Last time I reached out, we were just on the cusp of spring and now it’s basically autumn here in the Northern Hemisphere. Not that you would know, considering that it was scorching hot for many of the last few months, and it only now seems to cool down.

At least our new balcony solar panels are chucking along (280+kWh since mid-July!), just too bad that some of that energy needed to go into cooling.

(Climate change is real, and we are just starting to see the fallout of it.)

Of course, as always, 1000 thanks to the people who have taken out a membership, I really appreciate it, and it helps to justify putting time into standards discussions.

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Speaking of standards, as you probably gathered from the title of this email, stuff is happening!

👋 Eric

OZeWAI panel

On Thursday, October 15 at 9:00 Central European Time (in your timezone), I will join some esteemed colleagues in the OZeWAI panel series “Ask the Professional”. In addition to me, they have invited actual professional professionals: The wonderful Sarah Pulis (Intopia) and Patrick H. Lauke (Tetralogical) will join me getting grilled, I mean asked, about “WCAG Success Criteria and Conformance” by Gian Wild (AccessibilityOz).

Sign up to attend the FREE online panel

EN 301 549 webinar

The EN 301 549 is the European Norm that contains WCAG and adds additional requirements and which determines if you meet the requirements set forth in the European Accessibility Act (EAA).

In the webinar, I outlined what is in the EN beyond WCAG.

Find the Lunchtime: What EN 301 549 brings to the table recording on YouTube.

Two blog posts

• Screen readers are not testing tools – What it says in the title. Testing with screen readers is important, but they have not been built as testing tools and they often provide functionality that is not available to non-screen reader users.

• WCAG 3’s road to hell is paved with supplemental requirements – My relationship with WCAG 3 becomes more fractured the more I read about and of it. I think some of the ideas are great (and should have been in WCAG 2 for a long time), and others are not. What I’m not convinced on is to put a lot of optional material into the standard. Conditional material, I understand, but with supplemental requirements (which are optional and not required to conform), the experience has shown that it gets mostly ignored. When was the last time you have been asked about AAA criteria? And when did any of it actually get implemented?

  • W3C/WAI’s Director and my former colleague, Shawn Lawton Henry, has published a blog post titled “Crafting WCAG 3 for more accessible user experiences”, which explains the reasoning for adding these optional requirements (which feels like an oxymoron). I have to say I’m a bit lost in the ruler/rules image in the article because while policies and laws make the rules of what is legal, WCAG also makes the rules of what it means to meet WCAG. I both are disconnected, what does it mean to meet WCAG? Why does WCAG define conformance at all?
    
    And even if you say “if rulemakers/lawmakers want to extend accessibility, here is how to do it”, why put optional things into the same standard?

Standards updates

• A new version of WCAG 3’s Working Draft is out.

• The EN 301 549 (PDF) update is finalized and should be formally published by the end of the year. It’s version 4.1.1 now.

Parting words

Thanks again to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter, and a special thanks to all members. You know who you are, and you rock! Without you, my engagement in standards and elsewhere would not be possible.

👋 Eric

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Socials

My primary social media/Fediverse/Mastodon handle is @yatil@yatil.social, and you can also find me (increasingly reluctantly) on LinkedIn.

It starts to be spring here in Germany, going outside is much more enjoyable than in the winter, a winter, by the way, that felt incredibly long and sad.

I’m looking forward to being a bit more active during spring and see where that takes me.

Of course, as always 1000 thanks to the people who have taken out a membership, I really appreciate it, and it helps to justify putting time into standards discussions.

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In the last few months, I am trying to redefine what being an effective accessibility person means for me. There is so much focus on the product of “doing an audit” although that is rarely the right place for clients to start. I wrote about the infuriating inefficiency of accessibility audits 18 months ago.

👋 Eric

“AI” corner

My esteemed colleague Casey Kreer conducted research into different “AI” models and how they are able or not to generate accessible interfaces. The results are not good.

First, all models were severely error prone when not mentioning accessibility in the prompt. This reflects real-world guidance where accessibility often is not considered, too.

Mentioning accessibility halved the issues with some tools and slightly reduced the issues in others. Giving detailed accessibility descriptions, like how to implement forms properly with labels, for and IDs, did result in widely different results, sometimes better, sometimes worse than the lightly prompted results.

Note that Casey’s research is giving the “AI” models the benefit of the doubt on purpose. Of three attempts, only the two with the least errors (tested automatically through axe) counted.

What really surprised me was the comparison with the WebAIM million report. Even the best models produced worse results, and for most models they are not even close to matching what we have done manually. I wrote before about how the absolute numbers in the report are not as important, but that the trend line of improvements really matters more. With coding “AI”, it looks like the newer models are creating more complex solutions which are more error prone. If “AI” is more widely used, I expect to see a backslide in the WebAIM numbers, too.

(Note: WebAIM and axe run tests differently, but I think due to giving the benefit of the doubt, that it is a very useful comparison.)

Read the announcement of the research (in German).

Please support Casey if you can, her research is invaluable and she’s just a great person. Research like this would not be possible without Steady members that support it. Disclaimer: I support Casey’s work, too.

Support Casey on Steady

One blog post

• “WCAG is difficult to read, don’t read it” is a self-fulfilling prophecy – I did not blog much over the last months, but jumping off from Meeting WCAG is an achievement from last newsletter, I needed to follow up with the notion that reading and understanding the actual Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is important. There is a sea of “Easy WCAG” resources out there which can be too simplified or contain errors. While I understand that the text of the standard can be difficult and intimidating, the work to understand it pays off a lot.

EN 301 549 update & webinar

The EN 301 549 is the European Norm that contains WCAG and adds additional requirements and which determines if you meet the requirements set forth in the European Accessibility Act (EAA).

