Author: stevef

Patrick muses upon his Web Standards life, from the bad side of the moon It’s a hint not a label The placeholder attribute is defined as: The placeholder attribute represents a short hint (a word or short phrase) intended to aid the user with data entry when the control has no value. A hint could be a sample value […]

When is a label also an (accessible) name, when is it not and when is it neither? WCAG definitions: label text or other component with a text alternative that is presented to a user to identify a component within web content A placeholder can be an accessible name, but can never be a label A label element can be […]

WCAG 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value, states states, properties, and values that can be set by the user can be programmatically set Non-geek speak If something a person does to a thing causes it to change then the change is reflected in the code a person can Press something – aria-pressed Check something – aria-checked Select something aria-selected […]

so so intro It is unclear to web developers, browser developers and assistive tech developers when an accessible name provided via aria-label/aria-labelledby should replace the child content as the accessible name or be announced in addition to subtree content. This results in bugs and frustration for anyone that this issue touches. Taking the ARIA in […]

Note: I tried to find the orginal of this photo so I could attribute it to its creator, but came up with nothing, maybe Jonny knows… Old gold Back in 2014 I did some testing on Some stuff that doesn’t work between the DOM and Shadow DOM I was recently asked by my friend/colleague Demelza […]

Adrian tagged me into this chain letter of a post and Adrain being a friend and long time accessibility comrade I thought it impolite not to carry it on. Why did you start blogging in the first place? I wanted to share knowledge, politics, stupidity, music I like and visual homage’s to some of those […]

Disclaimer: this content was partially produced via automation FTW!  Don’t fear the AI future or the reaper. What can automated tools test without humans? SC 1.1.1 Non-text Content (A) Testability: ⚠️ Partial Automation can: Detect presence or absence of alt attributes. Identify empty/missing alt on <img> elements. Identify images using role=”presentation” or aria-hidden=”true”. Automation cannot: […]

  Updated: 26th August 2025 With thanks to Steve Green who pointed out some missing criterion and a spelling mistake Updated: 28th March 2025 – aligned partial/automated designations with the categorisation in a later article: mind the WCAG automation gap. Also added links to some accessibility testing bookmarklets. Apologies, I was too permissive in my […]

Why change? The old skool WCAG 2x definition of a web page is not fit for purpose when WCAG is used to test non web user interfaces as it is, for example native apps it leads to suboptimal outcomes. There has been much work done in the past and in the present to define a […]

Mike[tm]Smith has been a friend and mentor of mine for many years. I first interviewed him 10 years ago about his work on the W3C HTML checker. Today he is talking about the Ladybird browser: Mike, tell us about you and your work I live in Tokyo and I’m employed by the W3C as part […]