Accessibility Jumpstart 8: Stay Current with Accessibility
Welcome to the final part of my Accessibility Jumpstart series. Last time I chatted about a few of the helpful tools I use in dev and design processes, and this time we’ll be covering some ways in which you can stay current with accessibility industry trends as they roll out.
While it can be seen as a negative, the industry updates much more slowly than the rest of the web ecosystem, but accessibility as a first-priority is starting to gain traction. I can for-see more rapid changes as the years roll forwards and the initial web community becomes older and needs these changes to continue to use the web.
Standards bodies and browsers
If you don’t have a way to read RSS feeds, I’d highly recommend you get a RSS feed reader such as Feedly right away. Most of these standards bodies have a subscribe-able RSS feed so you can watch updates as they roll-out across the industry. I’ll list the current feed addresses below.
- W3C
- WhatWG
- Chromium (Google Chrome)
- Webkit (Apple Safari)
- Mozilla Firefox
Accessibility validation organizations
Many of the mainline accessibility testing, remediation, and verification agencies need to stay up-to-date or set the trends for upcoming changes in law or standards. Again, a feed reader for this sort of content is probably the easiest way to stay up to date.
- Level Access (Feedly can detect the blog, but there is no public feed URL)
- Deque Systems
- TPGi (formerly The Paciello Group)
- WebAIM
- Freedom Scientific (maker of JAWS and ZoomText)
- NVAccess (maker of NVDA, no public feed, reached out to see if they have one. Stay tuned.)
- Tenon.io
- IAAP (Accessibility Certifications)
Companies with a dedicated accessibility program
Your mileage may vary with the following companies as some are sales-pitchy, some are a great resource, and the rest are a blend of the two. I’ve found Twitter seems to be the best way to follow along with these orgs, but if you’re like me and have sworn off tracking-heavy social media, use a Nitter instance, visit the account and subscribe to its RSS feed instead.
Industry leaders
There are many awesome individuals that are focused on driving accessibility forward in their work. Some of the following are RSS feeds, Twitter links, or site URLs. There are a slew of other talented folks that I may have forgotten as well. Sorry! 🙁
- Adrian Roselli
- Bruce Lawson
- Eric Bailey
- Fizz Studio (accessible data viz)
- Heydon Pickering
- Léonie Watson
And lastly, once we go back to live events (or you enjoy participating digitally), there are a slew of conferences you could attend. Digitala11y has a large list of these accessibility events already on their site.
I’ve really enjoyed writing this overview and hope what you learned over the last few weeks was super helpful for you!