A notion that I always hear and have heard for a long time is that meeting the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) feels like not doing enough for accessibility[^ Specimen 1, Specimen 2, Specimen 3, Specimen 4]. And that’s true from a certain view. The goal of WCAG is …

I really wished I could sit back and let the whole “AI” frenzy play out without speaking up or getting involved. Usually these types of hype cycles don’t affect me. I have never blogged about crypto or NFTs because it was far too obvious that they were a fad. The hype cycle …

It’s no secret: I like the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Not only do they give us the four base principles of accessibility (perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust), but they also have neat guidelines and checkpoints to test for. We call each checkpoint a …

Craig Abbott wrote about the term “best practice” today. Thanks to posting his thoughts on Mastodon, I had time to kick my brain into gear and think about the topic myself. The first thing I noticed when reading his piece is that how he experienced the term is different from how …

I frequently see the word “help” used in accessibility, and I don’t like it. This is certainly a personal gripe, but I want to share my thinking behind avoiding it. First, where there is “help”, there is “helplessness”. Using the word “help” in the accessibility context implies …

Auf der Seite barrieren-gutachten.de hat die wundervolle Casey Kreer Gutachten zum Stand der Barrierefreiheit in Deutschland erstmals übersichtlich aufgelistet. Die Übersicht enthält 188 Gutachten, von denen 187 zur Bewertung „nicht bestanden“ kommen. Nur ein Gutachten hat das …

The deadline of the European Accessibility Act (EAA) is near (June 28 is just 20 days away as I write this), and you just realized that your website or apps will not meet the requirements by then. Maybe you have just heard of it for the first time, or you might have tried to …

Steve Faulkner tagged me in this chain letter/interview style post, and I foolishly agreed in advance to respond. So here we are 😂 Why did you start blogging in the first place? When I started blogging two decades ago it was just to share thoughts and interesting posts. I had …

Last weekend, I launched WAI A Day, the daily random WAI resource fun and information. I added some things: A web page lists the URLs now together with the dates they have been picked for. This meant I had to give the page a history of all previously generated URLs. In the first …

When I worked for W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative, we often discussed ways to spread the good word of our resources better. One idea that I was always fond of was to showcase the deep library of resources with a social media feed that would promote random resources regularly. …

Normally, I reserve these more introspective texts for my newsletter, which I send out occasionally. But this time, I want to make sure I document this particular struggle on my website, too. This is a difficult text to write and as I start, I realize that I don’t know where …

In accessibility, “focusable” UI elements are represented by two separate yet equally important concepts: the elements who can be focused sequentially and those who can only receive focus programmatically. These are their stories. Dun-Dun While working for a client the other …

Just to preemptively state it: I appreciate what the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (AGWG) is trying to do with the “In Brief” sections in WCAG’s Understanding documents. My criticism is about the execution of the information. In addition, this is not a plea to change …

On Mastodon, Steve Faulkner shared a link to a GitHub discussion around the A, AA, and AAA levels of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines). In it, the question is asked what makes a Success Criterion (SC) A, AA, or AAA. Basically, the question is what criteria are used to …

Accessibility audits are the bread and butter of every accessibility consultancy. It’s an easy to package product that clients have learned to ask for and buy. They have expectations on the deliverables and the form of an audit. Audits are usually also thorough, following …

The Web Content Accessibility Guideline’s (WCAG) Success Criterion 1.4.11 Non-Text Contrast is one of the harder to understand requirements. Here’s a deep-dive into the details of it, including practical examples, concerning only its “User Interface Components” section. Because, …

In our tech-focused society, there is this ever present notion that “accessibility will be solved by some technology”. But it won’t. Making things accessible is a fundamentally human challenge that needs human solutions in human contexts. I wrote about automated testing before. …

In the last couple of weeks, I had some encounters that made me think about the state of ableism. Turns out that despite a lot of slow but meaningful progress, the world overall is still pretty much ableist. This is not news for anyone who is disabled, of course, and it …

Accessibility, especially on the web but also elsewhere, is a complicated combination of people with different roles working together. At any point during the creation of a web page, a blog post, its design, sourcing of images, or writing, issues can creep in. As accessibility …

I place the start of my career in accessibility to some time in 2008. Sure, I had done accessibility stuff before then, but I always saw me as a front-end developer with an interest in accessibility, not an outright person whose main focus was accessibility. I chose this …