Accessibility is the practice of making resources accessible to people. It often involves handling disabilities in a special way. In general, you should always care about it.

= A11yaaS

There are companies providing accessibility as a service. This is ridiculous, laughable, wrong, stupid and shameful. Such services shall be ignored, their clients shall be educated xor ostracized.

Here's a list of such services I've found on real websites.

=> https://www.essentialaccessibility.com => https://www.equalweb.com => https://userway.org => https://accessibe.com

You do not need such services. To make your resource accessible, just follow the web standards and use common sense. Browsers, screen readers and operating systems will do the rest for you //for free//.

I also wanted to find some real+true reviews of these services from people who really care about a11y, such as blind people, but couldn't find one. Well.

= Links => https://seirdy.one/posts/2020/11/23/website-best-practices/ | Best practices for inclusive textual websites Rohan Kumar compiled a long and detailed list of guidelines to follow when designing a textual website. This is a good document, I recommend reading it.

=> https://drewdevault.com/2022/02/13/Framing-accessibility-in-broader-terms.html | Framing accessibility in broader terms

The typical developer’s relationship with accessibility, if they have one at all, is mainly concerned with making web pages work with screen readers. Even considering this very narrow goal, most developers have an even narrower understanding of the problem, and end up doing a piss-poor job of it. In essence, the process of doing accessibility badly involves making a web page for a sighted user, then using ARIA tags to hide cosmetic elements, adding alt tags, and making other surface-level improvements for users of screen readers. If they’re serious, they may reach for the WCAG guidelines and do things like considering contrast, font choices, and animations as well, but all framed within the context of adding accessibility band-aids onto a UI designed for sighted use.

=> https://sourcehut.org/blog/2020-05-27-accessibility-through-simplicity/

=> https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-10-16-ibus-typing-booster.html | Typing faster with assistive technology

The purpose of this [[tool]] is to assist the user by proposing words while typing, a bit like smartphones do. It can be trained with a dictionary, a text file but also learn from user inputs over time.

=> https://scribe.rip/@r.d.t.prater/linux-accessibility-an-unmaintained-mess-8fbf9decaf8a | Linux Accessibility: an unmaintained Mess

There are several podcasts where people talk about the viability of Linux on the desktop. However, as Linux reaches more and more mainstream users, it brings to light the disappointing truth that not everyone can use it. Those with disabilities, who could be the most helped by its open-source nature, are instead left for the for-profit companies which, regardless of what else they’ve done, at least have made their offerings more or less accessible. The author returned to Windows.

=> https://write.as/devinprater/by-the-blind-for-the-blind | By the Blind, For the Blind The author calls blind people to develop open-source software for the blind. They say such software ends up being better.

=> https://devinprater.flounder.online/gemlog/2021-10-14.gmi | On the stagnation of screen readers

Also imagine that there is a form of art that 95% of other humans can produce and consume, but for you is either blank or filled with meaningless letters and numbers ending in .JPEG, .PNG, .BMP, or other computer jargon, and the only way to perceive it is to humbly ask that the image is converted to the only form of input your digital interface can understand, straight, plain text. This same majority of people have access to everything digital technology has to offer. You, though, have access to very little in comparison. Your interface cannot interpret anything that isn't created in a standards-compliant way. And this culture, full of those who need to stand out, doesn't like standards.

=> https://hidde.blog/accessibility-objectivity/ | “That's not accessible!” and other statements about accessibility The author states that accessibility is not a binary thing.

=> https://fedoramagazine.org/accessibility-in-fedora-workstation/ | Accessibility in Fedora Workstation

=> https://hidde.blog/keyboard-shortcuts/ | Keyboard shortcuts need modifier keys Perhaps they do. Mycorrhiza lacks modifier keys for most hotkeys, might be a bad thing.

=> https://habr.com/ru/company/oleg-bunin/blog/660691/ | Почему вам не нужна версия для слабовидящих Обьяснение, почему не нужны некие отдельные версии сайтов для слабовидящих.

=> https://brailleinstitute.org/freefont | Atkinson Hyperlegible Font A font that is pretty unambiguous. Cool!

=> https://eli.li/2022/12/14/thoughts-on-accessibility-in-smol-computing | Thoughts on accessibility in smol computing Finally, someone noticed the problem.

=> https://zoyander.cc/zonelets/posts/2023-01-08 | Plain language as practice Text can be inaccessible semantically.

=> https://audio.mcsweeneys.net/transcripts/against_access.html | Against Access

The question I am asked most frequently by hearing and sighted people is “How can I make my [website, gallery exhibit, film, performance, concert, whatever] accessible to you?” Companies, schools, nonprofits, and state and federal agencies approach me and other DeafBlind people all the time, demanding, “How do we make it more accessible?”

Such a frenzy around access is suffocating. I want to tell them, Listen, I don’t care about your whatever. But the desperation on their breath holds me dumbfounded. The arrogance is astounding. Why is it always about them? Why is it about their including or not including us? Why is it never about us and whether or not we include them?

In my community, we are in the midst of a revolution. We have our first truly tactile language, called Protactile. We insist on doing everything our way, fumbling around, groping along, touching everything and everyone. We are messing with traditional spaces, rearranging them to suit us better, rather than the other way around. The Protactile movement is obsessed with direct experience. As Robert Sirvage, a DeafBlind architect, put it in a recent conversation, the question we begin with is not “How do we make it more accessible?” Instead, we start by asking, “What feels beautiful?” When hearing and sighted people join us, they pick up Protactile and learn how to work and socialize with us in our space. They often find themselves closing their eyes, either literally or by dimming their visual processing, because sight isn’t necessary. Bodies in contact become as normal to them as they are to us.

Protactile took root only when a group of DeafBlind leaders in Seattle decided to conduct meetings and workshops without any interpreters. DeafBlind community members were shocked by how well those events went, with participants communicating directly and rotating from cluster to cluster. This success emboldened us to break many taboos related to touch, including touching one another’s bodies instead of just moving our hands in the air. A grammar soon developed to coordinate all that contact. A new language was born. It’s no accident that this explosion occurred when we took a break from the most prevalent manifestation of access in our midst: ASL interpreters.

Take the card game UNO, one of the games widely available in a Braille version. The standard cards have dots at the corner that say things like “Y5” for a yellow card with the number five. In practice, playing the game with the Brailled cards is painfully slow. If Protactile hadn’t given us permission to rip sighted norms into shreds, I would still be fingering those dots like a fool. The way to go is with textured shapes, as in our homemade version of UNO, called Textures and Shapes.

=> https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/web-dev/web/accessibility