Easy A11y Guide

12/06/2026

How many sales is your ecomm quietly losing? I went to upgrade my account yesterday and used my autofill to speed up checkout.

And then it all went off the rails. Red error indicators but no messages about what was wrong. No field labels. Random numbers in random places. What was I supposed to fix?

And it was crammed into a tiny iframe I couldn't scroll or print from. I mean, I tried printing, the result was a horrifying mix of 4 different screens all on top of each other.

I didn't even know a print dialog could be that bad. So congrats, you have achieved a kind of horrible I've never before seen in my 15 years of web development.

I'm an accessibility specialist and I couldn't figure out what the form wanted from me.

That's an accessibility failure on a live commercial checkout.

Based on previous broken checkouts I've fixed, they are probably missing out on 10-40% of revenue.

This happens on many other sites too. Right now. Today.

What's the most broken checkout experience you've run into recently?

Mine was publer. Wow that basically a how-to on horrible checkouts.

10/06/2026

Did you know that skip links could work for keyboard users but fail for screen reader users?

It happens from time to time. Thanks Avada theme for reminding me about this.

Keyboards alone & screen readers combined with keyboards handle focus a little differently. And unfortunately that difference can mean you missed the criteria even though you thought you passed it.

So if you haven't ever tried your skip link with a screen reader, give it a go. It might surprise you.

If you forgot how to use the screen reader on your device, I'll drop the link for the deque quick reference for how to use the various screen readers.

07/06/2026

You want to do accessibility work but don't where to start. Sound familiar? This is what I hear repeatedly from both my 1:1 clients and from agencies.

Maybe you went to WAVE and did some fixes, maybe you used Google Lighthouse to try and get 100. But you felt like stuff was still missing and you still didn't have a specific plan. No confidence that the random acts of accessibility would get you to a good state.

There's a difference between my 1:1 clients seeing serious accessibility wins isn't just the log of fixes I give them every week (although they love that) and those pursing the random acts of accessibility. The difference is the the system of starting with the high impact items and working what impacts people in a structured, prioritized way.

These prioritized & structured fixes don't just help show meaningful progress to stakeholders. They show up in real numbers, like the client who reduced their customer service issues by 94%. Which was great, cause that freed up their staff for the 48% increase in sales year over year.

But I only have a couple of 1:1 slots and I'm already booked for June. The good news is, I just launched the Rapid Remediation course to help all of you DIYers out there to get the results for yourself.

Rapid Remediation is designed for people who aren't afraid to "Inspect Element" and search through the "View Source". They are thrilled to write some CSS and may even be good friends with JS & PHP (although a JS/PHP relationship isn't required). They want to fix their own site, their client's sites, hopefully their template site if they have one.

It's on sale for June for $199. It will go up in July, and will end the year at $497. So grab it now, or kick yourself later.

Enjoy the lack of a fancy landing page: https://easya11yguide.com/courses/rapid-remediation/

(Look I have clients to finish items for, when I get the shiny landing page together the price goes up too)

Clients are looking for big wins out of the gate, and users are looking for improvements that really matter. Rapid remediation tackles remediating the most common items with the biggest impact first. I'll be honest, you can get most sites to a pretty good place without ever reading half of…

18/05/2026

The most common question with accessibility is how to get started. I'm doing a follow-along workshop on May 21st (global accessibility awareness day) to get you actually start.

1 hour, 5 fixes for incredibly common problems. This is where you get started with accessibility and user experience improvements.

This workshop you bring your own site and work on it. I'll show how to test for an issue, then what to do to fix it. And then you'll have a few minutes to work on your own sites, if you run into problems, just ask for help!

We'll cover how to test & fix:

- Skip Links
- Color Contrast
- Focus Visible
- Links visible
- Headings

The most common question with accessibility is how to get started. This will be a follow along workshop where I'll show how to test for an issue, then what to do to fix it.

06/04/2026

Accessibility myth: add ARIA to make accessible.

Accessibility reality: adding ARIA probably made it worse.

ARIA is very powerful and can do a lot of things. But it's frequently the wrong tool for the job. The #1 problem I see everywhere is using ARIA when you never needed to.

And AI, it's making this so much worse. Here's what's happening.

I have a client who asked me to add a badge to their website. It's an image of a certification they have which is linked to the page that shows the cert is active. Common request.

The code put an aria-label on the anchor link and empty alt text on the image. That's wrong.

When an image is linked, the alt text on the image says where the link goes to. Alt text exists, use it.

