nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 09/10/2026This year's WP Accessibility Day had an unannounced theme: plugins can't replace skill, AI can automate the problem, bugs survive automation. Better tools, same question: what's still our job? Thank you to every organizer and speaker. #WPA11yDay 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 08/10/2026Our own sign-out dialog sometimes left keyboard focus behind on the page. A test caught it: 11 failures in 325 runs, the kind you re-run and call flaky. It wasn't flaky. It was a timing bug. Nobody experiences a bug as "1 in 30." They experience it as broken. 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 07/10/2026WP Accessibility Day is live: 24 hours of free talks. I'm catching Julia Undeutsch testing a11y plugins against real errors (11am PT) and William Patton on catching a11y bugs in your build pipeline (1pm PT). #WPA11yDay bit.ly/4rDvE7Zbit.lyRegister to Attend - WordPress Accessibility Day 2026It's free, and all sessions will be held virtually via Zoom, so you can attend from anywhere. Sessions will have CART captions and sign language interpretation. 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 02/10/2026Send me the component you'd rather nobody looked at. The tab set, the modal, the dropdown you inherited. I'll test it live with a keyboard and screen reader. Anonymous, costs you a link, don't tidy it up. Closes Mon Oct 19. natalie@a20y.com. Livestream on the 21st. 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 30/09/2026WP Accessibility Day is Oct 7-8: 24 hours of free WordPress a11y talks. AAArdvark is a Bronze sponsor, and I'll be watching. First on my list: Steve Jones on when page zoom becomes a failure. bit.ly/4rDvE7Zbit.lyRegister to Attend - WordPress Accessibility Day 2026It's free, and all sessions will be held virtually via Zoom, so you can attend from anywhere. Sessions will have CART captions and sign language interpretation. 001
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 29/09/2026"We're responsive, so we pass reflow." Not quite. Responsive is a technique, reflow is an outcome. WCAG 1.4.10 asks for a 320px window with no scrolling in two directions at once. A site with no breakpoints can pass. A responsive one can fail. #a11y 010
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 25/09/2026AI agents keep tripping over the same barriers people have reported for years. People hit them first. Neha Pandit's #id24 talk is first on my weekend list, next to the ethics framework panel. Thank you @inclusivedesign24.bsky.social: bit.ly/4Avfdyv 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 24/09/2026Every AI coding mandate is also an accessibility policy. A mandate scales the tool's defaults, and those defaults were learned from a web that mostly doesn't work for disabled people. Make the tool required and you own what it ships. More from Nilesh Singit: bit.ly/4tZfxBDbit.ly Random Reflexions — Notes from a Crip 001
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 23/09/2026For years I said we'd never build an accessibility score. Three weeks ago we shipped one. Today at 1pm PT: how scores get made, why a 100 can be useless, and the part of ours I'm least comfortable with. youtu.be/ucS9QQAY82o 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Roast My Component is open through October 5th. The whole test: Tab to it, work it with only the keyboard, land on it with a screen reader, then leave it and see where focus went. If you'd rather watch me run that on yours, send it. Anonymous, costs you a link. natalie@a20y.com 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 17/09/2026Automatic captions on my own livestream got my name wrong at 0:22, my company's name at 0:25, and captioned WCAG five different ways in three minutes without once getting it right. Watch two minutes of your latest video with the sound off and count the guesses. #a11y 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 11/09/2026Send me the component you're quietly worried about. A tab set, a modal, a date picker you inherited and never trusted. I test it live with a keyboard and a screen reader on stream. You stay anonymous. All it costs is a link. natalie@a20y.com, by Sept 21. 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 09/09/2026Automatic captions are good enough to look finished and not good enough to follow. I'd know, I use them. Today 1pm Pacific I turn ours on and score them live, then the three nobody does: transcripts, audio description, and a player you can reach. youtu.be/TqXv0BErl8c 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 04/09/2026The two loudest opinions about accessibility land in the same place: nothing gets fixed. One says a partial fix is just theater. The other says it's too big to start. Nobody waits for zero bugs to ship anything else. A keyboard trap you fix Tuesday helps somebody Tuesday. #a11y 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 28/08/2026Your team can only catch the accessibility problems someone on it already knows to look for. Peer review can't find the rest, because everyone was trained by everyone else. If your checklist hasn't gotten longer in a year, that isn't because you finished. #a11y 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 26/08/2026I've written a lot of focus traps. You can stop writing them. Not stop trapping focus, stop hand-writing the trap. The browser does it now, and better. Today 1pm Pacific I build a modal from scratch and mostly delete things. youtu.be/SFqczuXXkpQ 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 21/08/2026It takes longer to document a missing alt text than to fix it. Find it, screenshot it, note the URL, describe the location, paste it into a spreadsheet. Several minutes. The fix takes fifteen seconds. Do that a hundred times and you see why I built software. bit.ly/46QW1gD 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 18/08/2026A perfect focus ring is useless when a sticky header is sitting on top of it. That's WCAG 2.4.11 - if something takes keyboard focus, your own content can't entirely hide it. scroll-padding-top on the html element fixes most cases. #a11y 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 14/08/2026user-scalable=no does not block pinch-to-zoom on an iPhone. Safari has ignored it since 2016. Android still enforces it. Same page, same tag, opposite answers - and desktop reflow testing never catches it. 