Hello, my name is Léonie, and I 💜 AI. Well, that isn't entirely true, but I do use AI, quite a bit actually, and I'd like to tell you why.
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• Léonie Watson
Léonie Watson's personal website. Writing about the web, accessibility, and other things.
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btconf 2025 speakers
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Tag, you're it
Adrian Roselli tagged me in his Tag, you're it post in March, and it's taken me until now to do it.
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
I have no idea why I began blogging! It probably had something to do with having owned my own domain name since the late 90s but...
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• Léonie Watson
Tag, you're it
Adrian Roselli tagged me in his post back in March, and it's taken me until now to get round to answering his blogging questions!
Sticky pork belly slices
This recipe for sticky pork belly slices is one where you can turn up the heat if you like your food with a chilli kick to it. Otherwise, it's just sweet and sticky and just a little bit crunchy all the way.
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Makes: 2 helpings
Time: 10 minutes prep + 60 minutes
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Using Ray-Ban Meta Glasses
I wrote about the advantages of wearable AI tech for blind people back in 2020, when I bought a pair of Envision Glasses. At the time they felt revolutionary, and indeed they were, but they never became part of my everyday tech. I've had my pair of Ray-Ban Meta Glasses for a...
Slow cooker French onion soup with cheese toasts
Making French onion soup can be a bit of a faff, especially when it comes to caramelising the onions, but if you're not in a hurry, you can use a slow cooker to make it instead.
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Makes: 2 or 3 large helpings
Time: 15 minutes prep + 8.5 hours in the slow cooker
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Stranger Things The First Shadow with audio description (AD)
Last Sunday I went to see Stranger Things: The First Shadow at the Phoenix theatre in London and what really made my day was that it was a performance with live Audio Description (AD) and a touch tour beforehand.
Stranger Things: The First Shadow with Audio Description (AD)
Last Sunday I went to see Stranger Things: The First Shadow, at the Phoenix theatre in London. If you like the Stranger Things Netflix series, you'll love the play - and I absolutely did! What really made my day was that it was a performance with live Audio Description (AD) ...
Nielsen needs to think again
Jakob Nielsen thinks that accessibility has failed.
I give this some thought as I make my lunch with ingredients I purchased from an online grocery store. I keep thinking about it as I return to my desk and respond to a few emails using my online mailbox. I check my online c...
Adventures with BeMyAI
Today I was given early access to the BeMyAI beta, a feature that's being added to the BeMyEyes iOS app using ChatGPT4.
BeMyEyes
BeMyEyes is one of the most remarkable apps to have emerged in recent years. You sign up either as a sighted volunteer, or a blind or low vision p...
Addressing concerns about CSS Speech
The case for CSS Speech is not just about screen readers, but they do of course matter. Whenever the topic is mentioned, someone will contact me to say they worry about websites taking over their screen reader and making content less accessible instead of more enjoyable.
The...
Why we need CSS Speech
In these times when almost every device and platform is capable of talking to you, you may be surprised to learn that there is no way for authors to design the aural presentation of web content, in the way they can design the visual presentation.
Once this was largely an acc...
Perceived affordances and the functionality mismatch
Using one element or set of elements (usually because of their functionality) and styling them to look like something else is a common pattern. A recent conversation about using radio buttons styled to look like buttons highlighted the essential problem with this approach - ...
Thoughts on skin tone and text descriptions
In a blog post on writing great alt text, Jake Archibald asked "Should skin tone be mentioned in alt text?". It's a good question, and one I've asked myself as a blind person, so Jake's post has prompted me to do some thinking out loud...
Here's a question for you: if you re...
Patrick H. Lauke's Goulash
The 15th in a series of posts that bring together the two sides of my blog: food and technology. I’ve asked the great and the good from the web standards community to share their favourite recipes. This meltingly good goulash recipe comes from Patrick H. Lauke.
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Notes on synthetic speech
I've been thinking about conversational interfaces for some time, and about the importance of voice quality as a part of user experience.
I use a screen reader and it sounds the same, whatever I'm doing - reading an email from a friend, reading news of a global disaster, rea...
AccessiBe and data protection?
The case for not using accessibility overlays has been made and endorsed by industry professionals, disability organisations, and people with disabilities. One concern is the privacy of personal data, and in the case of the AccessiBe overlay, it deserves closer scrutiny.
Enh...
Thoughts on screen readers and image recognition
The provision of text alternatives has been a first principle of accessibility since before WCAG 1.0 made it official in 1999, but apparently not everyone has got the message. According to the WebAIM Million from February 2020, more than 30% of homepage images were missing t...
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Playing with Envision Glasses
Vision accounts for most of our brain's electrical activity, but AI apps like Microsoft's SeeingAI have only partially solved the problem for blind people — you still have to point your phone at what you want to see, which is inconvenient and socially awkward.
Playing with Envision Glasses
We humans put a lot of effort into seeing. When our eyes are open, vision accounts for two thirds of the electrical activity in our brain; 40% of the nerve fibres that are connected into the brain relate to vision; and more of our neurons are dedicated to vision than the oth...
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Everybody be Coil. You... Be Coil
I've decided to monetize this website using Web Monetization and become a Coil member because I've had enough of intrusive online advertising, tracking, and having my personal information bought and sold across the web.
Everybody be Coil. You... Be Coil
Online advertising is, in my opinion, intrusive, invasive, and, in the case of accessibility, frequently destructive. Yet since it first emerged in 1994, online advertising has been one of the few ways content creators have had to be compensated for their efforts. Until now....
How screen readers navigate data tables
When a table is created using the appropriate HTML elements (or ARIA roles) screen readers can inform users about the characteristics of the table, and users have access to keyboard commands specifically for navigating tabular content.
For the purposes of this post I'm going...
The difference between aria-label and aria-labelledby
The aria-label and aria-labelledby attributes do the same thing but in different ways. Sometimes the two attributes are confused and this has unintended results. This post describes the differences between aria-label and aria-labelledby and how to choose the right one.
The a...
Amelia Bellamy-Royds' Vegetarian (or not) chilli
The 14th in a series of posts that bring together the two sides of my blog: food and technology. I’ve asked the great and the good from the web standards community to share their favourite recipes. This versatile recipe comes from Amelia Bellamy-Royds.
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Makes: 6-...
Pork rillettes
I've loved pork rillettes since my family used to holiday in France during the summers of my childhood. I have many happy memories of sitting around the kitchen table in the cottage owned by friends in Parcay-Meslay, spreading rillettes onto slices of baguette with a good sp...
The difference between keyboard and screen reader navigation
18/5000 한국어 번역
People often include screen reader users in the much larger group of keyboard-only users. Whilst this is correct (most screen reader users don't use a mouse), it also creates a false impression of the way screen reader users navigate content.
To help explain t...
Using the aria-roledescription attribute
The aria-roledescription attribute changes the way screen readers announce the role of an element. Intended to give authors a way to provide a localised and human-readable description for a role, it has the capacity to both enhance and seriously break accessibility for scree...
Accessible SVG flowcharts
The accessible SVG line graphs post explains how to use ARIA table semantics to make that form of data visualisation accessible to screen readers. This article uses the same ARIA based approach to make a screen reader accessible SVG flowchart.
The example comes from the W3C ...
Eric Meyer's Cinnamon chicken
The 13th in a series of posts that bring together the two sides of my blog: Food and technology. I’ve asked the great and the good from the web standards community to share their favourite recipes. This mouth-watering chicken dish is from Eric Meyer.
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Makes: Four...