April 15, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #503
This newsletter issue was sent out to 191,062 subscribers on Tuesday, April 15, 2025.
Editorial
In light of the upcoming European Accessibility Act, many companies have launched their accessibility efforts, trying to get their products and services ready for June 28th, 2025. Starting from that date, all companies that serve European customers must comply with accessibility guidelines, most notably WCAG 2.1 AA.
But accessibility isn’t a checklist. It’s a dedicated effort to improve the digital experience for everyone, independent of their temporary, situational, or permanent disabilities. In this newsletter, we highlight some of the accessibility strategies and techniques to get there.
We’ve recently run an extensive, free accessibility workshop that covers all the fine details of accessibility and inclusive design — dedicated to designers and engineers. You can download all slides and resources from the accessibility workshop as well. No strings attached!
We also have a wonderful online workshop on Accessibility For Designers with Stéphanie Walter coming up on June 16–24 — with practical accessibility guidelines and accessibility best practices. You can still get a friendly early-bird ticket.
I hope you have a truly fantastic, productive, and preferably stable rest of the week, everyone!
— Vitaly
1. Accessibility Research
Inclusive design goes beyond being compliant with accessibility requirements. Maya Alvarado, Senior Accessibility Researcher at Booking.com, rather compares it to building a door that can be opened by anyone and lets everyone in. In her case study “Building accessibility research practices,” she shares valuable insights into how the Booking.com team built accessibility practices and inclusive design into their UX research process.
Another wonderful primer on how to get started with accessibility research comes from the team at accessibility platform Fable. With practical advice on how to build on your existing research skills, scope your accessibility research smarter, and achieve early wins, it helps you start small and build a pace that works for your organization. (cm)
2. Giving A Damn About Accessibility
If you feel that accessibility guides usually are too prescriptive, aspirational, or charity-driven, Giving a damn about accessibility is for you. A collaboration between UX Collective and author Sheri Byrne-Haber, the book wants to bring a more candid take on the topic.
Available as a free PDF and audio version, the handbook takes a closer look at the challenges and opportunities that designing for accessibility brings along. It introduces you to the kinds of people you will run into in corporate settings that will make life difficult for you and your accessibility efforts, and it explores why your first try at accessibility won’t be outstanding.
Of course, there are also practical tips to help you up your accessibility game and turn good accessibility into great accessibility. An entertaining guide that inspires designers to care and fight for accessibility, even if it’s hard. (cm)
3. Understanding The EAA
On June 28, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) will go into effect, requiring products and services that are made available within the European Union to be accessible. But what does it mean for your product and service? What do you need to consider to comply?
Léonie Watson shares a summary of how EAA applies to digital products and services, and Martijn Hols also published a guide with the main takeaways from the act. Two must-reads to help you understand which websites, apps, and services are affected, what is required, and how to get started to get everything fit before the act goes into effect. (cm)
4. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- The Secrets of Web Performance dev
with Ryan Townsend. May 7–21 - How To Measure UX and Design Impact UX
with Vitaly Friedman. May 12–20 - Enterprise UX Masterclass UX
with Marko Dugonjić. May 14–21 - Design Patterns For AI Interfaces UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Jun 4–18 - Accessibility for Designers UX
with Stéphanie Walter. Jun 16–24 - Smart Interface Design Patterns UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Video course + UX certification. - Jump to all workshops →
5. Accessibility Personas
How do persons with different access needs experience the web? What accessibility issues do they face? And how can these barriers be removed? To raise accessibility awareness, HMRC’s Digital Inclusion and Accessibility Standards team created a set of eight personas that simulate how difficult it is for persons with different access needs to interact with a poorly written website.
The personas represent persons with vision impairments, older users with multiple conditions, users with rheumatoid arthritis, deaf users, autistic users, and users with dyslexia and dyscalculia. Each persona has an introduction highlighting common frustrations they face when interacting with the web and a training task that is designed to roughly recreate their experience. A fantastic initiative to build empathy and help people without these impairments better understand accessibility barriers. (cm)
6. AI And Accessibility
Some see AI as the ultimate solution, others as armageddon in motion. But what are the facts when it comes to AI and accessibility? At FFConf 2024, Léonie Watson explored the good, the bad, and the “bollocks” of AI and accessibility. A recording of her talk is now available on YouTube.
In the 30-minute talk, Léonie shares lots of real-world examples of how AI can help accessibility — through text and speech generation, real-time descriptions, and pattern recognition, for example. Bias and stereotypes shaping AI outputs and AI tooling that make promises it can’t keep are the other side of the coin, as she shows.
So, what does all of this mean for developers? Is it safe to trust AI to write accessible code? As Léonie concludes, AI can be a useful tool to get things accessible, but use it well and use it wisely. Verification and testing are essential whenever we are dealing with AI. (cm)
7. Accessibility For Front-End Designers
Getting accessibility right often seems like an overwhelming task that requires a lot of specialized knowledge and extra effort. However, by considering a few best practices, we can significantly improve the user experience, not only for users relying on assistive technologies but for everyone.
In his guide to accessibility essentials, Martijn Hols walks you through the key accessibility principles every front-end developer should apply when building components. It covers everything from semantic HTML and forms to keyboard navigation, modals, alt texts, styling, and ARIA attributes. If you’re looking to kick-start your accessibility efforts, Martijn’s guide has got you covered. (cm)
8. Recently Published Books 📚
Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been at the core of everything we do at Smashing.
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. Have you checked them out already?
- Success at Scale by Addy Osmani
- Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns
- Touch Design for Mobile Interfaces by Steven Hoober
- Check out all books →
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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