No industry for old men

• Tetralogical
• CSUN
• W3C
• Alt Tag emptiness
• HTMLZ webshop
• WCAG guidelines
• Deque
• Using the HTML title attribute
• Prayer for the unentitled user
• Codepen popover examples
• HTML5 accessibility

Consummate professionalism as always for me.

I'm actually going to do this up because I am professional and this is my sort of corporate look.

[ Laughter ] Why is that funny?

I'm being serious.

I've got my little testological sticker which is who I work for.

I actually walk around.

I go to this conference called CSUN each year which is the California State something, something.

It's an accessibility conference, disability conference and I walked around like that the whole time.

I actually met somebody who had a similar jacket on and she stuck the sticker on the same way.

I've got a lovely picture of her and me.

Now I'm sounding like bloody Trump now.

Anyway, no industry for old men.

This is something that I was made aware of.

This is links from a semi-retired acquaintance and former colleague.

I won't reveal who that is but let's just call him Joe.

Joe Humbert exactly.

Anyway, this is the sort of casual ageism.

The reason why it's semi-retired was because I had worked for TPGI where Ian works for 18 years and I left there and now I'm working at, where am I working at?

Tetra logical, that's right.

I'm working at Tetra logical and well I'm actually one of the four directors at Tetra logical so I have some sort of stake in it but so I'm definitely not semi-retired even though as I'll say former colleague, yeah we used to work together.

Joe's a nice guy but oh wait there.

Okay, so here's another comment from another friend, friend, acquaintance, friend who, no he's one of my closest friends.

I won't mention who he is but let's just call him Patrick, just give him a name.

Okay, people, I met you during, I was just talking here today and he said this is his response.

People are shit but think they're great and have valuable things to share.

So that's an example of an imposter syndrome trigger.

I mean I always tell everyone that I'm shit at.

Sorry, can you say shit?

I don't know, I wasn't given that.

Anyway, I always tell people that I'm not good at speaking and I'm not.

But anyway, so the point is why would it be the case that my best work is in the past?

I mean I'm old, I'm 60, I've just turned 60.

I'm not dead yet and I continue to work for a full time.

Okay, so starting the prehistory.

This is me in 1987.

I was working Greenpeace for the time and I had a finger at one of those bike chains around my neck.

And we were obviously, the MV Greenpeace had been taken by the Russians and there's me risking my life.

So anyway, I was born in Australia, 10 pound palms.

Everybody know what 10 pound palms are?

People that got an assisted passage to Australia for 10 quid.

So my father was a tool maker, we went across there.

I was educated in Australia, I went to uni in the 1980s.

The only reason why I went to uni was because it was free at the time in Australia.

And because I come from a poorer background, they actually paid me to go to university.

So I appreciated that.

I lived in a utumba in the 90s, I worked in social care.

I got a part time job in Manly and then in Singapore I learned to HTML.

I went to UK in '99 and became a contract web dev.

Now, I must admit that this was at a time when if you could spell HTML, they gave you a job.

So anyway, and then I went back to Australia in 2001 after a couple of years here and this is where my accessibility journey started.

Sorry, did I mention that I'm entrenched within accessibility?

Why is it not?

Ah, there.

So December 2001, I started working at a charity called or a non-government organisation called Vision Australia.

I knew next to nothing about accessibility but these two people on the left, this is my boss, a guy called Andrew Arch, who now works for an organisation in Australia called the Utopia.

There's also a guy called Russ Weekley who works there, so you may have heard of him because he's quite cool.

I got sat down and I got given a paper copy of the web content.

So this is back in the 2000s.

So I was told to read it, which I duly did.

And it was actually, I was about 60 pages at the time.

This is my boss's boss but also my, so by, he was my boss boss, I suppose.

Yeah.

He says, "Our aim is to put ourselves out of business."

And at this point in time, that was the starry-eyed idea was that we could just do the accessibility stuff for a year or two.

Everybody will know it.

Everybody will take it on board and carry on.

Yeah, well, I'm still in business now.

And at the time, I mean, when I first started, I was a dickhead.

