You’re using a password manager. The site forces you to type the password manually because it doesn’t allow clipboard access.
Or you’re trying to log in. The site asks you to prove you’re not a robot. You click through eight squares showing traffic lights. One has a tiny piece in it. You misclick. Try again. Fail twice more. After ten minutes, you give up planning to try and pay your bills tomorrow.
Comments closedI’ve had some time off from this blog, from work, and had hoped to just relax. Apparently, that wasn’t in the cards for my vacation. But nonetheless, I’m back and at the desk planning out the next few articles, as well as some ideas on where I think the industry is headed, or should be in my opinion.
Comments closedIn the Sherlock Holmes story “Silver Blaze,” the key clue is that a dog did nothing. The dog didn’t bark when an intruder entered. That silence was the evidence.
Your website has the same problem.
A user submits a form. The page doesn’t reload. A loading spinner appears. It vanishes. Something happened—maybe success, maybe failure, maybe the system just gave up. But nothing spoke. Nothing announced. The status message was painted on the screen for sighted users and completely invisible to anyone who couldn’t see it.
Comments closedHere’s the thing about screen readers that most developers never learn until it’s too late: they don’t see what you see. They don’t render pixels. They don’t read CSS. They read the accessibility tree.
And if your HTML is a <div> with a click handler and no label, the accessibility tree has nothing to say. To a screen reader, that <div> doesn’t exist.
That’s the core problem WCAG 4.1.2: Name, Role, Value addresses. And honestly, it’s the single most important criterion for making your interface visible to assistive technology.
Comments closedEver since A New Hope dropped in 1977, and I saw how R2-D2 helped Luke & Han rescue Leia, I’ve wanted my own Droid. Not a marketing gimmick, not a surveillance drone—just a little friend to help organize my life. A pocket R2-D2. For decades, I chased every piece of tech that came out, hoping to find the magic. Digital notebooks, mini laptops, PDAs, iPads, iPhones, Verizon’s Official Star Wars themed Droid phone (yeah, I’m that nerdy). Nothing stuck.
Comments closedYou’re shopping online at your favorite store. You set up an account for future visits. You fill out your name, email, shipping address, billing info, card details. You save the info.
You start shopping and add some items to the cart. The checkout form asks for all that information again. Name, email, address, card. All of it. Fresh blanks.
You stare at the screen. “Didn’t you already know this?”
Comments closedImagine buying a car. You sign a contract. Then you discover the dealership changed the interest rate after you clicked “Accept.” Or you transfer money to a bank account. You confirm the transaction. Then you realize you sent it to the wrong person—and the funds are gone.
These aren’t typos. These aren’t forgotten passwords. These are consequential actions with legal, financial, or irreversible data implications.
And if your interface doesn’t protect users from making these mistakes, you’re not just violating WCAG—you’re exposing yourself to liability.
That’s the core of WCAG 3.3.4: Error Prevention. Unlike 3.3.3, which is about helping users fix field-level validation errors, 3.3.4 is about preventing catastrophic mistakes before they happen.
Comments closedYou submit a form. An error flashes: “Invalid.” That’s it.
Invalid what? Invalid how? Invalid because you used the wrong format, or invalid because the email is already taken, or invalid because the server had a seizure and forgot what an email even is?
For all the user knows, the system is lying. The form is broken. They’re blocked, with nowhere to go.
That’s where WCAG 3.3.3: Error Suggestion comes in. And its message is simple: tell people how to fix it.
Comments closedBefore I Can Fill It, I Need to Know What You’re Asking
There’s a form I encountered recently that had twelve fields. No labels. Just placeholder text inside each input that disappeared the moment you started typing. If you forgot what a field was asking for, you had to delete everything you’d entered just to see the hint again.
Twelve fields. Zero labels. Infinite frustration.
That’s not a design choice. That’s a barrier. And it’s exactly the kind of thing WCAG 3.3.2: Labels or Instructions exists to dismantle.
Comments closedThis post discusses eating disorders, mental health, adverse medication reactions, and hospitalization. If you’re struggling, please reach out to a healthcare professional. You deserve support.
Three months ago, I published “When Algorithms Forget You’re Human.” I wrote about my wife—recovering from an eating disorder, doing well (over a decade with no lapse), dealing with weight gain from disability changes—and how social media kept serving her GLP-1 ads. Skin removal surgery. Weight loss programs. Sono Bello showed up eleven times after she blocked them.
I wrote about how algorithms don’t respect choices. How Amazon Prime offers no way to mark content as problematic. How AI systems act as yes men. How platforms treat vulnerability as revenue opportunity.
Today is three months to the day since that post.
My wife is in a hospital bed.
Comments closed
