Accessibility Jumpstart 8: Stay Current with Accessibility

Posted on Category: Accessibility
Songbird on blossom branch (1900 - 1936) by Ohara Koson (1877-1945). Original from The Rijksmuseum. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

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.

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.

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! 🙁

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!


Want to read the rest of the series?

  1. What Is Accessibility?
  2. Standards
  3. The Law
  4. Assistive Technology
  5. Using Assistive Technology
  6. User Testing
  7. Dev & Design Tools
  8. Staying Current with Accessibility
My opinions & views expressed may not reflect my employer's.


Add a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.