Well, I'm still a dickhead, but I was more of a dickhead then.

And this is one of my colleagues, and they used to have stupid arguments about stuff.

And one of the others is, "You don't need a space in Alt to signify empty Alt."

So, and I said, "Yes, you do."

Turns out I was wrong, Sophia was right at the time.

And so she's right.

You don't need an Alt, you don't even need an Alt attribute to signify empty Alt because if you just put image in there without, no, you don't need the equals and the things.

You do need an Alt attribute.

Yeah, sorry.

See, I told you, you'll come out more confused.

So you do, you need an Alt.

So there's an article and you can, if you feel the desire, I have a website and I have, this is an article all about Alt tag emptiness and, you know, the various, how it actually works.

That is the picture.

I don't know if I, no, I haven't mentioned it, but I do web standards merchandise.

And this is an example of a mug that says, "Say Alt tag again," and with a well-known retro, reprobate or, yeah.

Adrian, Adrian Roselli, who's got a really nice cursor or tattoo, which doesn't actually have, but he, yeah, he put it on there for some reason.

Okay, so that was the prehistory end and this is W3C start.

Now, again, accessibility is fun.

Just remember, well, if you remember nothing else, remember that.

And if you remember that, get the shirt.

From HTMLZ Etsy shop.

Okay.

What was I going to say?

Well, I was going to telling myself that I should stop saying, I don't know if you've ever noticed, but in like I've noticed this over the years, that in some people, especially people that were enthralled with XML and XHTML, tend to use this sort of start and end of, with like it was an element.

And so I thought, yeah, I like that idea.

So I've taken, so they'll write something, they'll write a response to some email on a mailing list and they'll go end of conversation or some bullshit like that.

So that's what I'm doing.

So ways to contribute to accessibility at the W3C.

Who has ever been contributed to anything at the W3C?

So a fair amount of people.

Who has found it a frustrating and horrible experience?

Yes.

Well, it's frustrating, but there is fun to be had.

So there's many ways you can do it.

You can follow issues on repositories, you can comment on issues, you can follow PRs, pull requests, comment on PRs, join a community group, join a working group.

So of those people, how many people are currently involved?

Yeah, okay.

So it's an interesting place to be involved in.

And I was thinking, because I walk my dog around where I live in Kingston, which is in south west London.

And I was walking past some people who were talking about themselves being, they were talking about football or some sport and how they were sort of in depth about it.

And I was thinking, being involved in this shit is very much the same as being involved.

It's like it's a hobby and it's something to do and it keeps our minds.

And you can sort of analyse stuff.

So despite the fact that most people think it's not that much fun, it is worthwhile doing.

And the good thing about it is that these days you can interact or you can contribute to the level that you feel comfortable at.

So I'm a member of, by dint of my organisation, which used to be TPGI, now, sorry, I just got a flash in the eye.

It used to be TPGI, now Tetralogical, as they are both members of the W3C and so I can enjoy any working group.

And I do, but I just sort of sit there and watch a lot of stuff.

So I've got to the point now where I don't really want to contribute much.

Not contribute, I just find that being across everything is just, I'm getting old, it's too much energy and I did it for years and years and years.

And so I sort of stepped back.

And I think that's partially why Humberto said that I was semi-retired because last year I, for about 10 years or more, I was editing a number of specifications.

One of them, I'll talk about that later, but I was editing specifications and then I decided to step down and send it to her because there were people doing better work on it than me.

And that people person was really a guy called, now I can't remember, Scott O'Hara, there you go.

There's something on like music coming out.

I've been watching, re-watching, what's it called?

Battlestar Galactica, it's when the people find out their silos because they're listening, sorry, I didn't want to spoil it for anybody.

[LAUGHTER] Where they're listening to the walls and I can hear music now and I know where it's coming from.

It's not coming from there.

All right, movies to sleep on.

Please do join, please get involved.

You could just go and comment on a particular thing.

One of the things I like to do now is through my social media, my multi-platform social media empire marketing machine is I like to share interesting topics of discussion, threads that are going on and that brings people out of the woodwork, which is always good because there's nothing better than seeing, somebody asks a question or somebody make a statement and then all these grumpy old people are piling on.