Another one (and this was 100% done by humans) was trying to put aria-label on an HTML label element. It's already got the text label, there is no reason to use aria. In fact, each item should have exactly one label, so by adding 2 you are violating the rules.

Key thing to remember: Most of the time, unless you are following a known good pattern (like the US design system validated to be WCAG conformant), do NOT use ARIA. Just don't.

Seriously, the first rule of ARIA is that not using it is better than using it wrong.

From the WebAIM most recent study, ARIA use is up 27% from last year. That's bad. Those pages with ARIA had 50% more errors than those without. And that was the easy to find automated errors.

What kind of bad ARIA are you seeing?

25/02/2026

In a world of AI everywhere, make sure that you differentiate between entering content into your newsletter and your chat tool. This is honestly one of the reasons why I keep my AI tool & other tools separate. So I can tell the difference about what goes where.

I just received the following email:

Just a quick reminder. Tomorrow we’re hosting our next Weekly Group Call + Q&A talking all about: [enter the topic]

As usual we will be going live at [enter start time and timezone]

Here is the link to join when it's time: [enter meeting link]

During the session we’ll walk through:

[Edit these bullet points to make them intriguing, curiosity based, high perceived value]

23/02/2026

AI news making you ask: is AI secure enough to actually trust it with my personal information? Are "local" models safer?

On March 4th at 11am ET I'll be joined live on Zoom by Kathy Zant, a security expert whose mission is to make security accessible & understandable to regular people.

Kathy Zant is a security consultant, award-winning keynote speaker, coach & author and she'll be joining us to talk about what you need to know to keep yourself safe in today's evolving world of AI. And also what to watch out for so that you don't become the next horror story news article.

Come join us and learn essential lessons to yourself safe in this constantly changing world of AI.

AI makes the news just about everywhere, and in some of those stories people's whole lives were upended by their use of AI. The meetup will be a presentation with some rea

20/02/2026

Should the form field be name or full name? Does it actually make a difference?

In pretty much every contact form out there we collect the person's name. But something many people building forms don't think about is, what's the right label?

And the answer is depends on what data you are collecting.

Full name: when you want the person to enter their full name into one field. In fact, if you didn't set up the autocomplete feature, but you correctly use "full name" as the label of the field, autofill tools in browsers & password managers can still map this correctly. Using "name" produces some odd and varied results (which often don't include the person's name).

First name/last name: when you want to populate the first name & last name into different fields. Label appropriately for your locale if you use "family name" locally instead of "last name".

And whenever possible, make sure that you put the correct autocomplete value on the field.

So next time you think of just writing "name" for the label, take an extra couple of seconds and put the correct label instead. It improves the experience of everyone filling out the form, and improves the quality of the data you get.

18/02/2026

Have you tested your forms to make sure they actually work? And that the right emails get sent? And that they populate any database CRMs correctly?

I was recently working with a client insisting on Zoho forms (don't use it, just don't, it's significantly inferior product). And the phone number field didn't validate at all, and it didn't ship into the Zoho CRM. Not in the slightest.

Went through several rounds, attempting it multiple different ways, and overall a nightmare.

On gravity forms this was easy. Just create the field, tell it to map to telephone (so that it autofills for people), and tell it I wanted 10 digit number plus extension. And done. It just worked.

Zoho, it's been a couple weeks and they are still fighting with it trying to get it to work.

Use a good form tool, one that supports making life easy for humans and getting the data to where it needs to go correctly.

What form tools have you had go well and make it easy for humans?

16/02/2026

Autocomplete on forms improves customer experience and accuracy. And lack of it causes a lot of problems and unpredictability.

I was recently working with a client who was moving to Zoho forms (spoiler: Zoho forms are missing a bit on accessibility and I do NOT recommend) and Zoho doesn't support autocomplete.

There's no options in Zoho, and it instead tries to set autocomplete to off for everything.

But here's what happens in the real world: people use browsers & password managers to store their information (name, email, address, etc). So when you set this to "off" and try to pretend it doesn't exist, things go really wrong for users trying to complete the form.

- Name field ended up with their street address in it.
- Coupon code field got their city in it.

This stuff isn't just annoying to users, it makes them stop filling out your form in the first place. Because your site is broken for not meeting their expectations.

And if the person isn't paying much attention and just zipping through the form, you're going to get some wierd data showing up based on this terrible mapping.

So, make sure that your forms support autocomplete and that they use the right values so that people's browsers & password managers put the right info in the right place.

Have you ever abandoned a form because the autocomplete didn't work or went really wrong?

I know I have. And on mobile, either autocomplete works or the browser window gets closed. I don't have time to deal with terribly coded websites.