Currently, the norm is in the process of getting updated to what is called version 4.1.0. (The previous versions were, I kid you not, 1.1.2 in 2015, 2.1.2 in 2018, 3.2.1 in 2021.) The plan is to include WCAG 2.2 and change a few of the unclear rules. For example there has long been a debate about the EN requiring dark mode in websites, which seems to get addressed. (You cannot block someone from your site when they are using dark mode now. Of course it is not explained what a “block” is.)

I had a look into the new draft last week, and while it was planned that it would be published in July, this seems less certain now. It’s a substantial update, but some changes feel just unnecessary, including the complication with minimum font sizes that I outlined in my comment on the standard.

I think it’s a very opaque process, which is not helped by the fact that work is done in Word documents and hence there is no clear commit path.

• Current version of the EN (3.2.1) – PDF

• Draft of the next version (4.1.0) – PDF

• Changes – Word diff document

• Issue tracker for comments

Free webinar about the EN on, March 12: Lunchtime! What EN 301 549 brings to the table

Axess Lab asked me to present a lunchtime webinar about the EN 301 549 on March 12. In it, I’ll focus on the additional bits of guidance beyond WCAG that the EN brings.

The webinar happens at 12:30, which is 7:30am on the US East Coast, 20:30 in Tokyo, and 22:30 in Sydney.

Sign up for free by following the instructions on the Axess Lab website.

Parting words

Thanks again to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter, and a special thanks to all members. You know who you are, and you rock! Without you, my engagement in standards and elsewhere would not be possible.

👋 Eric

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Socials

My primary social media/Fediverse/Mastodon handle is @yatil@yatil.social, and you can also find me (increasingly reluctantly) on LinkedIn.

Thanks for subscribing to my newsletter, and sorry that this is only the second edition this year. I really need to get to writing them more often, because I enjoy doing them.

2025 has been stressful in multiple ways. Multiple attacks on accessibility rights in many countries show how far we still have to go and also how much of an uphill battle the work we do is. Nothing is easy, nothing is simple.

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Web accessibility has become even more complicated, but not because of the subject. The best practices have not changed in the last decade, and crafting accessible sites becomes even easier with new concepts and better tools for inspecting.

But making accessibility a legal requirement has sucked the joy out of doing it for me almost completely. I have clients I've worked with for years that have made real, sustainable changes to address gaps in their testing, knowledge, and practice. Many of the companies falling under the European Accessibility Act (EAA) have been either oblivious (“we won’t be tested anyway”) or trying to pretend (“what are the easiest ways to look compliant?”).

Of course, with all bureaucratic things, the slowness of implementation does not help. Companies had 5 years to prepare, but so had political players and regulators. That Germany only managed to have a market surveillance operation starting at the end of September, a full 3 months after the EAA came into effect here, says a lot. But other market surveillance agencies struggle with the law because they claim they can only act once EN 301 549 is a proper harmonized standard.

Some companies lie in wait to see if there will be fines at all and how strict the agencies will be. I think it’s a terrible approach, like waiting to get a speeding ticket instead of looking at the sign telling you what the limit is.

👋 Eric

“AI” corner

Let’s break out the musings about “AI” to a separate section. As you might know, I’m not a fan. Especially the way generative “AI” is shoved into our faces and workflows is gross, usually providing no additional value.

I don’t need folder summaries on Google Drive or shallow automated responses on social media. And I find it especially irritating when there is no opt-out. Or when using unrelated features requires you to opt-in to it.

“But accessibility!” I hear this, and I do understand that sometimes LLMs or “AI” tools can be a solution to an accessibility barrier. Automated image descriptions can make inaccessible images more accessible. There is absolutely no problem with individuals using these Band-Aids. That’s just what a lot of assistive tech is. Band-Aids to paper over barriers that should not exist in the first place.

What I’m against is that these Band-Aids become standard approaches to address accessibility in the first place. “AI”-described images might be better than nothing in a pinch when encountering inaccessible material, but they are inappropriate when making a website accessible.

At the beginning of the year, a large accessibility company promised “100% automated accessibility” by the end of 2025 (or in the next 10 years?) and unsurprisingly, that was all marketing hot air. I think that’s what irritates me the most, the purported inevitability of “AI” tools, which siphons money, innovation, and talent from other places like accessibility. And all that for high environmental costs.

Five blog posts

• Avoiding the word “help” – Wherein I describe why I try to avoid the word “help” when writing about the accessibility needs and rights of disabled people.

• About “best practices” – I felt the need to clarify what I think best practices are, and how the term seems to have taken on a different meaning.

• WCAG’s Longevity – There is a long discussion on the WCAG GitHub about the requirements for videos where there are no pauses to insert audio description. Some argue that no audio description in this case meets the requirements for providing an audio description, so WCAG 1.2.3 and 1.2.5 are both satisfied. I’m not sure if I agree with this. However, the requirement comes from a time when videos were much more difficult to edit. These days, providing a separate audio with audio description and pausing a video player can be done in a few lines of JavaScript. In the article I argue that WCAG has endured so long because it is technology independent. But every so often, the SCs need to go with the times. (Can we have WCAG 2.3 with some of these clarifications, please? I don’t want to wait until the 30s to get it resolved in WCAG 3.)

• “AI is inevitable” is bullshit – Pardon my French, but I don’t believe that this hype is inevitable. Will some of those technologies be used in the future in some way? Sure. But it will be much less than what companies want you to believe.

• Meeting WCAG is an achievement – I came across a lot of “WCAG is not everything” and “you have to do much more” posts on social media. And while this is true in a way, most websites are far from meeting WCAG, and getting there is a good step that should be celebrated, not looked down on. And especially practitioners should not beat themselves up because a client is not following their recommendations. It’s extremely difficult to change these companies.

The future of this newsletter

I promise irregular newsletters, but two newsletters per year are way too few. But they are difficult for me to write and take a lot of time and energy. One of my goals for next year is to better collect information and create the newsletter from that, instead of looking back over months and months of work and trying to piece together what should go into the newsletter.