[LAUGHTER] So, yeah, you could just subscribe to the mailing list if you want.

If you just want to really to know about what's going on in web standards and accessibility standards in particular, you can do that.

One of the things that I would suggest is know when you don't know.

That is one of the frustrating things is that people who know next to nothing or think they know a lot more than they do tend to be the loudest.

So, and I was the same when I was a youngster or younger, but now I'm not.

So, it's important, yeah, because you can do this.

I don't know, I didn't know where I got this from, but it's like the circles of hell, but your area of expertise in the middle and this person, let's call him Joe or Patrick or not Joe, sorry.

People think because I've got a couple of people I work with, Joe and Alistair, hello, it's not Joe, it's Joe, but I'm talking about not you at all, Joe.

So, one of the things is you'll encounter all different types of people.

So, these are some of the examples that you will also find on Slack and WebAIM and LinkedIn or whatever, Zeta, Mastodon is the well-meaning people.

You'll also know they all look like Klingons, but they're actually all, then there's the argumentative people, then there's some people with an axe to grind, there's lots of people there with an axe to grind.

The practical, it's always good to have practical people in there.

The clueless, and as I said, they're one of the loudest of all.

Then you've got the old school people like myself.

Helpful, it's always good to be helpful, even if you're arguing against someone's point.

The true believers, the people that just believe that web standards are next to godliness.

And the revisionists, they're the people that want to rewrite the normally definitions of things all over the place because they don't disagree with them.

And unfortunately, yeah, it does happen that you get to rewrite stuff, but it involves putting out a new specification.

You can't just rewrite the old in the way that you want.

And then there are the lurkers, and there's lots of lurkers.

I would urge you, if you do nothing, lurk.

It's like Dave.

Okay, so that's W3C end, waking start.

Okay, how am I doing for time? - 10 minutes. - Oh, fuck.

Look, I always do this.

I'm the exact opposite of my good friend, Lloyd, who revises and rehearses and does all these things and works out the timings.

I've got like 60 slides, I'm not going to get through them.

Again, best thing is to know your standards.

Know the core, like go to the source.

Don't believe some secondary source because they're almost always going to be out of date or even some of the primary sources are out of date.

But it's a good thing to know HTML, ARIA, CSS and WCAG in this case.

So one of the things about consistency, this talking about WCAG in particular.

WCAG 1, and this is, as I mentioned, I was around when I was using it, that auto checks, so I mean the difference between what you need to manually test versus the use of these wonderful automated tools that everybody touts, especially the larger companies, was that auto checks is about 30% of the WCAG success criteria that you can be tested with.

And of that 30%, even they still need to be interpreted. 70% is manual testing.

So WCAG 2 comes along, it's about the same amount.

And then I'll always get, when I do this and people will come, where did you get that 30% from?

I'm not going to argue about statistics, but anyway, even though I like to use them.

WCAG 2.1, very similar.

WCAG 2.2, it always seems to be like that.

Then, I'm not going to mention where that comes, then my mind got blown, as you can imagine, that my mind gets blown quite often.

I love that GIF, whatever.

I read on a website of a large corporation, accessibility corporation, we analysed 13,000 pages, page states, nearly 300,000 issues, found that 57% of issues for first time on all the customers could be found using automated testing.

I'm thinking, all right, that's almost double.

The question is, how was this achieved?

From a consistent 30% to 50%, almost double.

Yep, they turned it up to 11%.

Part of what they did was change the way the percentage is calculated.

So the old way, the way that everybody else seems to use, is total number of success criteria, which depending on WCAG, is currently about 60 or something, 55 A and double A success criteria.

The new was the number of instances of issues found on the auto testable criteria.

So that's how they, versus the, so it was a matter of auto testable checks versus manual checks.

Of the instances of issues.

So I was just, you know, why am I doing this anymore?

I mean, these tools are just amazing.

