"If (when) you see a marketing stunt like this from an overlay company again, especially on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, pay close attention to where the messages are coming from"
I spent some of yesterday doing experiments with possible techniques for the the overlays, and ended with with hands like Lady Macbeth's (always assuming that Duncan's blood was purple acrylic ink!). For such tenacious colour, the effect on the gauze was disappointingly feeble.
I'm concerned about the inktense because the first gauzes are beginning to look much muddier than when I started, but I think acrylic ink is not a better solution, in the end.
As with other overlays, it makes WCAG/ADA promises, fails to fix stuff, replicates platform features (poorly) in CSS, and introduces WCAG violations just by adding it to a site.
It's hard to believe that just 14 days ago I was 13,000km away in California, wondering how Hans Hillen and my talk on AI and web accessibility would go down at a CSUN conference where there were at least 20 presentations on related topics (it all went very well, thanks for asking 🙂).
When we were preparing the talk, we realised we had way too much material, so we had to chop a lot out to fit the time available.
I kept what I cut out, though, and have now used that to expand my talk transcript into a TPGi blog post, using my slides to illustrate the article.
My focus was on how AI is changing the web accessibility tools we use now, namely automatic alt text generation, automatic captioning and AI-powered overlays. No lack of potential controversy, then!
Anyway, I hope it's an interesting read and maybe adds a little to your perspective and understanding of AI and web accessibility.
Late to the party because I really needed to think about this.
I believe what is happening is IAAP is hosting a session promoting #overlays.
It has 7 dudes on a panel:
• One is from #FACILiti (filed SLAPPs against disabled critics).
• One from #UserWay (known for lifting content, failing at WCAG).
• One from #AccessiWay (was so bad I ignored it).
And then three more I’m disappointed to see aligning themselves with this.
Wow, the ZeroProject conference in Vienna next month hosts a overlay session, organized by IAAP D-A-CH, that has representatives of AccessiWay, FACIL’iti (yup, who press SLAPP lawsuits against accessibility people), and UserWay, of course. Because those $100M have to go somewhere.
And Google’s head of accessibility and one of WCAG’s founding people legitimize that shit.
@SteveFaulkner Level Access buying UserWay was definitely not on my 2023 Bingo Card.
Maybe Level Access released the news on a Sunday Dec 31st in the hopes that it would pass unnoticed and be buried and gone by the time folks return to work in the New Year. Normally you would only push out a news release today if you purposely wanted people to miss it entirely.
2023 sera donc l'année où, enfin, il y aura eu plusieurs positionnements officiels sur le fait que les outils de surcouche d'accessibilité ne rendent pas les sites accessibles aux personnes handicapées et ne permettent pas de répondre aux obligations légales.
Accessibility overlays: a strong statement from the European commission, stating that accessible overlays are no substitute for manually fixing your site, and an overlay won’t make your website meet the 2025 European directive on accessibility. So, what does it mean? If you have a site, selling things to people in Europe in 2025, the overlay won’t save you from a potential lawsuit.
> Claims that a website can be made fully compliant without manual intervention are not realistic, since no automated tool can cover all the WCAG 2.1 level A and AA criteria.