I have a few ideas for content creation and tools that I want to finalize, create, and share. Some of that might be member exclusive for a very short time.

And I would love to do an online member meetup or something in 2026.

Parting words

Thanks again to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter, and a special thanks to all members. You know who you are, and you rock! Without you, my engagement in standards and elsewhere would not be possible.

I hope you all had and have a great, relaxing, holiday season and a happy new year.

👋 Eric

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Socials

My primary social media/Fediverse/Mastodon handle is @yatil@yatil.social, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.

How has 2025 been to you so far? It treated me relatively well, but with all the upheaval around the world, I did not get to write this newsletter as often as I wanted. Because doing it once every 6 months is not the cadence I envisioned.

Anyway. After new old politicians, elections, more new politicians in new places, almost no rain in the first three months of the year, ongoing and new wars, I don’t really feel that I have much of substance to say.

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My year has been stressful, as predicted in the last newsletter, but in different ways than I would have thought. And it’s a little worrying.

Instead of working hard and furiously to fix accessibility bugs, many conversations were about laws and how the EAA would affect companies, and how some provisions of the EN 301 549 would need to be interpreted.

It showed me two things: First, that people will try to skirt accessibility, even if it is (becoming) a law. I had many very honest conversations with clients, telling them that their efforts will not be enough. And they have not been. I would rather not blame them, as the reason is often just a culture of sidelining disabled people. (I’ve written about the need to be anti-ableist in 2024.)

The second thing is how unprepared some countries are for this law. Take my country, Germany. While Sweden has a clear “market surveillance agency” (the people who actually test and fine for accessibility), which has even produced a web application where companies can submit their accessibility violations, Germany doesn’t.

Commerce and regulation of it is a state responsibility, so every state would need to have an agency. That is, of course, expensive and unnecessary. So at the beginning of the year, the German states agreed to combine their agencies into one. This agency is yet to be formed, despite the EAA being in effect.

Some states just did not manage in time to make the parliamentary decisions necessary to defer to this agency. There, it won’t happen until after the summer break. I don’t know what the legal implications are at this point. I am not a lawyer, but it objectively shows how this country’s ableist history can still manifest.

We will eventually get our act together, but it soured the EAA deadline date for me. Many celebrated it, and it’s their good right. But for me, it underlined even more what a slow process it will be to get all these agencies up to speed and then get to an understanding on how they interpret the flexible and unclear requirements of the EN.

This work has just begun, and it will be a wild ride. It will often feel as if we are only making the tiniest progress and yet, time and time again, we have to see that accessibility happens by a thousand curb cuts.

👋 Eric

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🖤🤍

Six blog posts

I have published six blog posts since the last newsletter:

• Values — When a large accessibility company announced to pivot to “AI”, I wrote about my values, and how those values differ from those of companies. It was an article like I would usually write it in this newsletter. So if you like my short essay above, read this article, too. The company has meanwhile pivoted another few times. (Insert the famous “Pivot!!” animated GIF from friends here, if you like.)

• WAI A Day & WAI A Day: A week — To highlight some Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) resources, I created the WAI A Day bot that posts a random WAI resource once a day to Mastodon. It’s also reluctantly available on Bluesky.

• Tag, you’re it — A short blog post about blogging.

• So, you screwed up your EAA compliance. What now? — The title says it all: Many companies will have not met the compliance targets, and it is now important to keep a level head and guide them through the process.

• Deutschland: Berichte belegen blamable Bilanz bei digitaler Barrierefreiheit — When Casey Kreer collected accessibility audits for public companies, I knew I had to write one of my rare articles in German. (Casey is on Steady, doing essential activistic/journalistic accessibility work here in Germany. Support her, if you can.)

Accessibility Statements

I started a list of accessibility statements, for us to compare and contrast. You are welcome to contribute by opening an issue or sending in Pull Requests. Currently, it’s Germany/Swedish dominated, but I would love to see how companies in other countries approach the statements.

Note that I use Codeberg instead of GitHub to not rely on a US company for this EU-centric project, and also I have no need of a “Copilot”.

W3C Content Accessibility Guidelines 3 (WCAG 3)

WCAG 3 hasn’t had an update since December, so no new concrete updates. As a re-charter is due (this is basically where the Working Group [WG] gives itself a roadmap for publishing a new standard) a few different options for WCAG 3 publication are discussed. Unfortunately, all discussions seem to lead into the first half of next decade for a first published variant, almost a decade after the last version of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.

I am not convinced that’s a suitable approach, and I commented in the discussion thread above. We should be making progress faster, incrementally, in my opinion. Unfortunately, it looks like the WG seems to be steadfast in their attempt to make one big change.

Parting Words

Thanks again to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter and a special thanks to all ten members, you know who you are, and you rock! Without you, my engagement in standards and elsewhere would not be possible.

Become a member

👋 Eric

Socials

My primary social media/Fediverse/Mastodon handle is @yatil@yatil.social, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.

The last four months have been oddly stressful, mostly because my planning did not include enough slack to work through speed bumps in a relaxed way. I hope to improve that next year.

I have to say that the surge of panicked European Accessibility Act (EAA) calls has not happened yet. I think this has two reasons:

First, many teams think they can do accessibility in-house and that it won’t be that bad. Clients come to me all the time and say, “we think we did a pretty good job with accessibility” while they did not incorporate testing or learning in their processes. This often leads to implementations where developers think they put the right ARIA attributes on stuff, but where there is no understanding beyond that. It’s all blindfolded people touching parts of an elephant without seeing the whole picture.

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Second, many think the efforts they need to do are so massive that they try to minimize the scope: Does this part of the website counts as e-commerce? (It probably does.) Can’t we just declare all product images as decorative? (No.) Do we really need to implement dark mode? (Depending on your regulator, maybe to yes.)

