Issue #433
Featured: Creating accessibility systems to fix accessibility issues
“When we first start to tackle accessibility work, it usually feels very urgent. It often happens because of a lawsuit, a legal ruling, or an industry trend. Teams get served a long list of accessibility issues, with or without guidance on how to fix them. And if they do fix the issues, what happens next? Do they wait for the next audit and do it all again? This urgency tends to make accessibility work reactive instead of proactive. It’s suddenly an emergency—even if it’s actually been a problem forever. This emergency approach isn’t sustainable for anyone, including accessibility specialists, product teams, and organizations as a whole.”
Read more of Creating accessibility systems to fix accessibility issues.
Sponsored: Digital accessibility webinar - Thinking beyond WCAG and compliance
Chris Scholtens presents how to move beyond WCAG compliance to create genuinely accessible digital experiences. Thursday, February 6 at 10:00 AM central. Live captioned on Zoom. Pre-approved for IAAP continuing ed credits.
News, resources, tools and tutorials
- Introduction to accessible PDFs (webinar - abilitynet.org.uk)
- Don’t wrap figure in a link (blog post - adrianroselli.com)
- Older adults and digital inclusion (event - meetup.com/a11ynyc)
- Advancing accessibility: Strategies for continuous improvement (blog post – equalentry.com)
- My top 10 take aways from 2024 that impacted Canadians with disabilities (blog post - niewe.ca)
- Fixing digital accessibility issues with the press of a button: Too good to be true? (blog post – elevenways.be)
- Accessibility essentials every front-end developer should know (blog post – martijnhols.nl)
- The four most dangerous words to people with disabilities (blog post – buttondown.com/access-ability)
- Moving on from React, a year later (blog post – kellysutton.com)
- Build for the web, build on the web, build with the web (blog post - csswizardry.com)
- Lessons from AODA and the roadmap to 2035 (blog post - deque.com)
- Your local government isn’t ready to evacuate disabled people (article - motherjones.com)
- Trump calls DEI programs ‘illegal.’ He plans to end them in the federal government (article - npr.org)
- Trump’s DEI orders may halt progress for disabled workers (article - axios.com)
Sponsored classifieds
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Start creating accessible documents with our free PDF accessibility checklist. This checklist will teach you how to make PDFs that are optimized for assistive technology.
New to A11y
Louise Clark wrote a post about considering accessibility for people with cognitive disabilities and differences that’s worth a read and bookmark. Cognitive disabilities often get overlooked, especially in introductory content. I like how this framing brings in Long Covid too, since that’s a recent example many people can relate to on a personal level.
Suggestions and corrections
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