

It turned out, using different colour scales as it is usually done in heatmap charts was not an option.

Numbers

This made it very clear, that I had to come up with a different way to distinguish values.

As the next step, I tried out numbers with a scale from 0–7 by keeping the colours in the background.

​Testing out the solution, I realised that a lot of people mistook the numbers for the amount of clicks and not as a way to rank from least to most clicks.

Symbols

I tried to find a different way to differentiate the values from each other by using symbols.

​Throughout our system, we already use symbols on line charts to distinguish different metrics.

Looking at the visualisation, it becomes very clear that the purpose of a heat map (using different scales to show relationships between values), has been disregarded entirely. It is not very straight forward to see, which hour of the day has the most clicks, unless you look for the symbol with the highest scale in the bottom key.

This is actually a very good example to see how trying to make things accessible for a certain group of users can hurt the usability for others. The symbols cause a lot of noise on the chart and also the aesthetics had to suffer from this.
ADA Leadz, Marketing Gimmicks Are Problematic for Accessibility (and Compliance)
By: Kris Rivenburgh
Tags: Web Accessibility, Ada Compliance, Accessibility, Ada Leadz, Website Accessibility

Is there room in the market to create an accessibility agency for small businesses?

Absolutely.

But the reason a gap exists isn’t because nobody has thought of offering accessibility services, it’s because legitimate web accessibility requires significant time, dedication, specialized knowledge, and the acceptance of very real legal risk.

All of those requirements come at a significant cost which is why many small businesses can’t afford them.

ADA Leadz provides none of what is actually required.

Rather, ADA Leadz goes the opposite route and tries to convince marketers and would-be marketers that ADA compliance is an easy value-add or something they can quickly build an agency around.

Not the case.

Beyond the legal implications, there is something that a lot of people overlook: We are in the midst of a great movement towards more accessibility for everyone in the world.

When you create a product that diverts or distracts from accessibility, you are slowing this movement.

This means you are directly and indirectly preventing access to millions of people.

Unless you are truly committed to making the digital world accessible, it’s best you don’t build a business around ADA compliance / web accessibility.

It comes at a real cost.
Accessibility Evaluation — Modcloth
By: Monica Mielke
Tags: Case Study, UX Design, User Experience, Accessibility, Accessibility Testing

Methods

Three methods were used to conduct the evaluation.

Automated code inspection: use of a tool to thoroughly review code against rules to determine whether the code meets accessibility guidelines.

2. Manual code inspection: relies on an individual to review the code and allows for qualitative judgments.

3. Experience walkthrough: evaluator navigates through the site as a person with one or more disabilities to, practically, get a sense of the user experience regardless of the formatting of the code.

These were chosen because each has its own advantages and disadvantages (see table below)and because of this, no one method can accurately provide the most complete picture of a system’s accessibility like the use of all three together.

Advantages and disadvantages of the three evaluation methods.

Automated code inspection

A trial version of SortSite was used to complete the automated code inspection of three web pages. Each error was recorded into an Excel spreadsheet, noting the exact issue provided by SortSite, level, and related guideline/failure.

Inspection spreadsheet

The spreadsheet was used to identify common unsuccessful guidelines across the different pages and used to easily transfer the information into the inspection results of the evaluation report.

Manual code inspection

Apple’s VoiceOver screen reader software, laptop keyboard, and Chrome’s code inspection feature were primarily used in the manual code inspection. The table below outlines some of the questions addressed during the inspection.

Some of the questions addressed during the inspection.

Some of my notes from the inspection and walkthrough

Experience evaluation

Apple’s VoiceOver screen reader software and laptop keyboard were used for the experience evaluation. The evaluator assumed the roles of a person with low vision and a person who can only use a keyboard, respectively. Additionally, the following criteria were employed:

How well the site supports use of assistive devices such as screen readers,

2. The degree to which the site is navigable without a mouse or trackpad, and

3. Whether the pages allow a visitor with disabilities to understand where they are and what they can do.
Metadata Not Saved- YouTube Video Upload Problem- How to Solve It
By: Abena D
Tags: YouTube, Tech

A quick workaround

YoutTube.com

If you regularly upload videos to YouTube, you are probably already aware of some of the issues associated with uploading videos to YouTube. If you are a newbie in the game then this article might be useful. Have you ever started uploading a video and assumed everything was ok and then after a few minutes, YouTube responds with an error message that says “MetaData Not Saved?” The big bad monster that is YouTube has literally rejected your video or rejected some of the information that you have input.

This simple workaround will get your video uploaded in no time at all.

After clicking publish, you will probably see an error message that looks something like the image below. The error message might also read, “Video settings could not be saved.”

There is a very simple explanation for this error message. Here are two main reasons why you might get this error message.

Slow Internet

A slow internet connection might impact your video upload

2. Invalid Characters in the Description box or in the title

When you have thoroughly checked your Internet connection and you have ruled out slow Internet. The next step is to check your description box for a particular character.

If you see characters that look like this < < >> in the description box or the title, delete them and try submitting your video again. Once you delete these characters, the problem should be solved.