This minimizing does not help. It will create a panic and some companies will just run into trouble with regulators. Of course, none of these are really our problems as accessibility people. Clients come to us when they are ready. That said, it’s so much more interesting and fulfilling when clients want to do accessibility correctly, or at least to the best of their abilities.

Let’s make sure that we are kind to each other and to clients. The next months will be stressful again, and I don’t think we’ll get a breather until the end of 2025. We need to take care of ourselves and take breaks before we burn out. Yes, ensuring the right to access is important, and we must do the work, but also that we stay healthy, mentally and physically, to do it.

PS: If you are a freelancer, take a look at the inflation rate since you raised your prices from last time and adjust them accordingly. And for long-term contracts, put automatic adjustments in the contract every year.

Onwards to a good 2025!

👋 Eric

Two blog posts

I have published three blog posts since the last newsletter:

• My grief with “In Brief” – WCAG’s Understanding Documents are getting “In Brief” sections which try to explain what is then explained on the same page. I don’t like them much, and I detail in this blog post why.

• Two different kinds of “focusable” UI elements – We use the word “focusable” for at least two different things, here I try to clarify what the common uses are and how to differentiate them.

Some other projects and things I did

• I worked on some ways to efficiently have custom information on how to test for certain Success Criteria in CAAT (Full disclaimer: Mindscreen GmbH is a “Team Membership” supporter). My current version consists of some very basic HTML testing instructions.

• An Axess Lab colleague asked me about feedback on a video, so I created a video annotation page – again in very simple HTML – that allowed to jump to the annotated page. The core JavaScript is only 30 lines long, thanks to all the built-in functionality of the web platform. Controlling video is super easy. I have not gotten around to creating a good example, so I cannot share it yet.

• For one of the courses I teach on behalf of Axess Lab, I created a transcript library that takes the raw HTML output from MacWhisper and wraps an HTML around it that includes the language tag and navigation. It also creates an overview page that lets you navigate to individual transcripts. Nothing to share for now, but it was a fun little PHP project.

• When a client asked me about how they could ensure they got most bang for their buck, I created three little JavaScripts to make three things easy for JS developers:

  • Skip Links – Programmatically adding skip links to the page.

  • Page Title – Use a mutation observer to always use the content of an element and set that as the title of the page.

  • Visible Focus – A way to ensure that focus is always visible.

  Because these scripts are not super fine-grained, I called them sledgehammer-a11y.

• In addition, I helped Polypane (Affiliate Link) developer Kilian by requesting some features and help to find some bugs/inconsistencies (I’m good at that!) which he squashed (He’s excellent at that!), and we were both glad whenever he noticed that the underlying Chrome engine does something weird. Anyway, if you have not had a chance to look at Polypane in the last year, there has been a lot of progress and I could not imagine testing without it.

W3C Content Accessibility Guidelines 3 (WCAG 3)

A new version of the WCAG 3 draft has been published, and it looks like the Working Group is trending into an interesting direction. I share some of the concerns that Deque formulated in their response to the Call for Consensus (CfC). The CfC is basically the group confirming that they have consensus for a specific action – in this case, publishing an update to the draft.

Creating a sequel to arguably one of the most successful W3C standards is a daunting task. It’s probably as difficult to follow up as the original Star Wars trilogy was, and the prequels had far too much bureaucracy in it. I hope WCAG 3 won’t share that fate.

The blog post WCAG 3 December 2024 Update & Thoughts from the Co-Chairs has a great summary of the thinking behind the update, I recommend reading it.

It also has this banger of a quote in it:

“Do not use this draft content as a standard or revise your accessibility program and goals to meet the contents written in this draft. We are not there yet!  If anyone tells you otherwise, they are uninformed or lying.”

Links, links, and more links

If you follow me on Mastodon, you might have noticed that I share links in a separate account to my main account. You can follow @links@yatil.social to get informed about new shares. Recently, I added that my highlights in the articles also get shared as replies to the shared link. Neat!

I hope to integrate my links as seamlessly into my website as Hidde does, but I’m just not there yet. That said, the whole archive is on the Raindop.io website, which I use to manage my bookmarks.

Parting Words

Thanks again to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter and a special thanks to all nine members, you know who you are, and you rock!

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Let’s make the best of 2025 that we can.

👋 Eric

Socials

My primary social media/Fediverse/Mastodon handle is @yatil@yatil.social, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.

What many of us will do until next summer is getting projects ready for the European Accessibility Act deadline of June 28, 2025. That date seemed like a long way out when we first heard about it, and now we’re exactly 10 months out.

Here’s the friendly reminder that there is no transitional period for services like websites and shops beyond that date. We are currently in the transitional period.

I know this is now a stressful time, and it will get only more stressful as clients will notice that they need to be compliant and try to rush it. I hope we as an industry don’t get overwhelmed by the demand. Accessibility online is slow and steady and methodical.

That said, if other regulations like this have been any indication, initially, there will be more carrots than sticks.

Three new(-ish) blog posts

I have published three blog posts since the last newsletter:

• In detail: 1.4.11 Non-Text Contrast (User Interface Components) – There are plenty of misunderstandings about one of WCAG’s most complicated success criteria and my goal was to clear some of them up, especially what counts as UI component. I put great effort into the examples and am very proud of this one!

• The infuriating inefficiency of accessibility audits – In this article, I lament the fact that most audits come too late or too early in a product’s life cycle. But they almost always happen to products that have not been built with accessibility in mind. This makes auditing frustrating and time-consuming. Let’s change that!

• WCAG’s A and AA distinction is mostly academic – A discussion about what different WCAG levels actually mean to individual Success Criteria led me to write this article. In practice, AA is usually considered the baseline conformance level that is acceptable. Do we need the A and AA distinction? Spoiler: I think we don’t.

