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Steve Faulkner

Steve was the Chief Accessibility Officer at TPGi before he left in October 2023. He joined TPGi in 2006 and was previously a Senior Web Accessibility Consultant at vision australia. Steve is a member of several groups, including the W3C Web Platforms Working Group and the W3C ARIA Working Group. He is an editor of several specifications at the W3C including ARIA in HTML and HTML Accessibility API Mappings 1.0. He also develops and maintains HTML5accessibility and the JAWS bug tracker/standards support.

Posts

  • Bolt-on Accessibility – 5 gears in reverse

    Many organizations first encounter accessibility as a risk to be managed. They may hear of drive-by lawsuits, bad press, and inflated costs. They are the prime target for products that…

  • Notes from the a11y underground #2

    Things that caught my interest since Notes from the a11y underground #1: The ARIA working group is considering making it an author error to use aria-label, aria-labelledby, aria-describedby on some…

  • Notes from the a11y underground #1

    Warning: Patrick looms large in various discussions I have been meaning to start a periodic noting of meaty articles and threads related to subjects close to my technical heart. Today…

  • CSUN 2019 Round-up

    Every year the people of TPGi make the pilgrimage to CSUN. The faces may change, the venue may change, but TPGi has been a force to reckon with at CSUN…

  • Short note: The abbreviation appreciation society

    The HTML <abbr> element is deceptively familiar and attractive, its been around forever (1999) and thus people assume that it does what it does and does it well. Nothing much…

  • WCAG 2.1 parsing error bookmarklet – updated 25th February 2019

    In 2012 I wrote: While reading Jared Smith’s excellent article WCAG Next I was drawn to the following statement “next to impossible to evaluate” in reference to the checking of…

  • Accessibility testing tools – Updated May 2019

    Here at TPGi we have a technical accessibility testing process which does not rely on the use of automated tools. The technical audit results we provide to our clients are…

  • Short note on scoping mechanisms

    In 2 recent articles I have illustrated why the scope attribute is not needed on data tables with one row or column of th elements, or data tables with 1…

  • Shortish note on JAWS support for regions

    The JAWS screen reader has fairly recently changed the way it supports the announcement of ARIA landmark roles and HTML5 elements that map to landmark roles. This has lead to…

  • Short note on getting spaced out with SC 1.4.12 Text Spacing

    One of the new success criterion in WCAG 2.1 is 1.4.12 Text Spacing. Conforming to this criteria provides accommodation for people to modify their text styles according to their needs….

  • Short note on being busy

    The aria-busy attribute, when set to true is supposed to provide a hint to screen readers that the content within the subtree of the element it is on is being…

  • Short note on what CSS display properties do to table semantics

    The CSS display properties are powerful. You can change the visual display of elements to match your desired styling, but sometimes doing this can have an unintended effect of nuking…

  • Short note on hiding stuff in interactive elements from screen readers

    Symbols are cool. They add decoration and/or information to user interfaces. For screen reader users their inclusion can sometimes be annoying or confusing as the visual and aural user interface…

  • Short note on making your mark (more accessible)

    Is there a recommended ARIA pattern for making sure that <mark> is properly announced in screen readers? — Šime Vidas (@simevidas) December 3, 2017 Short answer is no, but there…

  • JAWS wide open

    In pursuit of a better user experience I, and many others like me, have long wrestled with this beast and others of its kind. Attempting to tease out the rhyme…

  • Shut up JAWS

    One of the tasks I perform regularly is to test web content using screen readers. It can be somewhat annoying to be capturing data in a desktop application while testing…

  • ARIA alert support

    Back in 2012 I did some testing of ARIA alert support across browsers, screen readers and operating systems. The results were not encouraging. Fast forward to yesterday, while in a…

  • An Overview of PDF Inaccessibility

    There’s a lot of help online about making Portable Document Format (PDF) accessible. Even with all the advice out there, I still encounter people who find it difficult to make…