November 26, 2025
I found a weird issue during a recent accessibility audit. I was testing a slideshow using the NVDA screen reader and keyboard navigation. The slideshow uses tab controls for the controls to switch the slides (incorrect IMO, but that's a different topic).
The problem was that when my keyboard focus was on the currently selected tab/slideshow control, I couldn't use up and down arrow keys to…
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Buttons with the tab role prevent NVDA keyboard navigation
November 20, 2025
A standard part of accessibility testing is to check if a site conforms to WCAG 1.4.4 Resize Text:
Except for captions and images of text, text can be resized without assistive technology up to 200 percent without loss of content or functionality.
"Without assistive technology" means that we should be able to use browser settings to resize text, without special accessibility tools. This…
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Differences between browser font size resizing and Firefox "zoom text only" setting: which can you use to test WCAG 1.4.4 Resize Text?
September 5, 2025
Removing borders from buttons is part of many CSS resets, including mine, till recently:
button,input[type="submit"] { border: none;}
However, during an accessibility test with a tester who uses high-contrast mode, I realized the problem with this.
High contrast mode is used by many people with low vision or photosensitivity. It replaces your carefully-chosen website colour…
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Accessibility: don't remove borders from buttons
September 3, 2025
Without fail, in my accessibility testing with blind users, links which open in new tabs (or windows, but that's less common these days) are a problem.
Often, there's no notification in the link that it will open in a new tab, as is required by WCAG Success Criterion 3.2.2 On Input. Other times, it's there but presented in an inaccessible way, such as the <title> attribute on the link. (…
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Accessibility: Just don't open links in new tabs
September 1, 2025
That isn't the most catchy title in the world, but it's a phenomenon that I come across all the time when developing sites for clients.
What happens is, a client will come to me with a request that doesn't make sense for outside users of their site. It would make the site less usable and less understandable for anyone who didn't know the site intimately or use it the way the owners or content…
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Website owners can't see their sites the way visitors do
July 24, 2025
This is probably a pretty niche topic, but for anyone out there using the Group module and the very useful Entity Group Field module to add content to groups, it may be handy.
I previously posted about how to get the rendered value of this field in Twig, but what if you want/need to get individual raw values?
Today I had to do just that; I needed to check the type of each group referenced from…
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Get raw values from Entity Group Field in Twig
May 9, 2025
I wanted to create a view of "event" content type, grouped by taxonomy term. For each group, I wanted to show only the first 4 items, with a "more" link to see all.
This seems like it should be a simple task, but isn't, and isn't possible out of the box with views.
I didn't want to have to create a view display for every taxonomy term. That's a huge pain, requires maintenance every time a new…
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How to limit number of rows in each group in a grouped View using Twig
April 16, 2025
This post piggybacks on my earlier post "Print raw values from Smart Date fields in Twig templates - Drupal 8+".
The Drupal Smart Date module allows users to choose a timezone for each date entered in a Smart Date field. One of my clients has a site with an event content type that uses a Smart Date field, and they needed event dates and times to display in the actual timezone entered. However, no…
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Drupal & Twig: How to show Smart Date dates in the created timezone, without conversion to site default or user-chosen timezone
February 28, 2025
The title of this post might seem a little odd, but it's inspired by a recent accessibility audit where I saw the HTML <nav> region being used in some unusual ways.
The MDN HTML spec defines the <nav> element this way:
The <nav> HTML element represents a section of a page whose purpose is to provide navigation links, either within the current document or to other documents.…
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Accessibility: What is a nav region?
November 18, 2024
Please note I'm not referring here to showing a block with a list of content that shares the same taxonomy terms as the content it is displayed on, a.k.a. a "related content" block. There are reams and reams of tutorials out there showing you how to do that.
This use case is when you have a specific block, maybe just some custom output, that you only want to show on content that is tagged with…
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How to show a Drupal block on content tagged with specific taxonomy terms