WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

August 2026 Newsletter

Features

If you have to ask, is it accessible?

Why would you allocate resources to creating a VPAT only to create a friction point for someone that is interested in giving you money?

Web Accessibility in Mind Conference

Join us September 15–16 for two days of practical insights, expert perspectives, and meaningful conversations about digital accessibility. Registration for the WebAIM Virtual Conference is now open.

Upcoming WebAIM Events

Resources

Google Docs makes accessible links easier: A small feature with big accessibility benefits

Google Docs replaces pasted URLs with page titles automatically. This small change helps people who use screen readers or voice control navigate more easily.

When You Can’t Stop the Ship: A Developer’s Guide to Handling Inaccessible Releases

In this blog, Nathan Ortiz writes about what to do when the call to ship something inaccessible sits above your pay grade. Drawing on his time as a developer on a small team, he sets out what you can still do.

A11y 101 – 4.1.3 Status Messages

A user submits a form. The page doesn't reload. A loading spinner appears. It vanishes. Something happened—maybe success, maybe failure, maybe the system just gave up. But nothing spoke. Nothing announced. The status message was painted on the screen for sighted users and completely invisible to anyone who couldn't see it.

Thirty-Six Years Later: The ADA at a Crossroads

The ADA has never been self-enforcing. It has always depended on litigation, regulatory follow-through, and public will to give its promises teeth. What’s different now is the number of fronts on which that follow-through is being tested at once.

Should a Dialog Close When Clicked Outside?

Maybe not, but I'll break these down into three categories because it depends on context and intent. Pretend this post also applies for pressing Esc.

Legal update: July 2026

An update on the current status of digital accessibility litigation and laws.

Writing for understanding

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about how to explain complicated things in writing, and how to help people actually understand them.

Accessibility is resistance!

Hello, my name is Léonie, and I 💜 AI. Well, that isn't entirely true, but I do use AI, quite a bit actually, and I'd like to tell you why.

Designing for people with no or limited mobility

People with limited or no mobility use a wide range of assistive technology, alternative input devices, and accessibility settings to interact with digital content. As you design your websites and mobile apps, how can you ensure they work well for them?

Accessibility Bugs Are Often Architecture Bugs

When the same accessibility problems keep appearing across different parts of a product, they are usually not just isolated bugs. They are architecture problems.

prefers-reduced-motion, explained (and how to test it)

prefers-reduced-motion is the CSS media feature that tells your site whether the person using it has asked their device for less animation. Honoring it is the single most important thing you can do for motion accessibility — and it is easy to implement and, it turns out, easy to get subtly wrong.

The "Disability Dongle": Why Silicon Valley Hates Me and you.

But here is the reality they refuse to accept: My disability is not a tragedy of biology. It is a failure of infrastructure.

AI and Accessibility for Ecommerce: What the Tools Really Do and What they Don't

Artificial Intelligence (AI) can build a retail storefront in an afternoon. It can generate product pages, create a checkout flow, and connect it to your backend processors. It can write the code behind all of it faster than any team could have a few years ago. What it can't do is tell you whether a shopper who relies on a screen reader can choose a size, add an item to the cart, or confirm the order actually went through.

Bend, Do Not Break: Building Resilient Accessibility Programs

A passing audit measures a system on its best day, in a stable environment, with the people who built it still in the room. None of those conditions last.

Quick Tip: Use text-based closed captions instead of burned-in open captions

For most videos, it's best to provide captions as a separate text-based caption track (closed captions) instead of a burning them directly into the video (open captions). Closed captions can be turned on or off, customized by the viewer, and are available to assistive technologies. If a platform does not support closed captions, then burned-in open captions are better than no captions at all.