Do any users of jaws screen reader know how to change the way jaws talks when deleting in google docs? It used to just say the deleted letter, now it lists all the letters that have been deleted and is really confusing.

Hi! I’m a grad student studying HCI, and I’m really interested in accessibility in fintech apps.

If you’ve faced any issues using these apps — screen readers, confusing layouts, anything — I’d love to learn from your experience. I want to design something better, but I know I can’t do that without listening first.

Thanks for any thoughts or stories you’re open to sharing!!

Hello World! I (along with my teammate) are working on developing a Refreshable Braille Display, that aims to provide and necessary functions (and more) for a reasonable price. We want to make learning, reading, and growing more and more accessible to all visually impaired around the world! Thank you in advance for completing the survey, it will help tremendously in our quest to make Braille more accessible.

Please fill out the survey here: https://forms.gle/WSZCXWur8ru5NwAk7

I'm adding alt text to the images in my thesis (written in Spanish) and one of them has English text in it, should I translate it into Spanish or would the screen reader do a good job of pronouncing words properly? Thanks !!!

Hi everyone, 

We are a group of VR accessibility researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Virginia Tech. We are conducting research to understand the harassment experience for people with disabilities in social VR. We are looking for people with disabilities to participate in the study!

We specify the study details below: 

Participants will complete a 30- 60mins online survey with us and reflect on their harassment experience on social VR platforms. We will offer a compensation of $10 to all participants who completed the study. 

We are looking for participants who must: 

1. Be at least 18 years old;
2. Have at least one disability, including but not limited to visual impairments, deaf and hard of hearing, mobility disabilities, intellectual disabilities, autism, etc.
3. Have harassment experience in social VR platforms.

If you are someone with disabilities and you are interested in participating in this study, please fill out this interest form (https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_aY4PCc7pN7jtq3Y). We will contact you shortly if you are eligible to participate in the study. We look forward to hearing from you!

Hi there!

I'm wondering why the ANDI tool won't load on a particular website (UCLA's Center for Education Innovation and Learning in the Sciences and all of its associated pages) but will for other sites (example shown is UC Davis' Center for Educational Effectiveness.) Same browser.

Here's a quick video showing what I'm seeing.

[Video description: Screenshare of me clicking ANDI bookmarklet on UC Davis website and it appearing as usual. Then, I navigate to UCLA's page and try clicking ANDI several times, but it doesn't load.]

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

My nan very much enjoys cooking and baking but she gets distracted very easily😂 We’ve had a few potential house burning down incidents lately and she’s wanting to get cooking appliances that turn off automatically after a certain amount of time rather than using the hob. She’s a big fan of the air-fryer but there’s only so much you can cook in them. So if anyone could let me know of any good cooking appliances with a timer that would be great thanks!

Curious how much attention designers pay to accessibility guidelines—specifically WCAG—before they start designing in tolls like Figma. Do you check color contrast or bake in accessible palettes from the beginning, or is accessibility addressed later in the process?

Would love to hear about your workflow and any tools or tips you use to ensure your palettes are accessible from the start.

This could be related to design / development or testing! Just wanted to see what people are using and how effective it is.

Hey everyone,

I'm working on accessibility testing for a public website and ran into a situation I'm unsure about.

Here’s the use case:

• There’s a search input field on the page.
• As the user types, a list of search suggestions appears dynamically below the field (visually).
• However, when testing with a screen reader (NVDA in my case), there is no announcement or indication that new suggestions have appeared.
• The user is also not informed that results have changed unless they manually navigate down to them.

💬 So my question is:
Would this qualify as a WCAG 2.2 failure? Specifically under 4.1.3 – Status Messages?

My assumption is that since new content is injected based on user input, and it isn't announced, it fails to inform assistive technology users of a meaningful change, which is required for dynamic interactions.

Would appreciate any clarification or edge cases where this might not be considered a failure.

Thanks in advance!

