There’s no Explore with Hadi meeting this month – enjoy your vacation, back-to-school planning, or other summer activities!

It's time to talk about comboboxes and autocomplete fields - it's something that everyone wants and there are a lot of options to choose from, but we want to make sure it is done accessibly and doesn't prevent users from using a website.

Some examples of accessible autocomplete implementations are:

• ARIA APG Combobox pattern
• alphagov/accessible-autocomplete (GitHub) (examples: Gov.UK Accessible Autocomplete examples, College of Education Faculty Finder)

Questions: What do we look for? What type of tests do we do to evaluate packages?

Join us to discuss this important and oft-neglected interaction pattern!

ARIA APG site relaunch

The ARIA Authoring Practices Guide (APG) website relaunched recently, with a focus on being more user friendly, simpler to use, and easier to read! Join us to hear about the APG directly from individuals on the University of Illinois campus involved in the APG Task Force.

Megamenus

The Web Implementations Guidelines Group (WIGG) is ready to tackle the megamenu as a component. They are looking to build the first component with menu items only. Later they will come back and make version 2 to add in the Call To Action portions like some of the Grainger menus.

They are looking for feedback on the design as well as development.

View the megamenu mockups in Adobe XD.

We're teaming up with the IT Pros Caffeine Break for an accessibility discussion about Audio Descriptions!

This week for Caffeine Break we'll discuss audio descriptions for video. We invite anyone to bring clips they've tried their hand at audio describing in order to get feedback. If you don’t have any clips to share but want to learn more about audio describing videos, please come as well! We'll be joined by folks involved in the audio description process for Chancellor's videos at the Urbana campus, as well as some others working on audio descriptions of live streamed events. We hope you'll join us to share your experiences, ask your questions, and join in the discussion!

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.

We have 2 topics this month:

Gies College of Business wireframes

The Gies College of Business is putting together a new site, and they would like to run the designs – especially of the widgets – past the Explore with Hadi group for comment. They have provided these Figma designs for us to look at:

• Homepage – mobile (courses cards)
• Events – desktop (calendar in drop down)
• Events – desktop (calendar)
• Events – mobile (calendar)
• News – desktop (filters)
• News – mobile (filters)
• All Programs – desktop ("jump to" links)
• All Programs – mobile ("jump to" dropdown)
• Course Catalog – desktop (filter dropdowns)

ThingLink Accessibility

ThingLink is an online application that allows users to create interactive digital content including infographics, virtual tours, online curriculum, etc. They recently added new accessibility-focused options to their product, and some folks on campus would like to bring this to Explore with Hadi to get feedback on the platform’s accessibility. If you would like to take a look at it ahead of time, here are some places to get started:

• Accessibility: New Options in ThingLink
• ThingLink Accessibility Version Example
• ThingLink 2022 Accessibility Statement (PDF)

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.