If past behavior is any indication, writing this newsletter often sparks new thoughts and blog post. And if you would rather not wait 8 weeks until I get around to writing a newsletter about them, I generally cross post them on LinkedIn and Mastodon, and the blog has an RSS Feed.

I mainly try to only post longer newsletters like this. Would it be useful to send emails for individual blog posts, even if I have no additional thoughts? Please let me know if you would like to be informed for every blog post in a short newsletter.

Links, links, and more links

If you follow me on Mastodon, you might have noticed that I share links in a separate account to my main account. You can follow @links@yatil.social to get informed about new shares. Recently, I added that my highlights in the articles also get shared as replies to the shared link. Neat!

I hope to integrate my links as seamlessly into my website as Hidde does, but I’m just not there yet. That said, the whole archive is on the Raindop.io website, which I use to manage my bookmarks.

Parting Words

Thanks again to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter and a very special thanks to all nine members, you know who you are, and you rock!

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I hope you all can enjoy the last days of summer or, if you’re in the Southern Hemisphere, overcome the final days of winter without too much dread. I apologize for the Northern Hemisphere-centered introduction, EAA is something that’s just very much on my mind, so anchoring the seasons here made sense to me.

👋 Eric

Socials

My primary social media/Fediverse/Mastodon handle is @yatil@yatil.social, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.

After a good run of monthly newsletters, this one restores the normalcy of irregular publishing. And the reason is that I have not many big picture thoughts at the moment. There’s a lot going on with my clients at Axess Lab (which turned 10 just a few weeks ago 🥳), so the bandwidth for blog posts and these newsletters has been limited.

I have been working on making changes to yatil.net, but the progress has been slow. I’ve taken a few days off to recharge the batteries and sit by lakes and such things.

Thanks, as always, to the members that support this newsletter, the blog, and the YouTube channel with their hard-earned cash. There are now eight of you.

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WCAG is 25 years old now! 🥳

On May 5, 1999, WCAG 1.0 was released. It kick-started accessibility on the web and laid the foundation for WCAG 2. Congrats to everyone involved in those years!

While the web should always be more accessible, I doubt that we would have reached the level of access without those guidelines and the halo effect they had on other web standards and best practices. We also wouldn’t have as unified of a legislation without them.

Three new(-ish) blog posts

I have published three blog posts since the last newsletter:

• Access by a thousand curb cuts — Some people claim that “accessibility did not work out” and we need different approaches. While I think that there is a grain of truth in that, it’s also a great simplification. Accessibility doesn’t just happen overnight. (March 9, 2024)

• Be anti-ableist — Where I argue that being not ableist is not enough, as that can reinforce the current conditions. To make accessibility successful, we must counteract ableism whenever we can. (April 5, 2024)

• “AI” won’t solve accessibility — As more and more applications put “AI” into their applications, the topic of “when will AI be good enough so I don’t have to care about (some aspects of) accessibility” comes up with clients and in random discussions. And the reality is probably never. Some “transformative AI” (most “AI” are transformer models) can be super useful. MacWhisper works great for transcripts of my meetings and when I do off the cuff videos. They are good enough for ephemeral content, but if I published a proper YouTube video, I would certainly double and triple check the output. (April 5, 2024)

If past behavior is any indication, writing this newsletter often sparks new thoughts and blog post. And if you would rather not wait 8 weeks until I get around to writing a newsletter about them, I generally cross post them on LinkedIn and Mastodon, and the blog has an RSS Feed.

Parting Words

Thanks again to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter and to all members, you rock!

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I hope y’all have a great May, including an effective Global Accessibility Action Day. Take care.

👋 Eric

Socials

My primary social media/Fediverse/Mastodon handle is @yatil@yatil.social, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.

It looks like the cold and uncomfortable months are over here in the Northern Hemisphere. I’m excited about more hiking and getting around in the coming weeks.

Accessibility-wise, it felt like there was still a lot going on this month, and I assume that we are up for a very, very exhausting 2024. As a recap from the last newsletter, Level Access bought an overlay company and there almost had been a conference panel that platformed overlays in the name of IAAP which turned out to be unsanctioned and later cancelled.

A short time after the last newsletter, we learned that Mike Paciello joined another overlay vendor. And while I cannot speculate about the personal motivation of individuals joining companies or publishing articles, it really feels like many are just searching for a quick way to profit from the “AI” hype around accessibility.

I blogged about being disappointed with many parts of the community giving up or changing their principles quickly in a blog post that I called It’s the hope that kills you (in a reference to Ted Lasso, of course). I wrote about hoping that my work had a higher impact, but also the realization that there is only so much you can do. Even if you are the most hard-working, extending yourself over the limits, burning out accessibility person, you won’t be perfect.

The good thing: You do not need to be perfect or create perfect results.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give your best with the resources you have. But be aware that there are limits to what you can do and the impact possible. One of the reasons is that accessibility is almost infinite, there’s always something that somehow could be done better. It’s inherent to the work in this field.

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We need to make sure that we distribute the work on more shoulders to give everyone a well-earned rest from time to time. And of course, tool help.

My accessibility testing has transformed recently by using a few new tools recently, and I really love that. (I plan to detail some things in the coming weeks on the blog and in the coming months in the newsletter.) New stuff is always great. I use a grammar and typo checking tool to write this newsletter, and I transcribe client calls and some trainings with a local LLM. That those calls were often only available as an audio/video recording irked me for a long time. I think for these use cases, LLMs can be very useful.

BTW: Thanks to everyone who had reached out to me after the blog post, it was really heartwarming.

A little teaser

I’ve been thinking for a long time of writing some longer form content. But, let’s face it: That’s not me.

And there are already lots of good books around! (That reminds me that I should port my book listing from my microblog to the real website soon.)

