Articles
Accessibility
The accessibility program I'd build if I started over
If you took away the incumbent team, the half-built tooling, and the political memory of an earlier attempt, what shape would the program actually want to be?
The accessibility debt problem and how to stop adding to it
Accessibility debt works like technical debt but compounds differently: the violations accumulate quietly, the cost to fix grows with every new surface, and there's no static analysis to surface the interest.
Touch targets and why minimum sizes keep getting violated
Touch target size minimums have existed for over a decade. They're still routinely ignored. The problem isn't that designers don't know the numbers. It's that the design environment hides the violations.
Alt text is not just a description of the image
The goal of alt text is not to describe what the image looks like. It's to serve the purpose the image serves. Those are different things more often than you'd expect.
Testing with real assistive technology: what you'll learn that audits miss
Automated audits and manual inspection find markup problems. Testing with real assistive technology finds usage problems. They are not the same thing.
How to get developers to take accessibility seriously
Developers don't dismiss accessibility because they're indifferent. They dismiss it because the feedback they've received about it has been vague, late, and disconnected from how they work.
What inclusive design actually means in product work
Inclusive design gets used as a synonym for accessibility, then as a synonym for diversity. In product practice it's something more specific and more actionable than either.
Cognitive accessibility and why it's often harder than the technical stuff
Screen reader support and keyboard navigation have clear technical requirements. Cognitive accessibility doesn't, which is why it's easy to feel like you're doing it when you're not.
How to build an accessibility program from nothing
Starting an accessibility program at a company that has none is less about training and tools than about knowing exactly where to apply pressure first.
ARIA: when to use it and when it's doing more harm than good
ARIA attributes can make inaccessible interfaces accessible. They can also make accessible interfaces inaccessible. The first rule of ARIA is not to use it.
Keyboard navigation: what it actually requires from a designer
Keyboard accessibility isn't something engineers bolt on after design. The decisions that break it are made in the design file, long before a line of code gets written.
How to design for screen reader users without making everything worse
Most attempts to make interfaces screen-reader-friendly make them harder to use. The fix is to design for both audiences at once.
Focus management is the accessibility thing everyone forgets
You can pass every automated check and still break keyboard navigation completely. Here's what falls through the cracks.
Color contrast is the easiest accessibility win. Here's how to not mess it up.
Contrast gets fixed more often than it gets solved. Here's the difference.
Accessibility is a design problem, not a compliance checkbox
When teams treat accessibility as a legal requirement, they do the minimum at the end of the process. They also do it worse than if they'd treated it as design from the start.
What I learned running an accessibility audit on a five-year-old product
The expectation was obscure edge cases. What we actually found was the same five problems repeated everywhere.