I went through the 128 questions that a11y.quest proposes

Soooo... I stumbled by chance upon a11y.quest (Opens in a new tab), the free accessibility quiz by Dave Davies (Opens in a new tab), and I went through all of its 128 questions expecting to be humbled from question one. You know, the classic let's find out how much I really don't know. 😅

Well... I was surprised!

The questions ramp up from easy to medium to hard, and I finished with 90 correct (which works out to about 70% accuracy), with a best streak of 9 in a row. Definitely better than I thought!

On the practical side, I was mostly fine: contrast, keyboard interaction, forms, focus management... the hands-on questions all felt familiar enough (maybe I do know about a thing or two! :D).

But then two things got me, and got me good.

The obscure corners of ARIA

I would have told you I was comfortable with ARIA. Turns out I am comfortable with the same ten attributes everyone uses, and the quiz went waaaay past those. 😱 A little taste of the ones that got me:

• Did you know that aria-relevant defaults to "additions text"? Meaning that removals from an aria-live region are not announced by default. But did you even know about aria-relevant, because I surely didn't 🤣
• aria-valuetext is what lets a slider announce a friendly "Quiet" instead of a raw 25 (while aria-valuenow has to stay a number); and, you guessed, aria-valuetext and aria-valuenow were also unknown to me... ahhh 😅
• I'll leave it here as it is... aria-atomic 🫠

A lot of these had me going ooooh, aha!, I see and a few oh god xD

The documents side of things

The other place I kept slipping was everything around how accessibility gets evaluated, documented and interpreted: the exact meaning of the conformance terms in a VPAT/ACR, the five steps of WCAG-EM, how ACT rules are structured, what ATAG actually asks of authoring tools, where EN 301 549 fits in Europe...

Acronyms for everyone!

So, my biggest learning

Knowing how to build accessible UI is not the same as knowing how accessibility gets assessed and reported, and I want to know more about the latter. It is time to actually sit down with the WAI-ARIA spec, the APG patterns and the conformance documents, at least to familiarize more with all these wild acronyms!

If you are curious, you can see my a11y.quest score here and try the test for yourself (Opens in a new tab) — and if you do, come tell me in the comments which questions got you! :D