Okay, so there's a certain irony in this, because when you, so what happened, talking about revisionist, what happened in WCAG 2.2 was this particular success criteria called 4.1.1 parsing, and it was found that, well essentially it wasn't well written to start with, and then as the years gone by, it just became defunct really.

I mean, there was never any, well, yeah, I won't go into it.

Anyway, it got obsoleted from all, including 2.2, WCAG 2.2.

So it was removed from the calculation.

If you remove from the stats that they provide, if you remove the WCAG, the parsing criteria, it's the percentage of, even in the new way, the percentage is still 31%, so they've actually had an improvement of 1%, not 30%.

And not naming the company, let's just call it Deque, or Dec, or whatever it is.

And I put that there because this is the table that I used, and it's still there, so people can, there is a link to it.

I'll make the slides available.

How much longer have I got, Dave?

Five minutes.

Five minutes, okay.

So we've got 30-odd slides to get through.

No, 40 slides to get through in five minutes.

So the point being here is that automated tools are still helpful and sometimes useful, but you still need people looking at the issues and people that understand the issues.

Anyway, WCAG, title attribute style.

I'll get through the title attribute, so don't disturb me.

It's going to be, again, lovely hat.

This is my wow, WCAG line.

People actually bought that.

So anyway, back in 2005, it was my first time I ever did a talk, and that was in Australia at a thing called Web Essentials, which is a precursor of web directions.

And so do users, and I asked the question, do users with disabilities, the whole thing is about the title attribute, but at the time I thought this is really obscure and nobody's going to be interested, but it's been something that people have continued to be interested in, wrote about in different contexts.

So at the time I asked, do users with disabilities read or hear the title text?

I wrote it in 2013, which is up on the TPGi blog, and I talked about user groups not well served by the title attribute, and there's a whole slew of them.

So it's always been problematic because of the nature of how it's displayed amongst many other things.

So there's been very limited change over a period of time, and one of the things that I did, at one point I was, I think, when you, yeah, at one point I was editor of the HTML5 spec at the W3C.

I think Bruce was at one point, yeah, as well.

But yeah, about 10 minutes, well, it was about 40 minutes.

Yeah.

But anyway, and during that time, about 2010, I wrote to the browser people at the time because I had their ear because I was doing this work, and I said, will you commit to implementing the title attribute on focus?

Because that's one of the things you, unless you can use a mouse, you can't see it.

And most of them said, no.

So it was really, we can't commit nothing.

Apple said, oh, we can't commit to doing anything.

And Microsoft said the same thing.

But anyway, so did this happen?

Well, not really.

And that's so, it's been like 14, yeah, 14 years.

If you have a look at the what W HTML specification or the HTML specification, I should say, 2023, there is a note in there about relying on the title attribute is currently discouraged as many user ages do not expose the aptitude and excess when I am, which is all true.

That was in there, put in there 12 years ago.

It's still the same today or very similar.

As always, if I want to say something about these things, I always want to check stuff.

So what I did the other day or the other last week, and I wrote an article about it, which you can read on my blog, HTML5XSME.com/stuff, but the link is there, which I'll make these slides available, is the title content display when interactive elements receive focus.

So in 2024, the situation is Chrome actually does this.

So if you move onto an input, it'll display the title attribute.

The rest of them, no.

So Firefox, Safari, Chrome.

And this is just desktop.

So talking about touch devices, mobile, whatever, it's much the same.

But there are more details in there.

So the answer is no.

So from 2005, when I was banging on about it, to 2000-- how many is that?

That's 19 years.

Still not a viable way to access or provide information to a user.

So in 2023, and this says thanks to Hiddi, because I was looking at work he'd done on the popover, that a new method or a different way to provide a visible label is by using the popover attribute.

And yes, reheat his stuff more about it, because I think that he covers things a little better than I do.

So one of the things that I found-- and please do correct me, Hiddi, if I'm wrong-- the popover doesn't show on hover and focus by default.

Yeah?

So that's a potential issue.

But what I did find-- no, no, no.

What I did find was just through the addition of some simple JavaScript-- sorry, simple CSS.

You see, that's the problem with using ChatGBT.

