Text-to-speech can help you create more versatile, accessible content. You could purchase recording equipment and spend hours recording and editing each narration, but if you want most of the benefit for only a couple of minutes and a few pennies per post, consider using AWS instead. In this article, Philip Kiely will demonstrate how to use Amazon Polly to narrate your content. In the next article, he will embark on the return journey, from speech-to-text, and consider the accuracy of these transcriptions by sending various samples through a round-trip translation.
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In this series Chris Ashton attempts to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. Data can be prohibitively expensive, especially in developing countries. Reducing the data footprint of your website goes hand in hand with improving frontend performance. It is the single most reliable thing you can do to speed up your site. In this article, Chris puts himself in the shoes of someone on a tight data budget and offers practical tips for reducing our websites’ data footprint.
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How can we improve our keyboard-only (KO) and Assistive Technology (AT) user experiences without affecting the experience for anyone else? In this article, we’ll dig into some specific, practical examples including skip links, navigation menus, modal focusing, and user education components. In this article, Aaron Pearlman is going to go over a few of those affordances that can make your KO/AT user experiences better without really changing the experience for anyone else.
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How do browsers and HTML support screen readers today? In this article, Be Birchall explains why it’s so important to prioritize accessibility among teams and why there needs to be more awareness raised among developers. Lack of awareness and prioritization, rather than any technical limitation, is currently the main barrier to an accessible web. We hope to shift your perspective closer to Haben Girma’s by showing how web accessibility fits into the broader areas of technology, disability, and design.
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Have you noticed that contact forms are disappearing? Have you also noticed that many websites are replacing their forms with chatbots? Whether you put a chatbot on your website or direct visitors to one hosted on Facebook Messenger, is that a better solution for capturing leads and other contact information than with a traditional form? In this article, Suzanne Scacca will explore what is happening to forms on the mobile web and why chatbots may or may not be a suitable replacement for them.
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It’s essential to be ready to design for both visual and voice. Since prototyping for voice is new for many designers, it may be unclear as to where to start and what process to follow.
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Not everything that’s round and stands out is considered to be a button. In this article, Vadim explains how you can create a proper interactive button for your users — one that shouldn’t be confused for anything else.
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In this Smashing TV webinar recording, join Léonie Watson (a blind screen reader user) as she explores the web, and find out about some unexpected properties of HTML elements that not only have a huge impact on accessibility, but also turn out to be pretty good for performance, too. We felt that the webinar was so valuable that we would open it up so that it’s free for everybody to use. Hopefully, it will serve as a resource for the whole web development community to understand how — and why — semantic markup matters.
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Web Standards, and the documentation to support them, provide huge insight into ‘the why’ and ‘the what’ of the world wide web. They are a fantastic resource for any web developer and help people build stuff for the web that is functional, accessible and cross-compatible. In this article, we take a look at the history of Web Standards, how to use them in your work and ways you can get involved in making them. In this article, Amy Dickens will give you an introduction to web standards, as well as ways you can get involved in contributing to new and existing standards. Let’s begin!
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A sighted user puts himself in the shoes of a non-sighted user. In this series, Chris Ashton attempts to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. I hope to raise the profile of difficulties faced by real people, which are avoidable if we design and develop in a way that is sympathetic to their needs. Today, Chris experiences first-hand difficulties that visually impaired users face and describes what we can do as web developers to help.
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