Feel free to bring any web projects you’d like evaluated from an accessibility perspective or topics that are on your mind! (Please send us URLs for web sites/applications in advance so we can be prepared to discuss any issues or questions.)

Additionally, since we’ll be meeting on Valentine’s Day, let’s talk a bit about love… of accessibility! Is there a tool or technique you find incredibly useful? Perhaps a website you think really knocked accessibility out of the park? Or maybe there’s someone you’d like to give kudos for their accessibility efforts? Bring any celebrations to share!

We’re always looking for websites and topics to discuss! Email us any time and we’ll add your site/topic to the agenda for an upcoming meeting.

Topic 1: Retirement of FAE Service in 2023

Jon Gunderson: the FAE service hosted by the University of Illinois will be retired in 2023. The FAE service will continue as is until version 2.0 of the OpenA11y Evaluation Library is released. Although no specific date has been set, the new version of the library is expected to be released sometime this spring. After the release, the version of the evaluation library used by FAE will no longer be synchronized with the version used by AInspector for Firefox. To eliminate any confusion between results from FAE and AInspector for Firefox, the ability to run new FAE reports and create new accounts will be disabled. Existing accounts and FAE reports will remain available until at least January 1st, 2024.

Topic 2: Discussion of <input type="number">

Bryan Jonker: there can be potential issues with using the 'number' input type, depending on your use case. Here are some articles to read that lay out issues we can discuss:

• Why the number input is the worst input
• Why the GOV.UK Design System team changed the input type for numbers

Topic 3: Using details/summary tags vs. accordion

Bryan Jonker: I've promoted that using the details / summary tag as an accordion is the way to go, but after consideration and reading Why <details> is Not an Accordion, I'm rethinking that decision. The WIGG Web Components group is going to be building a custom accordion element modeled after ARIA APG: Accordion (Sections With Show/Hide Functionality).

Leslie Sherman, Teri Merrell, and Keith Hays will join us to discuss the recent updates to the procurement process to ensure the products we purchase follow the campus Digital Accessibility Policy. Learn how you can help ensure the information and communication services, tools, and applications we implement are inclusive for all of our users.

Topic 1: SkipTo.js 5.1

Jon Gunderson will show the newest version of SkipTo.js, with a lot of under the hood changes and support for web components. As always, feedback and suggestions are welcome!

View Jon's slides

Topic 2: IT Pro Forum Accessibility Topics Redux

There were many interesting accessibility-related presentations at the recent IT Pro Forum, including “Best Practices for Inclusive IT Experiences”, “Accessibility in the Procurement Process”, and “Accessible Word Document? Yes, We Can!” Join Leslie Sherman, Bryan Jonker, and Keith Hays for further discussion of these topics, session summaries, and extra time to ask questions and get into more in-depth conversations about the topics.

You can view recordings of the presentations on the IT Pro Forum Sessions page (videos require University of Illinois login).

Blazor is a new technology built on ASP.NET that allows developers to quickly generate interactive web applications. While it tends to use standard HTML5 tags, it uses Web Sockets and SignalR instead of JavaScript and cookies to manage state and update the status of the web page/app.

Bryan Jonker has built a prototype Course Repository Editor application (U of I credentials required for login) using this new technology, and would like opinions on its accessibility before continuing forward with this. Once logged in, you can self-subscribe by clicking the “add yourself to a test source” link to try out the functionality.

There are also a few third-party components that he may want to use, and wishes to analyze for accessibility:

• Blazor: UI Components | DevExpress
• Blazor Components Demos and Examples - Telerik UI for Blazor