What I have seen cropping up a lot in the last few months is misinterpretations and misunderstandings of WCAG, and I think I can make a little difference there. I have a very specific resource I want to create, which hopefully helps with it.

One example: I regularly see people being confused by “decorative image”, a phrase that did exist before, but we put it into the WAI tutorials in 2017-ish. There, we used it as a nicer way to describe the WCAG concept of “pure decoration”. And the last note on the page clarifies that any image that adds more than “improve the look of the page” is informative. Nobody thought that the change of wording here would introduce a problem. (W3C resources are usually very thoroughly checked, and I assure you, we had so many revisions of these tutorials.)

But what happened is that instead of asking “Is this image or graphic pure decoration?” practitioners started asking “Is this image or graphic decorative?”

And I think you can understand how many more images/graphics fall under “decorative” than fall under “pure decoration”.

Anyway… The goal of the resource is to help with the nuance and why WCAG is written as it is. Understanding these nuances not only makes it easier to make pass/fail decisions in audits but also gives a better starting point for best practices.

I’ll have to plan this a bit more, I need to modify the website, and I consider rolling individual articles out for Member supporters first or as in-work preview. But that depends on how well this all integrates with my publishing workflow. (As always, I consider my content a donation to the community, so it will be freely available.)

Let me know what you think. 📧 If you have any ideas, or questions about WCAG. This is a resource for you all, after all.

Parting Words

This newsletter has been going on for far too long. Maybe I should blog more!

Thanks again to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter, you rock! Thanks also to the members who directly support my activities financially.

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I hope y’all have a good and uneventful March. Take care.

👋 Eric

Socials

My primary social media/Fediverse/Mastodon handle is still @yatil@yatil.social, and you can also find me on LinkedIn (where I wear a tie (Narrator: Eric has never worn a tie.)) and Bluesky (why am I there?).

The first month of this year, that is 2024 for those who are counting, went by really, really fast for me. It felt like accessibility is going to change a lot over this year.

It was all kicked off by Level Access’ December 31st announcement to buy overlay company UserWay for almost 100 Million Dollars. I’m still baffled why an established company would do something so damaging to their reputation. Learning that Level Access is backed by private equity firms explains some of it.

Do I think this is the start of overlay companies getting bought and integrated into real accessibility companies? I don’t know. But I can certainly see how this move legitimizes overlays despite their general ineffectiveness. Selling tools is super profitable compared to services.

And of course, Level Access had the uproar blow over and at some point just stopped interacting or responding to critical voices. We have seen this in other situations. I don’t think we have the structures to keep the discussion on that going, especially as we are all so busy.

I wrote down my thoughts on the whole debacle shortly after it happened: Level Access crosses the line; buys accessibility overlay company

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At least good news on the activity front towards overlay platforming. I noticed that a well-known conference in Austria planned to platform overlay vendors and posted about it on LinkedIn. It was framed as an IAAP panel, but apparently a volunteer organized the session and wasn’t authorized to do it, which leads to the session being cancelled. Lainey Feingold has a great write-up on why this needed to be tackled.

What else?

I wrote some blog posts since the last newsletter:

• WCAG 2: Guidelines and Guardrails – About the two standards in WCAG 2.

• 2023 – My year in review article.

• Level Access crosses the line; buys accessibility overlay company – The aforementioned article.

• The Year of Focus on Focus – Where I publish my yearly theme… and to be fair, that hasn’t gone too well yet. Such a busy January!

It looks like I tend to always write a blog post very shortly after sending out newsletters. I guess my writing brain gets activated by the practice of writing. Interesting observation.

WCAG Updates

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group has gotten consensus to continue with a complete WCAG 3 revamp instead of a WCAG 2 evolution. This is not surprising, I think most people steering the effort are tired of the way WCAG 2 is structured, and they yearn for something new. I get that.

It will probably take until the end of the decade until we have published a full version of W3C Accessibility Guidelines 3. However, the Working Group has also agreed to a modular approach. If that is done well, we might see the first finished modules by 2028 or so. I hope we will be able to add them into WCAG 2 without too much fuss.

Parting Words

These are weird and unprecedented times, not only in the accessibility industry. I am glad to see millions of Germans taking to the streets to stand up to fascist people and parties that have befallen my country yet again. This makes me hopeful that we won’t tolerate those who are intolerant.

Thanks again to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter, you rock! Thanks also to the members who directly support my activities financially.

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I hope February is a little less stressful, but somehow I doubt it. Take care.

👋 Eric

Socials

My primary social media/Fediverse/Mastodon handle is still @yatil@yatil.social, and you can also find me on LinkedIn (where I make a fuss about overlay panels) and Bluesky (where nothing happens).

(Yes, this is all quite complicated!)

One of the greatest obstacles is probably the sheer number of well-trained accessibility professionals. We should have ten times as many people working on this as there are currently, but training people up for the task is difficult. Not because we don’t have clever people starting out with accessibility, but because the web is so complex and free flowing. You really need to understand the medium and the technology and design principles well to make good decisions for testing.

And all that happens at a time when code quality (and web designs, to be honest) is all over the place. It’s very challenging to learn this from a book, six to twelve months of practical experience is the absolute minimum time to get acquainted with the in’s and out’s of web technology and accessibility.

I’m not sure what we can do about it, the awareness of accessibility as a requirement seems to rise slowly, but we need programs that thoroughly teach accessibility in its practicality and complexity.

Blog Posts

I wrote four blog posts since the last newsletter:

• Use the accessibility shortcuts on iOS to speed up your testing workflow and Inspecting websites and web views on iOS devices are write-ups about testing websites and apps on iOS. This little series is missing an article using the Xcode accessibility inspector for more thorough inspection. It’s on my todo list.