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 12/08/2026People keep asking if it's time to prep for WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 3, so I read the draft. The section everyone writes about is labeled Exploratory, and the Bronze threshold says "to be determined." Today 1pm Pacific. youtu.be/cd82ZiwmY9o 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 07/08/2026A freelance developer told me why she was looking at our software. Her answer had nothing to do with the software. She's a team of one. She wanted people behind her, not a better dashboard. When you do a11y work alone, the hard part isn't knowing what's broken. It's keeping up. 100
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 30/07/2026Tomorrow's the last day to join this cohort of the AAArdvark Circle. If accessibility has been a big, vague, intimidating thing on your list, this is the most direct way I know to make it feel manageable. $549/yr locked for life, kicks off Aug 7. bit.ly/4aAAoVn 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 27/07/2026"I have a master's in software development, and accessibility was never in the curriculum." A developer told me that last week. When accessibility gets missed, it's almost never that people don't care. It's that no one ever taught them. That's a far more hopeful problem to solve. #a11y 021
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 16/07/2026Accessibility work can be lonely - often you're the only one who cares, and when you hit a wall there's no one to ask. That's why I run the AAArdvark Circle: a small group, monthly masterminds + Q&A. New cohort starts Aug 7, doors close July 31. bit.ly/4aAAoVn 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 15/07/2026Scanners made finding automated issues easy. That's the only easy part. The issues you only catch by hand, and fixing any of it, are still hard. Today at 1pm Pacific I'm giving an AI agent a broken site + our AAArdvark context to see how much it can fix, live. youtu.be/dj2mbNkEACY 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 09/07/2026Tomorrow I'm hosting our Circle session on using AI in accessibility work. Not "AI is amazing." Not "AI is dangerous." The useful version: where exactly does it stop helping and start needing you? Today's the day to join if you want to be there live. a20y.com/circle 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 08/07/2026A carousel that only advances by swiping leaves out everyone who can't swipe: head pointers, eye tracking, tremors, one finger. That's WCAG 2.5.1 Pointer Gestures. The fix: add previous and next buttons. Keep the swipe, just don't make it the only way in. #a11y 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 06/07/2026We spent close to seven months rebuilding Visual Mode, the part of AAArdvark people rely on most. It already worked - that was the problem. "Works" isn't "works reliably," and reliable is a feature. Rebuilt from the ground up: loads cleanly, easier logins. Give it another look. #a11y 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 04/07/2026AI is a brilliant assistant and a terrible author. It'll draft alt text, captions, a fix. None is finished. It reasons about the accessibility tree but has never used the page. Where AI stops and you take over is our July 10 Circle session. Join by then to be there live. bit.ly/4aAAoVn 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 01/07/2026My team audited a community college site that had an accessibility overlay installed the whole time. We still found a long list of issues it never touched. Today I'm testing one live, by keyboard and screen reader, and digging into the 2026 lawsuit data. Come watch: bit.ly/4g5Ty8q #a11y 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 25/06/2026Build anything, anything, and people come out of the woodwork wanting to buy it. I get "want to sell AAArdvark?" emails almost daily. The answer's no. But the knocking isn't really about your thing being special. It's proof you finished something real. Keep building. 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 23/06/2026The accessibility alphabet soup (ADA, Section 508, EAA, VPAT, Trusted Tester) scares people off before they start. The secret: almost all of it traces back to WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), the technical standard. Learn that, then just know which law applies to whom. 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 23/06/2026"Move fast and break things" is ableism wearing a startup t-shirt. The stuff that breaks first is what disabled people depend on: focus order, labels, contrast, alt text. None of it shows up in a launch demo. Move fast if you want. Just decide on purpose what you won't break. 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 17/06/2026I've tested so many tab components that look perfect and break the moment you press an arrow key. Today I'm building accessible tabs from scratch, live, testing with a screen reader at every step, using the ARIA tabs pattern. Come build with me: bit.ly/3QH8AqL #a11ybit.lyBuilding Accessible Tabs From ScratchTabs look simple. A row of labels, a panel of content, click to switch. So why do so many tab components trap keyboard users, confuse screen readers, or do n... 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 16/06/2026Most accessibility issues aren't bugs. They're design decisions. IBM found ~67% start in design, not code - the contrast, the unlabeled form, the "learn more" links. By code review you're catching most issues at the priciest moment to fix it. Move the conversation earlier. #a11y 153
