March 10, 2025 • Issue #439

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Featured: Values

"Let’s talk about the disconnect within the accessibility scene/industry/community and about the stampede of elephants in the room. Last week, Deque used their free axe-con marketing event to announce the vision of getting to 100% automated accessibility (by volume) across all disciplines within the next 10 years. This would be possible with “AI”. The backlash during the keynote was swift and forceful. I’m not sure how this was not anticipated. Axe-con is still a conference considered part of the accessibility community, so the message to replace genuine human testing and evaluation with “AI” could never land with that audience. But it also wasn’t made for that audience."

Read more of Values.

Sponsored: Webinar - From concept to code — Communicating accessibility in the design handoff

Speaker Danielle Zarcaro will present crucial details designers need to provide to guide developers in implementing designs accessibly. Live captioned on Zoom, Monday, March 17th at 7 PM central.

Register for the Concept to code webinar.

News, resources, tools and tutorials

• Be wary of accessibility guarantees from anyone (blog post - adrianroselli.com)
• Best practices for cognitive accessibility in web design (blog post - a11y-collective.com)
• There’s no such thing as ‘menubar navigation’ (blog post - tempertemper.net)
• Designing for accessibility right from the start with Stéphanie Walter (video/talk - youtube.com)
• Accessible color palette generator (tool – thisisfranciswu.com)
• “I’m not a designer but...” (blog post – adamsilver.io)
• The accessibility blame game: The fallacy of the "lazy developer" (blog post – linkedin.com)
• Why economic uncertainty hurts people with disabilities the most (blog post – buttondown.com/access-ability)
• A11y 101: 1.3.5 Identify Input Purpose (blog post – tarnoff.info)
• Navigating dyscalculia: Designing with empathy in mind (blog post - accessibility.blog.gov.uk)
• Usability testing with disabled users is a good investment (blog post - nicolas-steenhout.com)
• Trump prepares order dismantling the Education Department (article - npr.org)
• Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest AI (for accessibility) of them all (blog post - cerovac.com/a11y)
• Overlay timeline (resource - overlaytimeline.com)
• WCAG colour contrast: What does the 4.5:1 ratio actually mean? (blog post - davedavies.dev)

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New to A11y

Eric Bailey gave a talk recently and wrote a related post on harm reduction principles for digital accessibility practitioners that you should watch and read. Working in this space is hard. You'll never get it right all the time, nor be able to change it all the injustices. These principles can help evaluate a team's progress in tackling accessibility.