100 Days of A11y

Day 38: Accessible Custom Widgets Overview

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Struggling a bit as to what exactly I need to be studying when it comes to accessible techniques (beyond browser and assistive technology compatibility), I'm moving onto the next WAS Body of Knowledge topic "create interactive controls/widgets based on accessibility best practices." I feel mostly familiar with the topic I researched yesterday, and I feel like getting back into code and doing some testing myself will help solidify more knowledge. In reality, the interactive controls/widgets concept will circle back around to the "accessible JavaScript, AJAX, and interactive content" and ARIA sections, but will offer me more context and application to this head knowledge.

And, to be honest, after all this reading and Googling, I'm ready to jump back into coding with CodePen, as well as my local environment.

Things I accomplished

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In review

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What I learned through researching accessible interactive content, I need to:

Basic keyboard interactions with a webpage:

Remember... W3C has a thorough document on ARIA authoring practices, including an extensive section on Design Patterns and Widgets.

What I learned today

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In Deborah Edwards-Oñoro's The State of the Web: Making the Web More Accessible, she offers her takeaways from a 30-minute video that Google produced about the importance of web accessibility. It's a quick read when you're crunched for time, and a good reminder of just how important accessible websites are. My favorite was takeaway #1: The more accessible your website is, the more usable it is to everyone.