Watch the video below for further clarification
Atlanta Botanical Garden: Garden Lights Holiday Nights
By: Kim H.
Tags: Atlanta Botanical Garden, Atlanta, Christmas Lights, YouTube

A peek into Atlanta Botanical Garden’s Garden Lights, Holiday Nights in Atlanta which runs until Jan 16th! Share with a friend who would love this! 😍 Press play and watch for details on how you can visit and a map of the event! Should I post a longer video of this? #YouTubeShorts #Shorts I’m late to the party for Vlogmas 2020 but I’m here! Thanks for watching be sure to subscribe. For more things to do in Atlanta, check out this article https://www.workhardtravelwell.com/day-trip-to-atlanta/ Thanks for stopping by! Subscribe Now and turn on notifications! http://bit.ly/whtwy
An earthquake is caused by a sudden slip on a fault.
By: Muhammad Ammar
Tags: Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Bitcoin, Mozilla

An earthquake

An earthquake is caused by a sudden slip on a fault. … When the stress on the edge overcomes the friction, there is an earthquake that releases energy in waves that travel through the earth’s crust and cause the shaking that we feel. In California, there are two plates — the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate.

Earthquakes are usually caused when rock underground suddenly breaks along a fault. This sudden release of energy causes the seismic waves that make the ground shake. … The rocks are still pushing against each other, but not moving. After a while, the rocks break because of all the pressure that’s built up. Causes of Earthquakes in General

· Induced Earthquakes. Induced quakes are caused by human activity, like tunnel construction, filling reservoirs, and implementing geothermal or fracking projects.

· Volcanic Earthquakes. Volcanic quakes are associated with active volcanism. …

· Collapse Earthquakes.

Qatar is considered the country least likely to experience cyclones, droughts, big floods, and earthquakes.

Japan

For which country do we locate the most earthquakes? Japan. The whole country is in a very active seismic area, and they have the densest seismic network in the world, so they are able to record many earthquakes.

Earthquakes can be very dangerous if you are in the wrong place. They can make buildings fall down and set off landslides, as well as having many other deadly effects. An earthquake that occurs at the bottom of the sea can push water upwards and create massive waves called tsunamis.

Martin Vidal Stacy Cellier-Gomez Theresa Smith Chris Smith Steven Tyndall Shirley J. Davis Peter D. Kaizer Pierre Rognion Camille DeAngelis

WebdesignerDepot Mandy Edwards Rebecca Lynn Freddy Daniel Garcia Paul Fairweather Ryan Hoover
10 YouTubers You Should Definitely Subscribe & Watch
By: Madison Russell
Tags: About, Videos, Foryou, Youth, YouTube

17 Year Old wanted to make a career out of writing
Top maker channels on YouTube 2021
By: Joshua Dance
Tags: Maker, YouTube

Mark Roper

Mark Roper is my favorite YouTuber. Full stop. He releases 1 video a month and they usual have some sort of awesome build. He has made squirrel obstacle courses, shark blood water testing devices, and glitter bombs to stump would be thieves.

Destin Sandlin — Smarter Every Day

Destin isn’t a straight maker. He does a lot of videos about just learning amazing new things. But the guy is a rocket scientist and when does does build something… it us usually incredible.

Shane Wighton — Stuff Made Here

Shane burst onto the scene recently. His builds are incredible. He combines mechanical, electrical, and programming knowledge to make some incredible things.

Simone Giertz

Simone got her start making bad robots. But after a close call with brain cancer she has started making cool, weird, things.

Colin Furze

Colin Furze is nuts. Plumber turned incredible YouTube maker, it feels like Colin can make nearly any machine.

Giacomo Di Muro — Giaco Whatever

Not making as many build recently. Focusing on running his company etc, but a very talented maker, with great filmmaking skills.

Cody Don — Cody’s Lab

Cody does tons of experiments. He is a bit out there, but does some really cool things. People say he is doing real life Minecraft as he mines metals from abandoned mines and grows his own food.

Kevin Kohler — Backyard Scientist

Sometimes I get frustrated by his lack of scientific rigor, but he does some cool experiments and builds.

Alec Steele

Awesome blacksmith with a perfect name. His videos are super high energy, to the point of almost being over the top, but he is good at what he does.

Ben Krasnow — Applied Science

Ben is incredible. He delves deep into the science behind is techniques. He doesn’t do traditional builds, but you can learn incredible techniques from him.

Adam Savage — Tested

Adam Savage is famous from Mythbusters but he is an incredible maker. He does a lot with movie props etc, but his techniques are great and super interesting.

FliteTest

If you like DIY airplanes, these are your guys.

Frank Howarth

Incredible wood worker and wood turner.

Bob Clagett — I Like To Make Stuff

Incredible maker. Great filming skills and his projects range from wood working, arcade cabinets, props etc.

Alexandre Chappel

Just found this maker. He is super energetic and does amazing builds utilizing 3D printing.

Josh Dance Make All The Things?

Jk this is my channel I just started. I am taking Mark Roper’s 1 Month Creative Engineering Class.

If you want to follow along, here is my channel. Who knows maybe one day I will actually belong on this list, not just because I wrote the article. :)