William Reuschel

Tech Notes If you’ve been anywhere on the internet, you’ve encountered accessibility issues. While you might have not noticed them, they’re everywhere. But why are they so common? Even though sometimes there are explicit decisions made which deprioritize accessibility, we never assume that there's ill intent when we encounter issues. Generally, the problem is lack of awareness coupled with inexperience, which go hand-in-hand. For example, one of the common situations we'll see is with small…

Tech Notes Did you know that your smartphone can talk? As accessibility professionals, sometimes we take certain knowledge for granted. We assume people have a baseline awareness of what "accessibility" is, and we spend our time advocating for more inclusively designed apps and websites. But sometimes we skip over one of the most basic questions: how can a person who is blind use a smartphone? Yes, most of us have heard Siri or Google Assistant respond to a question that we asked, but did you…

Tech Notes Is your website accessible? It's a complicated question. There is certainly no shortage of automated scanners, tests, and overlays that purport to tell you what to fix, or supposedly "fix" it for you. But even if there was a perfect automated solution that would find and fix technical compliance issues (which there isn't, by the way, not even close), wouldn’t that be missing the point? If "accessible" is what we're aiming for, anything less is technically illegal, making it the…