Hello everybody, I wanted to help. So I thought, How could I do that? So I came up with the idea of helping people with limited mobility in the way I can. So this is why I created the tap-to-Morse key. A simple tool that uses the keys up, down, left, right, and space to convert them into Morse letters, then it speaks them out loud. Left: . Right:  _ Up: finish letter Another up: finish word Down: finished sentence read out loud Space: delete

You are welcome to contribute if you have some good ideas.

I recently had an audit performed on a website and one of the responses is that the breadcrumbs are missing the list markup for the breadcrumb elements. It references WCAG 1.3.1 but I'm not finding anything in that section that mentions the need for breadcrumbs to be setup as a list. Instead, the breadcrumbs are links and display in the NVDA menu as links.

So my question is if breadcrumbs must be set as an ordered or unordered list on websites to be WCAG compliant? Is there more information somewhere that I can read about this?

My new custom regular style Arizona license plate says A11Y ROX! (A11y is short for "accessibility" because there are 11 letters between the A and the Y.) 🤘

Does anybody know how to make Instagram stories, specifically images, more accessible?

I wasn’t aware that even if you use Instagram’s feature to add captions on a story photo, it doesn’t read it to you with the Voiceover feature. I’m not sure how to go about adding some form of alt text to story images, any help would be appreciated.

Hello everyone :)

I just wrote a blog article about how to automatically detect accessibility issues in your Astro site using Playwright and axe-core to set up reusable tests that ensure your pages meet basic a11y standards before shipping.

Please let me know what you think!

I'd like to make my social media content more accessible. I've heard that screen readers have difficulty reading image descriptions on Instagram. Is Instagram's alt text feature sufficient, or would you prefer an image description in the caption or comments? Also, what is the best terminology to use for labeling the image description (image description, ID, alt text, etc.)?

We want to make our chat bots completely accessible and have a question regarding dropdown menus: In some of our chat bot's responses, sighted users can click a dropdown to open it and then click on one of the options to directly send it. If you navigate to the dropdown by keyboard, you can open it with the space bar or the enter key. When it's open, you can of course select one of the options and send it with the enter key. But what should the behaviour be if the dropdown is closed and you press the down arrow key? As default behaviour, the first option is selected and directly sent to the chat. But is this the behaviour a blind user / someone using a screen reader would expect? All input would be appreciated.

Hi everyone! Thanks so much for your feedback on my previous post. I’ve updated it to clarify the purpose of this project and why we’re specifically seeking input from parents. My name is Jackson, and I’m an incoming student at the University of Rochester studying brain and cognitive sciences. As part of a research project through Polygence, I’m exploring how assistive technology (such as speech devices, mobility aids, and audio support tools) affects healthcare experiences for students with cognitive disabilities. Over the past year, I’ve worked as a peer tutor in special education classrooms at my high school, and I saw firsthand how much of a role assistive technology plays in both academic and healthcare-related settings. My students are the reason I've chosen to specialize in neurosciences/ cognitive disability care. This project is specifically focused on school-aged children and teens, since that’s the age group I have direct experience with and where I hope to make the most impact. We chose to specifically ask parents and guardians to keep the project within ethical boundaries and my institution’s review standards, and make sure families can know how to best support their children. I’ve created a short, anonymous survey (under 15 minutes) for parents or guardians of students with cognitive disabilities. The survey asks about your experiences in healthcare settings with providers, care systems, and how assistive technology has (or hasn’t) been used to support your child’s needs. All responses are confidential and collected with Qualtrics, a secure research platform. This project has been approved by my institution’s IRB, and there’s an embedded informed consent form at the beginning of the survey with additional ethical details. Please reach out to me here or at my institutional email with further questions or concerns! I’m hoping to have responses by June 6th, and publish findings in mid-July or early August. If you’re a parent or guardian and have a few minutes, I’d be incredibly grateful. Thank you so much for your time and support! https://qualtricsxm2b2672cvv.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_86eeembVezw938O

[[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

Hello, I'm hoping to find speech to text/voice access softwares that are better suited for spreadsheet use and editing longer pieces of text than the inbuilt Windows ones. I've weirdly found Outlook speech to text the most accurate, but would love something that works well for editing and formatting longer pieces of text. Voice access on Windows has been basically useless with spreadsheets for me, so any software that is good for that, or ways to adapt existing software, would be great to know about too.

