On CSS accessibility and drinking tea
summary
Claim: CSS generated content is exposed to assistive tech — ::before/::after text gets inserted into the accessibility tree in most browsers, surprising screen readers. Evidence: demos and browser testing; caveat about IE. Problem: FlexBox visual order can break keyboard navigation — order changes layout but not DOM tab sequence, making tabbing confusing. Fixes tried: tabindex and ARIA flowto both fail at scale; Firefox bug currently makes tab order match visual order provides a practical workaround. Demos include a web speech polyfill and the visualAria bookmarklet; CSS Speech module is speculative with poor support.
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chapters (49)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:45Space Jam
- 1:43Tablebased layouts
- 2:15Font elements
- 2:50Accessibility problems
- 3:33CSS 1 introduction
- 4:16Drinking tea
- 4:27Platform accessibility APIs
- 5:00Checkbox example
- 6:07DOM accessibility tree
- 7:32Example
- 9:22Pseudo selectors
- 9:44After example
- 9:54Before example
- 10:06Generated content
- 10:21Maybe you might be surprised
- 10:36Tequila makes me happy
- 10:58All current browsers
- 11:21Accessibility tree
- 12:04CSS accessibility disaster
- 12:47Keyboard sequence
- 12:59Buttons
- 13:10Flexbox
- 13:38The inevitable happens
- 14:08If youre a sighted keyboard user
- 14:21If the order of content is important
- 14:50Using tabindex
- 15:49Demo
- 16:01Tabindex
- 16:36AriaFlow
- 17:14Screen reader support
- 17:34A terrible experience
- 18:22One possible solution
- 18:41A bug in Firefox
- 19:49Tea time
- 20:48Speak property
- 21:21Voice volume property
- 22:42Speech demo
- 23:46Visual Aria
- 24:59Tea
- 25:55Accessibility tools
- 26:32Accessibility audit
- 27:05Other accessibility tools
- 27:56Icon fonts
- 29:17SVG alternatives
- 29:49If we adopt the Firefox bug
- 31:46So use it
- 32:02in the second row
- 32:41focusable content
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