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 13/06/2026For years I thought I was good at accessibility. Keyboard nav, contrast, passing scans. Then I listened to a screen reader read one of my own sites and it was a mess. You don't know what you don't know. Finding that out isn't failure - it's the job. #a11y 010
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 09/06/2026Marketers just discovered alt text. They think it'll get them picked up by ChatGPT. Maybe it will, maybe it won't - nobody's proven that. But alt text was always worth writing. For the screen reader user who landed on your post a decade ago. #a11y 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 07/06/2026Had an idea knocking around my head for ages. Tried Midnight Sprint by Hannah Siegertsz and minutes later it was fully baked, name and branding included. Free right now, V2 coming. If you keep circling an idea but never start, give it a look: midnightsprint.sheshipssaas.com 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 06/06/2026What I've spent months on: plain-English fix instructions for every accessibility failure our scanner can flag. More than 300 written so far. The industry solved finding problems. It never solved fixing them. A finding without a fix is just a guilt trip. We're closing that gap, one at a time. #a11y 010
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 03/06/2026I've watched teams get a clean scan and think they were done. The scanner sees about a third of what matters. The rest takes a human. Today 1pm PT I'm going live to make the gap visible: pass the scanners, then test by keyboard and screen reader to find the rest. bit.ly/3PC9VPk 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 02/06/2026The right way to hide content from sighted users but keep it for screen readers isn't display:none (that hides it from everyone) or left:-9999px (old trick, breaks scrolling). Use an .sr-only class with clip-path. Small snippet, big difference. #a11y 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 28/05/2026You are temporarily abled. Burned fingers. Arm in a sling. Vertigo. Parent holding a baby. Cracked AirPods on a train. Allergies wrecking low-contrast text. None tick "disabled" on a form. All need your site to work. Disability isn't a fringe. It's most of us, eventually. #a11y 010
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 26/05/2026Missed the same 12-pixel close button three times last week. Steady hands. Mouse. Sitting still. The button still won. That's WCAG 2.5.8 failing in real time. Tap targets need 24 by 24 CSS pixels in WCAG 2.2 AA. Walked through the most common failures and CSS fixes on LinkedIn today. #a11y 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 21/05/2026Five things on GAAD (Global Accessibility Awareness Day): 1 Scanners catch a third. 2 Semantic HTML does most of the work. 3 Keyboard support is the wedge. 4 ARIA is the last resort, not the safety net. 5 And the hardest part isn't the code. It's making the case to the people writing it. #a11y 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 20/05/2026The case I make most often: accessibility isn't a niche concern, you use accessibility features every day without realizing it. Going live at 1pm PT today to walk through the framing. Tomorrow is GAAD (Global Accessibility Awareness Day). bit.ly/4tF0f4e 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 19/05/2026The "separate accessible version" pitch is the web equivalent of the freight elevator in the back. Even when it works, it tells disabled users they're a separate audience, not a default one. Fix the main site, not the workaround. #a11y 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 16/05/2026For 20 years, my accessibility workflow felt like a data entry job. Scanner, export, spreadsheet, hand-craft a report. The actual work was 30% of the time. Nobody had built a tool that fit. So we did. AAArdvark has a free plan. No demo call. a20y.com 010
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 13/05/2026Most a11y debates aren't really about accessibility. They're about unnamed priorities. Compliance, user experience, time-to-market - these aren't the same goal. They produce different roadmaps. The fastest way to make better accessibility decisions: be honest about what you're optimizing for. 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 09/05/2026You used to be able to dismiss a11y warnings in AAArdvark but never confirm them - so every scan felt like starting over. Now: one-click confirm or dismiss, batch across instances. Warnings become errors. The list shrinks as you review it. We built this because we needed it. 000
nataliemac7.bsky.social @nataliemac7.bsky.social · 06/05/2026The most broken ARIA I've reviewed was almost always written by experienced devs. ARIA fails confidently - the UI works, but the announcement is wrong. The fix isn't more ARIA knowledge. It's testing what you ship. Live demos today 1pm PT: bit.ly/3P35AEr 000
