2025, here we come!
Hello to the final newsletter of the year from me, your accessibility pal Eric Eggert.
The last four months have been oddly stressful, mostly because my planning did not include enough slack to work through speed bumps in a relaxed way. I hope to improve that next year.
I have to say that the surge of panicked European Accessibility Act (EAA) calls has not happened yet. I think this has two reasons:
First, many teams think they can do accessibility in-house and that it won’t be that bad. Clients come to me all the time and say, “we think we did a pretty good job with accessibility” while they did not incorporate testing or learning in their processes. This often leads to implementations where developers think they put the right ARIA attributes on stuff, but where there is no understanding beyond that. It’s all blindfolded people touching parts of an elephant without seeing the whole picture.
Second, many think the efforts they need to do are so massive that they try to minimize the scope: Does this part of the website counts as e-commerce? (It probably does.) Can’t we just declare all product images as decorative? (No.) Do we really need to implement dark mode? (Depending on your regulator, maybe to yes.)
This minimizing does not help. It will create a panic and some companies will just run into trouble with regulators. Of course, none of these are really our problems as accessibility people. Clients come to us when they are ready. That said, it’s so much more interesting and fulfilling when clients want to do accessibility correctly, or at least to the best of their abilities.
Let’s make sure that we are kind to each other and to clients. The next months will be stressful again, and I don’t think we’ll get a breather until the end of 2025. We need to take care of ourselves and take breaks before we burn out. Yes, ensuring the right to access is important, and we must do the work, but also that we stay healthy, mentally and physically, to do it.
PS: If you are a freelancer, take a look at the inflation rate since you raised your prices from last time and adjust them accordingly. And for long-term contracts, put automatic adjustments in the contract every year.
Onwards to a good 2025!
👋 Eric
Two blog posts
I have published three blog posts since the last newsletter:
My grief with “In Brief” (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) – WCAG’s Understanding Documents are getting “In Brief” sections which try to explain what is then explained on the same page. I don’t like them much, and I detail in this blog post why.
Two different kinds of “focusable” UI elements (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) – We use the word “focusable” for at least two different things, here I try to clarify what the common uses are and how to differentiate them.
Some other projects and things I did
I worked on some ways to efficiently have custom information on how to test for certain Success Criteria in CAAT (Full disclaimer: Mindscreen GmbH is a “Team Membership” supporter) (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). My current version consists of some very basic HTML testing instructions (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre).
An Axess Lab (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) colleague asked me about feedback on a video, so I created a video annotation page – again in very simple HTML – that allowed to jump to the annotated page. The core JavaScript is only 30 lines long, thanks to all the built-in functionality of the web platform. Controlling video is super easy. I have not gotten around to creating a good example, so I cannot share it yet.
For one of the courses I teach on behalf of Axess Lab (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), I created a transcript library that takes the raw HTML output from MacWhisper (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) and wraps an HTML around it that includes the language tag and navigation. It also creates an overview page that lets you navigate to individual transcripts. Nothing to share for now, but it was a fun little PHP project.
When a client asked me about how they could ensure they got most bang for their buck, I created three little JavaScripts to make three things easy for JS developers:
Skip Links – Programmatically adding skip links to the page.
Page Title – Use a mutation observer to always use the content of an element and set that as the title of the page.
Visible Focus – A way to ensure that focus is always visible.
Because these scripts are not super fine-grained, I called them sledgehammer-a11y (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre).
In addition, I helped Polypane (Affiliate Link) (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) developer Kilian by requesting some features and help to find some bugs/inconsistencies (I’m good at that!) which he squashed (He’s excellent at that!), and we were both glad whenever he noticed that the underlying Chrome engine does something weird. Anyway, if you have not had a chance to look at Polypane in the last year, there has been a lot of progress and I could not imagine testing without it.
W3C Content Accessibility Guidelines 3 (WCAG 3)
A new version of the WCAG 3 draft (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) has been published, and it looks like the Working Group is trending into an interesting direction. I share some of the concerns that Deque formulated in their response to the Call for Consensus (CfC) (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). The CfC is basically the group confirming that they have consensus for a specific action – in this case, publishing an update to the draft.
Creating a sequel to arguably one of the most successful W3C standards is a daunting task. It’s probably as difficult to follow up as the original Star Wars trilogy was, and the prequels had far too much bureaucracy in it. I hope WCAG 3 won’t share that fate.
The blog post WCAG 3 December 2024 Update & Thoughts from the Co-Chairs (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) has a great summary of the thinking behind the update, I recommend reading it.
It also has this banger of a quote in it:
“Do not use this draft content as a standard or revise your accessibility program and goals to meet the contents written in this draft. We are not there yet! If anyone tells you otherwise, they are uninformed or lying.”
Links, links, and more links
If you follow me on Mastodon, you might have noticed that I share links in a separate account to my main account. You can follow @links@yatil.social (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) to get informed about new shares. Recently, I added that my highlights in the articles also get shared as replies to the shared link. Neat!
I hope to integrate my links as seamlessly into my website as Hidde does (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), but I’m just not there yet. That said, the whole archive is on the Raindop.io website (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), which I use to manage my bookmarks.
Parting Words
Thanks again to everyone who has subscribed to this newsletter and a special thanks to all nine members, you know who you are, and you rock!
Let’s make the best of 2025 that we can.
👋 Eric
Socials
My primary social media/Fediverse/Mastodon handle is @yatil@yatil.social (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), and you can also find me on LinkedIn (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre).