You start to get-- because you get a code block, and it says JavaScript when it is actually CSS.

So anyway, using this, you can create a popover that is shown as well as on mouse enter or whatever or mouse click that you can get shown on hover and focus.

So that's one issue that-- I don't know.

Does anybody know what this is?

What?

Some CSS?

No, not me.

You, out.

Back of the bus.

No, because the reason why I've got this icon is I looked at when I was creating these examples.

The icon was-- I picked it, and I thought, oh, that looks interesting.

So the other thing is the popover content not uses the app name by default.

So one of the things being an accessibility wonk-- fascist, some people say-- I look at-- so the button.

The button has an icon, and it needs an accessible name.

The accessible name is the name that is provided in the accessibility tree.

So when a screen reader or something gets focused on it, it'll announce what the accessible name is.

So I was thinking, in the case of these pseudo title displays, tool tips, it would be perfect if the content within the popover content would be the accessible name for it.

So I thought, OK, well, I'm using a button, and so I should just be able to put a label in there, and that will become the accessible name for it.

So we've got a label for-- this is a bong.

It's a bong, by the way, if you didn't know.

I don't know why they have that as an icon, but anyway.

I thought it was one of those things that you-- No, no.

It's-- [LAUGHTER] We'll do the charades later.

But anyway, and so I wrote this, and then I looked at-- in the accessibility tree, no accessible name.

I was thinking, what the fuck is going on here?

Then I remembered that when a label element is used as a accessible name, if it's hidden, then it won't provide the accessible name.

So once I focus on that and the thing comes up, the popover comes up, then the accessible name will be this is a bong.

But there's not really much use because it relies upon-- it doesn't have any accessible name until it gets physically focused in the browser.

Not much use at all.

And I thought about this, I thought, well, what I wanted you to-- I don't know if anybody's ever heard of the first rule of ARIA, and that is use HTML unless you can't, essentially.

And I thought, I really wanted to use standard HTML.

But I remember why this wasn't happening, it's because it was hidden.

But then what I found is if I just put the label outside of the popover, doesn't show any-- it doesn't make any difference.

It doesn't get displayed.

But doing that, if the content of the label is hidden, that's fine.

As long as the visible label, then it will populate as an accessible name.

I've got-- why has it got-- oh, there.

OK, CodePen, I've got a whole slew of them that I've done.

Because also I was looking at why-- it's fine on desktop, but how does popover work for touch devices?

And it seems it has a problem.

If you've got a button that you want to have the accessible-- the label for it, you don't want to have to push the button in order to see the label.

But you can't really-- there is a conflict between pushing the button and doing the thing it wants to do and showing the label.

Whereas if you're using a mouse or whatever, you don't have that problem.

So anyway, there's a whole bunch of collection-- there's a collection of CodePen shit that I did that goes through this.

So the other way that you could do it is using the-- is aria-labelledby.

And that doesn't-- then it doesn't matter whether the thing is hidden or not.

So there are a number of ways, but provide an accessible name.

So you're going to miss out on "Accessfully Dreaming."

I'm sorry, because this-- but title attribute end and "Accessfully Dreaming."

And I did have a dream back in 2010.

And it was that accessible HTML would be a beautiful thing.

And that's why I started working on this.

And eventually it became this.

And then I lost interest.

[LAUGHTER] Well, it did.

Everything-- it served its purpose.

From 2010 to 2023, I think, shit got a lot better as far as this stuff was concerned.

And my interest is specifically in how browsers implement accessibility semantics.

So yeah, I'll just go through quickly, because you see all the-- ah, yeah.

Here's me and Lionel.

This guy, Lionel, is-- this was in TPAC last year.

I'm hoping to see him again this year.

I've got another shirt to wear with him.

This guy works for-- what is it-- Userway, the one that was bought by somebody.

And I was going to talk about how I use AI.

I don't use any accessory testing.

I was going to talk about-- but I wanted to get to this to say, this is for David Swallow.

He's inspirational, along with Patrick, as you can see.

They're friends of mine.

I wouldn't be where I am today without them.

Thank you.