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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

  • In browser spellchecking

    “Necessity is the mother of invention” We have changed our Quality Assurance (QA) methods recently at TPGi and now require a screen reader friendly method to find spelling errors in…

    February 9, 2017Technical

  • TPGi at W3C in 2016

    The TPGi partners Mike, Debs and Charlie have always placed an emphasis on developing and sharing knowledge on how to make the web more accessible for users. A major aspect…

    December 23, 2016Technical

  • A (not so) short note on ARIA to the rescue

    Native HTML elements don’t require the addition of ARIA attributes to expose the semantics they have, as, for the most part, browsers expose this information: YAY. This is expressed in…

    October 8, 2016Technical

  • Notes on ZoomText Web Finder

    ZoomText Magnifier/Reader is a popular combination magnifier/screen reader, primarily for users with low vision. A feature it provides is Web Finder, which makes use of HTML semantics to provide navigation…

    September 2, 2016Technical

  • Custom Element Semantics

    The following content written by me, was until recently a part of the W3C Custom Elements specification, but was removed/substantially re-written when a new editor took over. As we think, in…

    April 5, 2016Technical

  • Short note on use of alt=”” and the title attribute

    A discussion occured on A11ySlackers gitter channel last evening about whether use of the following markup pattern was a WCAG 2.0 failure: <img src=”a.gif” alt=”” title=”some text”>

    February 10, 2016Technical

  • Short note on improving usability of scrollable regions

    You can make an element scrollable using CSS overflow property, problem is that typically the content cannot be scrolled using the keyboard.

    February 3, 2016Technical

  • The state of hidden content support in 2016

    I have reported previously on support in browsers and screen readers (SR) for aria-hidden and the HTML5 hidden attribute. The last time was 2 years ago, the orginal article published…

    January 26, 2016Technical

  • Simple standalone toggletip widget pattern

    Tooltips have always bugged me, apart from regularly mispelling as “TOOTlips” it is a bugger trying to create one that works across browsers with Assistive Technology (AT), in particular screen…

    January 15, 2016Technical

  • Simple inline error message pattern

    Error messages can be problematic to convey consistently to all users across browsers and assistive technology (AT). Using simple HTML, with a little ARIA polyfil magic if you want to…

    January 3, 2016Technical

  • TPGi folks – selected articles

    Recent articles by people of TPG:

    December 4, 2015Technical

  • WCAG 2.0 Parsing Criterion is a PITA

    Any change in WCAG 2.1? Nope, 2.1 parsing criterion is still a PITA The WCAG 2.0 Parsing Criterion is a Pain In The Ass (PITA) because the checking of it…

    November 20, 2015Technical

  • Thoughts on “Notes from the future of HTML session at TPAC”

    Stinkin’ thinkin’ on HTML @w3c (AKA what i would be saying at #TPAC2015 if I was there) HTML is being discussed, again, at W3C. HTML5 was published as a recommendation…

    October 29, 2015Technical

  • THUS SPOKE HTML

    For many of us HTML as a language is expressed visually and often implicitly as graphical user interfaces (often dressed in fancy CSS threads). For others it is an aural…

    October 26, 2015Technical

  • Notes on use of multiple ARIA role attribute values

    The role attribute in HTML can have multiple space separated values :

    October 15, 2015Technical

  • Easy content organisation with HTML5

    Typically designers and web developers divide web pages into macro content areas (let’s call them regions). Doing an image search for typical web page returns lots of examples of diagrammatic…

    September 24, 2015Technical

  • Short note on coding alt text

    The other day, in relation to a github comment, I was asked by my friend Mike[tm]Smith “Can alt have line breaks in it or does that do weird things to…

    September 15, 2015Technical

  • Short Note on HTML conformance checking

    When you check a HTML document, using the W3C HTML conformance checker, to find out whether its code conforms to the rules defined in the HTML specification (and other referenced…

    August 10, 2015Technical