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Category: Writing and blogging

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On hitting 1000 Medium followers

Posted on: October 5, 2020 February 9, 2021 Written by: Sheri Byrne-Haber Comments: 0
It took me 22 months, 159 articles, and 195 comments on other people’s articles. But am I getting anything meaningful out of it? Who Am I? Sheri Byrne-Haber — mother of three wonderful daughters (one of whom has congenital progressive…
Continue reading “On hitting 1000 Medium followers”…
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Context is the most critical aspect of alt-text everyone seems to miss

Posted on: October 1, 2020 February 9, 2021 Written by: Sheri Byrne-Haber Comments: 0
This is the article I SWORE I would never write. But I have a different perspective on alt-text than most accessibility managers, so I decided to share it. Twenty-two months ago, when I started this blog, I swore I would…
Continue reading “Context is the most critical aspect of alt-text everyone seems to miss”…

Website copy says more about your company than you think

Posted on: November 12, 2019 November 29, 2019 Written by: Sheri Byrne-Haber Comments: 0
Your corporate image will be hurt by beautiful, complicated language if you are leaving your users behind. A LinkedIn connection posted a critique of the following language in a press release. To protect the guilty, I have deleted the company…
Continue reading “Website copy says more about your company than you think”…
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Accessibility and Disability Blogging — one year anniversary

Posted on: November 4, 2019 November 29, 2019 Written by: Sheri Byrne-Haber Comments: 0
Here are a few things that I’ve learned In April 2018, I had been thinking about writing a book on accessibility. Blogging, I thought, would be a good way to meet my writing goals and would help me explore topics…
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Recent Posts

Accessibility Considerations for Off-Site Navigation and Downloads

When a website links to content it does not own or control, it is easy for assistive technology users to miss that they’ve ended up on a different domain that likely has different accessibility, privacy, and security controls than the…
Continue reading “Accessibility Considerations for Off-Site Navigation and Downloads”…

Sometimes the Best Accessibility Fix is a Usability Fix

Teams often arbitrarily divide work into two piles: “UX defects” and “accessibility defects”. That split creates the belief that accessibility is an add-on rather than a dimension of good design. In practice, accessibility gains often come from fixing ordinary UX…
Continue reading “Sometimes the Best Accessibility Fix is a Usability Fix”…

Why Separate Guest and Logged In States Create Accessibility Barriers

Do you have differing logged-in and logged-out experiences for your users? Do you merge the two when someone logs in? If you don’t, you are creating accessibility barriers. People often think of accessibility as something that happens on the surface…
Continue reading “Why Separate Guest and Logged In States Create Accessibility Barriers”…

Why You Need to Close Open Objects When Users Navigate Away

Imagine opening a dropdown, expanding an accordion, or opening a dialog box, then following a link that loads a new object. The old object is still programmatically marked as open. That means it lingers in the accessibility tree. If you…
Continue reading “Why You Need to Close Open Objects When Users Navigate Away”…

When Accessibility Progress Plateaus: How to Regain Momentum

Most of the time, accessibility programs usually don’t fail suddenly; they quietly stall. Fewer people are trained, bug fixing slows down, and the accessibility dashboard (which executives no longer watch) plateaus. In extreme cases, accessibility can revert from a program…
Continue reading “When Accessibility Progress Plateaus: How to Regain Momentum”…

Accessibility and Usability: Inline Field Validation vs. Constantly Active Submit Button

User researchers have exhaustively explored the pros and cons of having the submit button active throughout form entry versus validating each field before allowing the user to proceed, and only exposing the submit button when there is a valid value…
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How to Avoid Boiling the Accessibility Ocean

Accessibility is often framed as a gigantic task that requires attention to everything at once. People sometimes describe that type of endless activity as “boiling the ocean.” The phrase reflects how things feel when accessibility relies on a small group…
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Don’t Fall Into the “Accessibility Grade/Score” Trap

In the rush to make digital products accessible, many teams lean on a single accessibility score or grade to convey how good (or bad) a product is from the accessibility point of view. An example of this might be 92…
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What Continuous Improvement Model is Best for Accessibility?

Most organizations start their accessibility journey in reactive mode. A complaint arrives. A defect ticket opens. A fix ships under pressure. The immediate barrier may disappear, yet the system that created it stays intact. Over time, the same issues resurface…
Continue reading “What Continuous Improvement Model is Best for Accessibility?”…

Accessibility Contractors Have Their Place-But It’s Not Everywhere

The all-contractor “accessibility team” has become an increasingly common pattern in organizations trying to build some semblance of an accessibility program while avoiding headcount limits and long-term commitment in expensive locations. While it appears to be an attractive shortcut, unless…
Continue reading “Accessibility Contractors Have Their Place-But It’s Not Everywhere”…

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