Tags
15 posts
A page can pass the WCAG reflow width test and still lose a fixed 82 pixels of vertical reading space at every screen height. This article walks through the measurements that show it and what to do differently.
A 320px reflow pass did not prevent severe vertical reading-space loss at short viewports. The loss was a fixed pixel cost, largely outside the application CSS.
Seven tooltips, each measured against Dismissible, Hoverable and Persistent separately. Every CSS-only build fails Dismissible; popover="hint" fails Hoverable.
WCAG 1.4.10 Reflow at three viewport heights: horizontal verdicts were identical. What 400% zoom changes is height. An 82px sticky header ate 41% of it.
axe-core found zero WCAG 1.4.12 violations. Then I applied the four declarations the criterion asks for and 570 elements clipped. Which one does the damage.
W3C's ACT suite labels 1,213 HTML examples. axe-core caught only 145 of 387 failing ones under the matching criterion, and 22 of 36 criteria scored zero.
Tabbing down six pages found zero WCAG 2.4.11 failures. Shift-Tabbing up the same pages found 16, because browsers align focus targets to the nearer edge.
W3C shipped WCAG-EM 2.0 in July 2026. I sampled 26 pages by its procedure, then swept the whole 1,342-page build. The sample caught one of four defect types.
I built one opening-hours table four ways, then ran axe-core and five extractors over it. axe passed all four, yet three lost all 7 rows once HTML became text.
Keyboard focus escaped an aria-modal dialog on the third Tab press while axe reported zero violations. I measured the same markup under aria-hidden and inert.
22×22 pagination links your thumb keeps missing still scored 92 on Lighthouse. I measured WCAG 2.2 SC 2.5.8 (24×24) two ways and coded the spacing exception.
I seeded eight WCAG barriers into a checkout page and ran axe-core. It caught the four rule-based ones and missed the four needing human judgment entirely.
aria-label can make the accessibility tree announce a word no one sees. A reproduced WCAG 2.5.3 Label in Name failure, with Agentic Browsing going 0 to 100.
axe-core in jsdom catches structural a11y violations without a browser, but color-contrast comes back incomplete, not pass. Why it happens, and how to split CI into two tiers.
A demo bakery page scored 55 on a Lighthouse accessibility audit. Here's the log of fixing six WCAG failures to reach 100, plus a keyboard trap the tool missed.