When we’re deciding whether to adopt a new feature, we usually look at a support table. We check caniuse, see what percentage of cells are green, and once it clears 90%, we think “okay, we can use this now.” But there’s a question the support table never answers: Can you use it with a keyboard? Does a screen reader read it correctly? Those are two different questions. There’s a bigger gap than you’d expect between a browser implementing a feature and that feature actually handling accessibility. Some features quietly replace accessibility code we used to hand-write; others open up brand-new traps. ...

This is Part 18 of the “Frontend Testing, Done Right” series. Browse the full series · Glossary Open a coverage report and four numbers stare back — Stmts, Branch, Funcs, Lines. Which one matters? This article is about reading that report: which number is honest (spoiler: branch), what to fill in from the red lines, and where to look for the team health that numbers can’t show. If you’ve been following the series, this is the hands-on follow-up to the strategy part’s point that “coverage is a reference, not a target.” First time here from a search? That’s fine too — we use Vitest, but reading a report works the same no matter which tool you’re on. ...

↻ 2026-09-10 Updated A new Working Draft was published on September 10, 2026, and it changes the premise of the “Bronze/Silver/Gold Are Back” section below. The September draft defines a single conformance line (all core requirements met) and moves Bronze/Silver/Gold out of conformance into reporting tiers. The requirement count also grew from 182 to 216. This post stays as a record of the March draft; the changes are covered in What Changed in the WCAG 3 September 2026 Draft. Introduction Search for “WCAG 3” and articles describing the 2021 draft still show up near the top — the era of scoring criteria and tallying them into a grade, a concept that has completely disappeared from the document by now. Web standard drafts change fairly often, and there’s less material out there keeping up with the pace than you’d expect. ...

This is Part 17 of the “Frontend Testing, Done Right” series. Browse the full series · Glossary Tests have no power while they’re “something you run locally, sometimes.” They protect a team only once they become a checkpoint that runs on every PR. This article builds that checkpoint with GitHub Actions — a merge gate where unit tests, E2E, and accessibility checks must pass before code can merge — from a single workflow file. Never touched CI? Fine. Three minutes of vocabulary first. ...

Introduction This is the seventh post in the WCAG 3.0 series. The expanded scope post looked at how far WCAG 3.0 reaches “beyond the web.” This time, I want to answer a question a lot of people keep asking me. “Should we migrate to WCAG 3.0?” Short answer up front: not yet. But there’s an important nuance to that answer. “Conformance” and “improvement” are two different conversations. Source document: This post is based on the W3C Working Draft of March 3, 2026. Drafts are generally updated on a roughly six-month cycle, so details may have shifted by the time you’re reading this. ...

AI regulation news usually sounds like someone else’s problem. Banned use cases, fines as a percentage of revenue — that reads like legal’s department, not ours. But a provision that takes effect on August 2 contains this sentence: Ensure that high-risk AI systems comply with the accessibility requirements in accordance with Directives (EU) 2016/2102 and (EU) 2019/882 Those two directives are the Web Accessibility Directive and the European Accessibility Act (EAA). In other words, an AI regulation has pulled accessibility standards into itself. Whether you’re building an AI system or deploying one, once it’s classified as high-risk, accessibility stops being “nice to have” and becomes a conformity assessment item. ...

This is Part 16 of the “Frontend Testing, Done Right” series. Browse the full series · Glossary Ever had every test green while the screen was broken? Logic fine, one CSS rule collapsing the layout? Visual regression testing stores a reference screenshot (the baseline) and compares pixels, automatically catching “regressions only eyes can see.” It’s built into Playwright — one line to start — but there’s a knack to stable shots and an ambush called environment differences. All covered here. ...

There’s a month that doesn’t show up on most calendars, yet is observed all over the world. July — Disability Pride Month. The pairing of “disability” and “pride” can feel unfamiliar at first. The emotional register we’re used to around disability observances tends to be “consideration” or “overcoming.” Pride Month tells a different story: disability isn’t something to overcome or to hide — it’s a natural part of who a person is. ...

What happens when you run one million home pages through an automated accessibility checker? About 56 million accessibility errors come pouring out. That’s an average of 56.1 per page. The number alone might get a shrug — “that’s just the web.” The problem is the direction. Last year it was 51. In a single year, errors grew by 10.1%. After years of slow-but-steady progress, web accessibility just took a step backward. ...

Say you run an accessibility checker. You feed it a site’s URL, and the checker has to decide: which pages should it actually look at? Is the homepage enough? If so, you don’t have much basis for saying “this site is accessible” or “this site isn’t.” But checking every page isn’t realistic either — forums, blogs, and shopping sites can have hundreds or thousands of posts. Auditing all of them blows the time and cost budget. ...