Two years ago I published The Great Accessibility Blog Roundup. At the time, I was relatively new to following blogs and thought it would be helpful to post the most useful and informative blogs I had found. Now, it’s time to update the list. Below are many of the accessibility blogs I currently follow. While you’re here, be sure to check out The Accessibility Twitter Roundup.
- 456 Berea Street
- Roger Johansson gives informative, useful accessibility tips in short, easy-to-understand blog postings.
- A List Apart
- Their RSS feed is still broken 2 years later (you often get duplicate and repeated entries), but ALA is a must read for any web developer.
- Accessibility Tips
- Mike Davies has posted this excellent collection of tips, guidance, and practical suggestions for developing accessible websites.
- Accessify
- Ian Lloyd and the folks at Accessify post many accessibility items, particularly ones relevant to the UK crowd.
- Accessites.org
- The goal of Mike Cherim and his “Team Access” is to prove that accessible web sites can function well and look beautiful. The feed features highlights of accessible web sites and insightful articles on accessible web design.
- Adobe Accessibility
- The Adobe Accessibility team’s blog on accessibility in Adobe products.
- All Access Blogging
- Skye Kilaen provides valuable tips for making your blog more accessible.
- AniktoBlog
- Kel Smith’s User-Centered Design and Web Accessibility Blog.
- box of chocolates
- “You never know what you’re going to get” is the tagline, but with Derek Featherstone you get a true Accessibility
NinjaJedi Knight. - Bruce Lawson
- Bruce Lawson’s blog offers a mix of very interesting humor (you’ve been warned), personal experiences, and in-depth accessibility and standards info.
- Digital Likeness
- Andrea Hill, an accessibility and social media Wonder Woman, writes on a variety of topics.
- Do It Myself Blog
- Glenda Watson Hyatt provides vast, first-hand insight into accessibility, assistive technology, and living with a disability.
- iheni :: making the web worldwide
- Henny Swan, a web evangelist from Opera, blogs about efforts to make the web worldwide.
- Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design
- Joe is a freelance accessible site designer that shares his immense knowledge though his blog and many articles.
- Juicy Studio
- Gez Lemon provides some of the most influential research and writing in the accessibility field, particularly on the technical aspects of accessibility and assistive technologies. He writes infrequently, but when he does, it’s best to read carefully.
- Learning the World
- Martin Kliehm’s blog about web standards and accessibility.
- Marco’s accessibility blog
- Marco Zehe, Mozilla’s accessibility QA and assistive technology wunderkind, blogs on all aspects of accessibility, disability, and assistive technology, with a focus on open source and Mozilla products.
- Max Design
- Russ Weakley’s blog on web design and web development focusing on Cascading Style Sheets, usability, accessibility and web standards. His weekly “Links for light reading” are awesome!
- splintered
- Patrick H. Lauke is a very vocal accessibility expert. He’s active on about every accessibility project and mailing list there is, is a prolific author and blogger, and is now Opera’s newest web evangelist.
- Standards Schmanders
- As the blog subtitle suggests, Peter Krantz’s writings provide a pragmatic approach to web accessibility.
- The Paciello Group Blog
- The Paciello Group is comprised of some of the smartest, most influential accessibility experts on the planet. TPG’s Steve Faulkner posts a vast wealth of information to their blog.
- The Web Standards Project
- WaSP is a grassroots coalition fighting for standards. The Accessibility Task Force membership, of which I’m proud to be a member, include many of the brightest minds in web accessibility. The news feed represents just a small portion of the work that goes on behind the scenes at WaSP.
- Wait till I come!
- Chris Heilmann of Yahoo! has turned out some of the best writing and presentations on web standards and programming in recent years. He has a unique ability to push the very edges of innovation while focusing on standards and accessibility in everything he does.
- Web Axe – Accessibility Tips
- Web Axe is a podcast and blog featuring practical web design accessibility tips. There are currently 70 podcasts available for download and every one of them provides useful accessibility information. Dennis Lembree’s site provides loads of useful information and interviews with the who’s who of web accessibility. Dennis is also the creator of Accessible Twitter.
What have I missed?
Several blogs that I follow were not listed here because posts are made infrequently or they don’t have a strong web accessibility focus. I’m sure there are many excellent accessibility blogs that I’m unaware of or overlooked. If you write or are familiar with an accessibility-focused blog that’s not listed above, please post the URL in a comment below.
Jared,
I was always wondering which are the blogs/tweeters you follow and do not share:-) In a way I like the idea that you share the very best, but I think it would be great to put a list of many good ones together.
Tom-
You can see everyone I’m following on Twitter at http://twitter.com/jared_w_smith/friends
I must admit though, that I strive for high signal to noise. There are many great accessibility experts that I do not follow directly because of the sheer volume of posts they make. There are a few on the list above that I don’t follow – even though they have great contributions, I don’t want the useful message of others to be lost amongst their many less-useful posts.
To combat this a bit, I spend a lot of time using the Twitter search API to find posts about WebAIM, accessibility, disability, etc. I’m working on a custom web app that will show me all tweets based on these search terms that are NOT from people I follow. This gives me info from people I follow and SEPARATE info from people I don’t follow, but that are posting on relevant topics.
I do a similar thing with Google Alerts with blogs. I subscribe to the ones I really like and use Google to compile info from other blogs.
Useful list, thanks!
UMN.edu / ITSS has a feed http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/support/Training/Online/webdesign/webdesign.xml for the new links in their extensive list of links.
Accessibility is only one of the categories but it’s still interesting enough as it’s updated weekly (more or less).
A planet exists for french speaking people: http://www.planete-accessibilite.com/?type=atom10
Thanks for the mention! Although I don’t do much accessibility work anymore, I’m still very interested in it. I need to keep up!
By the way, I’m curious about your use of the term “Wonder Woman” – did you know that one of my favorite quotes is by Robert Fulghum- “Be aware of wonder. Live a balanced life–learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day some.” and I used to have “wonder” as part of my email address?
Thanks for the mention! Although I don’t do much accessibility work anymore, I’m still very interested in it. I need to keep up
I wonder, would you mind putting a note nearer the top of your post that these blogs are focussed about web accessibility? It’s a great list – I read most of them myself and learn a lot – but you don’t have any blogs focussed on non-web accessibility.
Because the link is being re-tweeted so much (along with your twitter users a11y list) these are being read by people who don’t realise that WebAIM is basically just about web accessibility and not the “everything computer related” type of accessibility.
I write at @atmacjournal and the linked website about Apple related accessibility which is primarily not web-focussed and doesn’t fit this list so I wouldn’t expect to be on it (ATMac is also in hiatus due to my health at the moment) … but people are being confused.
Also, “web is not the be all and end all of accessibility” is a bit of a soapbox of mine and it bugs me when people think that web accessibility is the entirity of the field. So clarifitation would be doubly appreciated.
Cheers,
Ricky
Our slightly irreverent take on accessibility and assistive technology issues – issues are serious – style less so
Hi,
I’m an ex-Flash developer and I have to say I’m excited to see the HTML 5 push of getting video and other rich media back out of proprietary formats.
While I’m still not in love with CSS/Javascript animations, for accessibility reasons, I think it is the way to go for sure.
Cheers,
Leon