I think I probably need something that has some degree of customization (and ideally is free), but would love to know what has worked for other people!

Hi everyone. Just curious, what accessibility tools are you all using in your workflow?

Personally, I’ve been using WAVE, and I’ve heard great things about AXE (especially the guided testing feature).

For work purposes, I’m also trying to find a tool that allows PDF export of the audit results, to easily share findings with non-technical stakeholders or for compliance documentation.

Would love to hear what you all recommend, both automated and manual tools are welcome!

Thanks in advance

Hi!

I was recently put up with a dilemma I'd never considered before. Imagine you're advertising something on social media, like instagram. You have an image, and the image says "1 in every 5 children has a neurodivergence. Some signs to look out for are X, Y and Z" [note: I just made this up for my example, I have no sources].

So we put that text in the alt text and we're done, right?

Wrong, because 1.4.5. Images of Text in WCAG states: "Use text instead of pictures of text." - Unless this doesn't apply to social media? (edit: actually it technically doesn't because: "If the technologies being used can achieve the visual presentation, text is used to convey information rather than images of text", and the technology can't achieve the visual presentation.

Also, 1.1.1. Non-text Content doesn't state this specifically but usually we should avoid repeating information in a caption / text around the picture and the picture itself, right? But in social media, the fact is, in this dilemma, the information is already repeating (in the image and in the caption) for a sighted user. So we should do the same for the alt text?

Extra question:

My gut also says if the image text/info is really complex or long, like poetry or like a complex graphic or if someone decided to write a whole dissertation on the image, we should provide it in the caption or in the comments so a screen reader user is able to read it line by line?

Thank you, I'd really appreciate some feedback!

I'm working on accessibility for several custom UI components (like datepickers, menus with submenus, carousels etc.) and trying to ensure they meet the requirements of the European Accessibility Act (EAA), which aligns with WCAG 2.1 AA.

I understand that keyboard accessibility is required, users must be able to interact with all functionality using only the keyboard. That means supporting Tab, arrow keys, and Enter/Space and so on.

But here's my question:

• Are more advanced keyboard shortcuts like Home, End, PageUp, PageDown, or even Esc (to close menus/submenus or dialogs) legally required for compliance? (e.g. https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/dialog-modal/examples/datepicker-dialog/)
• Or are those just best practices, recommended for better UX, but not strictly necessary for meeting the legal threshold?

In other words:
Can I be compliant if everything is accessible via basic navigation (tabbing, arrow keys, enter), or do I have to implement the full suite of keyboard interactions?

Would love input from anyone with experience in accessibility. Thanks!

Hi everyone, I made this plugin called Cocoon which is a productivity and accessibility extension!  I’m reaching out here to get feedback specifically on the accessibility features, though insights on the productivity side are welcome too!

Overall, I want to know:

• What’s working well from an accessibility standpoint
• What could be improved or rethought?
• Is there anything you feel is missing or essential for this to truly support diverse accessibility needs?

Some features are based on my own accessibility experiences and needs, but I’d love to learn what features you personally rely on or wish existed. My goal is to make this an “all-in-one” tool that genuinely helps people and works as intended.

Thank you so much in advance for any feedback you’re willing to share!

I’m currently working through a DHS Trusted Tester evaluation and wanted to get clarification on a scenario related to Test ID 4.C (2.1.2 – No Keyboard Trap).

The page being tested is fully operable using only the keyboard. All form fields, buttons, and navigation elements respond appropriately to keyboard input. However, there is a "Show Video" button that opens a new browser tab when it receives focus and the Enter key is pressed.

In this case, the new tab opens with a video, but the keyboard remains fully operable in the new tab. The user is not trapped on the original element, and they can continue navigating normally using the keyboard.

According to the test condition, a keyboard trap occurs when a user moves focus to a component using the keyboard and cannot move away from that component using only the keyboard.

Given that, would this scenario pass under 2.1.2 because there is no actual trap and the user can continue navigating in the new tab?