• Exclusive accordions exclude is an article where I describe my dissatisfaction with the introduction of native “exclusive accordions” (where only one panel can be open at any given time) without any recourse for people who need or want to see multiple panels at the same time. It’s just not good enough to ship this feature without addressing cognitive accessibility needs.

• It depends, indeed. describes my thought about the need to be vague and respond to the needs and practicalities around web accessibility. There are always many ways to remove a barrier, what is practical, feasible, and efficient is different from project to project.

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WCAG Updates

The new Accessibility Guidelines Working Group charter is approved and WCAG 2 is now in maintenance mode at least until October 2025. WCAG 3 is now full steam ahead, in the next 2 years, the goals are:

• Know what will and will not be part of WCAG 3,

• have a timeline for delivering WCAG 3, and

• have decided how WCAG 3 will be delivered (all at once, in phases, or as modules.)

This will be a very transitional period for WCAG where technology is about to change a lot. The charter still says WCAG 3 will be delivered in Q2/2026, but going from knowing the three things above to a full standard in 8 months feels ambitious. I guess let’s check back in two years to see how it’s going!

The WCAG 2 taskforce which makes changes to Understanding and Techniques seems off to a good starts in the meantime, with several changes. I personally would rather see the time and effort put into fixing normative language, but that’s a ship that has sailed.

Parting words

Thanks to everyone who supports this independent writing, and exploring, and fixing WCAG. Special thanks to everyone who has signed up to support me through membership, too.

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I wish you a happy holiday time and/or a good rest to go into the new year refreshed. I know I need it.

Take care.

👋 Eric

Socials

My primary social media/Fediverse/Mastodon handle is still @yatil@yatil.social, and you can also find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

I also try to formulate more medium long posts on my microblog, which is published at micro.yatil.net and can be followed on the Fediverse at @yatil@micro.yatil.net.

(Yes, this is all quite complicated!)

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There is a lot going on in the world at the moment, so my brain is not really in the moot to write long accessibility blog posts. Indeed, most days are a slog to get through.

As accessibility professionals, working is sometimes especially hard on the mind. Despite our best efforts, the work as a tester especially can be supremely frustrating. Consulting on big projects can be stress inducing.

That’s because our work is incredibly important, but if our work has any, a little or a lot of impact is often not in our hands. Sometimes you guide, test, and train for weeks, months, years, and a business change in the company wipes away all the progress. And there is nothing you can do.

I feel this often, and with world events, there is even less space to work through the bad thoughts. One of the ways to work through these anxieties, for me, is to do something that is fun. For me, that is building LEGO sets while churning through episodes of the Total Party Kill actual play D&D podcast. Or going outside. Or playing Super Mario Bros. Wonder. (It’s superb!)

It’s fundamentally necessary that we can switch our brains off from accessibility work (he says, typing this newsletter on a Saturday).

I’ve recently republished a Twitter thread on protecting yourself and accepting that real-world accessibility is messy. And takes time and patience. It’s a truth that we have to acknowledge. Sometimes good enough is good enough. Sometimes there are still rough edges left after our work is done.

That’s not a failure on our part. It’s the way accessibility is structured at this point.

Shell Little created a whole presentation on “The Accessibility to Burnout pipeline”, where she quotes from the thread above.

(I have not seen it – mostly because I don’t feel like being reminded of my burnout, but also because Deque’s axe-con page has forgotten my account again, and the registration page seems to not submit for me.)

Putting the fun in accessibility

I remember the early 2000s to mid 2010s where the accessibility industry was a loose federation of people who really, really cared. Much of the work was done in free time or thanks to employers who saw the value. And that aspect has not changed at all among people who deeply care.

• Testing Accessibility from Marcy Sutton is insightful and beautifully illustrated.

• Practical Accessibility by Sara Soueidan has 15 hours of carefully manicured sessions over more than 35 videos that get you started with accessibility.

• Adrian Roselli is tirelessly publishing blog posts that push accessibility forward.

• Heydon Pickering’s Webbed Briefs videos are amazing artifacts of packaging accessibility content in weird and fun ways. The Accessibility Overlays one is special.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The unfortunate reality is also that many who start out do not see this side of accessibility at all. For them, we are relentless bookkeepers that want to trash their work.

And yes, sometimes we are. And sometimes, the best effort we can recommend is a rewrite or a redesign. I know for me that’s always the last resolution. I try to salvage as much existing work as possible, because time invested in rebuilding is not invested in fixing other stuff.

But it’s important to remind ourselves of the great, fun resources out there.

WCAG 2.2: What’s next?

A month has now passed since WCAG 2.2 has been released as a standard, and the impact has been limited so far. I try to look at the new SCs when working on projects, but there has not been obvious issues with any of them. And I’m happy for others to find the corner cases of SCs these days.

• There are many open issues in the WCAG repository that address small editorial issues in WCAG and the supporting documents. I want to highlight that there seem to be some old versions of Understanding documents floating about on the W3C server. Just double-check that you see the latest information when surfing the resources.

• A couple of the issues I submitted are still open, too.

• W3C did not manage to update the Quick Reference in time for the publication of WCAG 2.2. I have contributed an update to the repository (which seems to be published now) and also just today submitted a pull request for tags to new success criteria.

  • Find a preview of the changes on my GitHub.

• I’m thinking of overhauling even more of the QuickRef – it’s very outdated and my vision today does not really mesh with the vision W3C/WAI and the Working Group have for this resource. (Let me know if you have any ideas, too!)

With the next Accessibility Guidelines Working Group charter, which should come into effect on October 31st (spooky, isn’t it!) the WCAG 2 chapter at W3C is closed, apart from maintenance work. As I have written about extensively, I don’t think this is a good decision. WCAG 2 needs a strong group that quickly acts on issues and clarification, and that can make normative decisions.

The Down-Under-Accessibility-Friends from Intopia have published short animated videos about the new success criteria on their YouTube page.

