Blog

Do we need WCAG 3 (now)?

Earlier this week, W3C/WAI announced that Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 is now at the last hurdle before becoming a standard. This is huge news because its precursor WCAG 2.1 is the basis of a lot of accessibility policy and laws. For example, the European …

WCAG 2.2 misses mark on defining visible focus

About two weeks ago, the WCAG WG released a new version of the Candidate Recommendation for WCAG 2.2. After it had been in the Editor’s Draft for quite some while, it changed the requirements for the Focus Appearance Success Criterion (SC). The SC was deemed to not be AA-worthy. …

We need accessibility action

The latest WebAIM Million has come out. For those who are unaware, it is an automated accessibility evaluation of the top 1 Million home pages. While it is an automated test which only finds a subset of accessibility barriers, its results can at least show us trends: Average …

Automated testing won’t solve web accessibility

Over the past few years, accessibility companies have started to develop tools that claim to find accessibility problems automatically. Often the idea is that “automated testing is not quite there yet, but in a few years there will be a revolution”. I don't believe that. Human …

New WCAG 2.2 features rated

It’s January 2023 and there is a new WCAG 2.2 Candidate Recommendation Draft (which apparently is a different type of document from the September Candidate Recommendation Snapshot). Here is a diff between these two versions for your convenience. Table of Contents About the …

2022

Year in review blog posts are very en vogue this year. Probably because people now have more time on their hand now that they are not constantly doomscrolling on Twitter. Good stuff We have settled in to the new apartment, and it is still great and everything we could wish for. …

Lamenting Twitter’s and WCAG’s potential

Twitter was and is (for now) an integral part of my web presence. Since March 2007 I have tweeted over 72 thousand times. That’s roughly 13 messages a day. I found community and friendship there. And the love of my life. Twitter was (is?) important to me. Seeing it change over …

Accessibility in the Fediverse (and Mastodon)

Many people think about moving or at least establishing a presence in the so-called Fediverse. The Fediverse is (and this is probably a very shortened and incorrect) a collection of distributed web applications that can talk to each other. The most well known software is …

On the Parallel podcast

Thanks to Shelly for inviting me to talk about all things WCAG 2.2 on the Parallel Podcast, Episode 75! It was a wonderful conversation, and we walked through all the individual changed and new success criteria. Note: RelayFM. Parallel’s podcast network, supports St. Jude …

On the Working Draft podcast

Thanks to Christian, Hans, and Vanessa for having me on the German language Working Draft Podcast Episode 540! We talked about all things accessibility, including the German WCAG 2.1 translation, that we at outline carried out with support from Tomas Caspers and Aktion Mensch. …

Welcome to the dark side

The previous incarnation of this website had a dark theme option, but when I did the redesign a year or so ago I did not get around to implementing it. I’m of course aware that a dark option is an important accessibility feature for many people, especially as I’m using dark …

Preferences (beta)

Select a Theme
Font Settings

Preferences are saved on your computer and never transmitted to the server.