Weekly Platform News: CSS column-span Property, ADA applies to Websites, Auto-generated Image Descriptions

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In this week's roundup: multi-column layouts gain wide support, the ADA means more A11y for retailers, and Google is doing something about all the empty image alt attributes in the wild.

The CSS column-span property will soon be widely supported

The CSS column-span property, which has been supported in Chrome and Safari since 2010 (and IE since 2012), is finally coming to Firefox in version 71 (in December).

This feature enables elements that span across all columns in a multiple-column layout. In the following demo, the headings span across both columns.

article {
  column-count: 2;
}

h2 {
  column-span: all;
}

See the Pen
Demo of CSS column-span: all by Šime Vidas (@simevidas)
on CodePen.

(via Ting-Yu Lin)

The Americans with Disabilities Act applies to websites

In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to websites, which means that people can sue retailers if their websites are not accessible.

Domino’s Pizza’s appeal was recently turned down by the Supreme Court, so the lawsuit against them for failing to make their website accessible to screen reader users will now resume in district court.

Guillermo Robles, who is blind, filed suit in Los Angeles three years ago and complained he had been unable to order a pizza online because the Domino’s website lacked the software that would allow him to communicate. He cited the ADA, which guarantees to people with a disability “full and equal enjoyment of the goods and services ... of any place of public accommodations.”

(via David G. Savage)

Google announces automatically generated image descriptions for Chrome

When used with the VoiceOver screen reader, Chrome can now automatically generate image descriptions for images that do not have proper alt text (<img alt> attribute). Google has already created more than 10 million image descriptions, but they are not meant to replace alt text written by humans.

Image descriptions automatically generated by a computer aren’t as good as those written by a human who can include additional context, but they can be accurate and helpful.

This new accessibility feature, called “Accessibility Image Descriptions,” may not be enabled by default in your version of Chrome, but you can enable it manually on the chrome://flags page.

(via Dominic Mazzoni)

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