Parting words

Thanks to everyone who supports this independent writing, and exploring, and fixing WCAG. Special thanks to everyone who has signed up to support me through membership, too.

👋 Eric

Socials

I’m now also findable on Bluesky, with the handle @yatil.net. I’m not active there, but my blog posts and some microblog posts might get syndicated over there.

My primary social media/Fediverse/Mastodon handle is still @yatil@yatil.social, and you can also find me on LinkedIn.

I also try to formulate more medium long posts on my microblog, which is published at micro.yatil.net and can be followed on the Fediverse at @yatil@micro.yatil.net.

(Yes, this is all quite complicated!)

If you follow me on Mastodon or LinkedIn, you might have noticed that my posts are now often about the professionalization and opportunity in the “accessibility industry”.

From my (heatedly discussed) mild wonder about the efficiency of accessibility certificates to my personal discussion to not join IAAP events until there is a clear commitment to expel overlay vendors; to the thought that most accessibility opportunities are available for seniors, but there is not enough training for junior people to even get these opportunities.

I want accessibility to be better and stronger. I think it’s very well reflected by my blog posts this year, too:

• New WCAG 2.2 features rated (28 January)

• Automated testing won’t solve web accessibility (11 February)

• We need accessibility action (1 April)

• WCAG 2.2 misses mark on defining visible focus (2 June)

• Do we need WCAG 3 (now)? (28 July)

• Accessibility is not inclusive design or disability rights. It’s a part of it. (16 August)

• Misconceptions can kill accessibility momentum (24 September)

Seven blog posts in 9 months is pretty good for me, I’m really happy, and it would not be possible without the support of you subscribers, especially the ones who have signed up for a paid membership.

I hope to condense my thoughts about education and apprenticeships into a blog post soon, too. It looks like a lot of people see accessibility in academics, where it certainly needs to be engrained into various computer science courses. TeachAccess is tirelessly working on that. The question is if the job of a dedicated accessibility tester is not better suited for a practical, hands-on training instead.

Waiting for WCAG 2.2 no more!

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 was finally published as a Recommendation, which is the W3C term for “web standard”. As much as I understand it, internationalization concerns over parts of WCAG 2.2 that have been in effect since WCAG 2.0 caused the final delay. In the meantime, the Working Group updated WCAG 2.1 with text that designates Success Criterion 4.1.1 Parsing as passed when HTML and XML is used. This is a sensible update, considering that the success criterion is now also removed from WCAG 2.2. The reason for the removal is the frequent misunderstandings what and how should be tested. Also, the low impact of issues in the source code after HTML5 parsers apply their fixes. I do expect the same note to be added to WCAG 2.0, too.

For more on how to categorize common issues that we would have assigned to SC 4.1.1, see Adrian Roselli’s “The 411 on 4.1.1”.

Thanks to all involved in WCAG 2.2 for the work and the dedication to make this version of WCAG reality.

Molly Holzschlag (1963–2023)

I think Molly’s impact on the positive sides of the web and how it works can only be underestimated. As a fighter for web standards and accessibility, she constantly fought for a better, more just web.

And while our paths never crossed face-to-face, her enthusiasm and strength fighting for the web had a long-lasting impact on me. (We almost met after her talk at Fronteers Conference 2009, but it wasn’t meant to be. That she considered meeting up at all is still an honor to me.)

She never disguised her dissatisfaction with how some aspects of the web have turned out. I respect her for speaking out, and I’m sure that some aspects would have turned out differently if she had been around with her full strength.

I’ll miss her voice.

Eric Meyer wrote about his memories of Molly.

What’s next?

It’s shaping up to be an autumn that is packed with work. Large clients, small clients, exciting clients. I still hope to be able to write a few more blog posts. Maybe I even send out another newsletter! Wouldn’t that be a neat thing?

👋 Eric

Everyone has a newsletter and apparently so do I. It's a bit dusty and I'm not 100% sure what I'm going to do with it. I expect it to be relatively sporadic. Feel free to email me (mail@yatil.net) if you have any ideas or feedback. Of course, if I can improve the accessibility here, let me know as well!

WCAG 2.2 – the saga continues

I've taken a deep dive into the suggested success criteria and evaluated what's currently proposed. I think most of the SCs are OK, but the Focus Appearance SC still troubles me because it is still so vague.

• My article: New WCAG 2.2 features rated

• Alastair Campbell’s response: Focus Appearance thoughts

• My video where I explore a “simple” use case for conformance (43:21)

I said it in my article, and I say it here again: The Working Group generally has done a good job, but this is far from my ideal to make it easy to do the right thing.

New blog post: Automated testing won’t solve web accessibility

In my latest blog post, I wrote about the limitations of automated testing tools.

I think we’re in a situation where accessibility is put into packages that are convenient to sell. Companies like to buy tools because they are cheaper than educating their developers and testers. But it leads us more than ever to a “green ring mentality” – where people’s main concern is to make the tool happy.

If those tools miss out on WCAG AA criteria, websites might look “accessible” internally while in practice there are many serious issues still left. After all, you can still only see what you measure.

Let’s make that clear: In capable hands and with supervision of knowledgable people, who know what they are measuring, automated tools can be a good supplement to a testing practice. But they cannot stand on their own, at least for now.

Some links

• The amazing Eric W. Bailey has also a newsletter called SC 2.4.4. Such a clever name! He also wrote this insightful article on how technical choices can actually prevent users to achieve their goals.

• Henny Swan wrote a great simple introduction to WAI-ARIA on the Tetralogical blog.

• The APPT project has interesting stats on mobile accessibility feature use.

• Tom Scott has looked into my soul with his latest video about AI.

Thank you

Thanks for subscribing to this newsletter and a special thanks for the people who are supporting me with Steady contributions. You know who you are. 

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These contributions and the support of each and everyone of you makes this independent work possible.

👋 Eric