Eric Bailey

Eric Bailey

@ericwbailey.website

#accessibility / #a11y advocate, post enjoyer.

9.3K followers2.3K following1.9K posts

Eric Bailey reposted

king lola 👑
@lolaodelola.bsky.social

📢 I need 160 more web developers to answer 1 important question. How do you interpret the "Fully Supported" label on MDN support tables? Let me know in the survey below and tell your web developer friends to answer too 🙏🏾 github.com/lolaslab/acd...

github.comHow Do You Interpret BCD "Fully Supported"? · lolaslab acd-site · Discussion #3Every MDN reference page has a browser compatibility table at the bottom of the page which says the support status for the feature across browsers. The browser compat table for <example-feature> lo...

Eric Bailey reposted

king lola 👑
@lolaodelola.bsky.social

📢 Web developers, I need your help! I've made a very short survey, literally just one question, about how you interpret "Fully supported" or the tick in the support tables on MDN. Please take a minute to answer the question: github.com/lolaslab/acd...

github.comHow Do You Interpret BCD "Fully Supported"? · lolaslab acd-site · Discussion #3Every MDN reference page has a browser compatibility table at the bottom of the page which says the support status for the feature across browsers. The browser compat table for <example-feature> lo...

Eric Bailey reposted

Jess Fink🍉🌈
@jessfink.bsky.social

The reason the saying "that's bananas" is so good is because at one point in history bananas were so new, unusual, out of the ordinary, that we needed to talk about it

Eric Bailey reposted

Passle ☭
@passle.dev

Replying to @passle.dev

Kind of mourning tech in general a lil bit. There used to be a sense of "thats impressive, or cool, or interesting" whenever some new open source project or app was announced, and now everything feels a bit empty and uninspiring

Eric Bailey
@ericwbailey.website

time to play the game of “is this a LLM swarm, a schizophrenic developer with a cluster of alts, or some definitely fun and exciting hybrid of the two”

Eric Bailey
@ericwbailey.website

Welcome to tech blogging! Where you externalize your expertise, but are only taken seriously when you link to someone else's externalization of their expertise.

Eric Bailey reposted

Robert Kingett
@weirdwriter.caneandable.social.ap.brid.gy

An Open Letter to Matt Mullenweg on Accessibility in WordPress https://blindaccessjournal.com/2026/10/an-open-letter-to-matt-mullenweg-on-accessibility-in-wordpress/ #Wordpress

blindaccessjournal.comAn Open Letter to Matt Mullenweg on Accessibility in WordPressOctober 18, 2026 Dear Mr. Mullenweg, I am writing to you publicly as a blind daily screen reader user, an IAAP Certified Professional in Web Accessibility (CPWA), and the publisher of Blind Access Journal. Many of our readers, and many of my professional colleagues, are authors, creators, publishers, developers and site owners with disabilities who rely on WordPress every day. I am choosing to make this letter public because the decisions at issue were made in public, they affect a very large community of people, and that community deserves to hear your answers directly. My concern is your recent action on WordPress Trac ticket #50486, “Improve the admin notices accessibility”, and what it signals about the future of accessibility in WordPress. ### What the Ticket Was Meant to Fix Ticket #50486 was opened in 2020 to address a basic barrier. Admin notices in WordPress carry no semantics that identify them to assistive technology. When a notice appears, a screen reader user is not told about it, and a keyboard user has no way to move directly to it. In practice, people like me can miss confirmations, warnings and errors that sighted users see at a glance. The ticket was postponed through many release cycles. Earlier this month, a modest fix was finally committed. It placed notices in a navigable landmark and added a notice count to the page title, which is the first thing a screen reader announces when a page loads. After six years, it represented real progress. ### What Happened Next The change surfaced legitimate technical problems, including notice counts appearing on the Dashboard and in the block editor when no notices were visible, and contributors were actively working through fixes. Refining or reverting an imperfect change is a normal part of software development, and the revert commit that followed explained its technical reasoning clearly. My concern is not that the work was revised. My concern is how the decision was made and what accompanied it. Your first comment on this six-year-old accessibility ticket was an instruction to revert all of the work. In the same comment, you told Andrea Fercia that he no longer holds any WordPress.org positions or authority and was “invited to contribute your talents to another project.” No technical reasoning was offered on the ticket. As reported by The Repository on October 16, you later said in WordPress Slack that you were simply no longer interested in his contributions. I acknowledge that you also apologized for the temporary locking of his account and said that was not your intent. Mr. Fercia has contributed to 33 WordPress releases, has been a core committer for a decade, and is one of the most experienced accessibility specialists the project has had. Removing him in this way, on an accessibility ticket and in the middle of active collaboration on that ticket, sends an unmistakable signal to disabled users and to the people who advocate for us. ### A Pattern That Concerns Our Community This does not stand alone. In August, you declared that the Accessibility Team had overstepped its authority, usefulness and charter, and that any other team or committer could override its suggestions. In 2025, you proposed developing accessibility improvements as a canonical plugin rather than in core. Taken together, these actions make it difficult for disabled users to know whether accessibility remains a core value of WordPress or is now treated as an obstacle to progress. Accessibility cannot be optional for the people who need it. When it lives outside core, or depends on the standing of individual advocates, people with disabilities are the ones left behind. The effect on contributors matters too. Several respected members of the WordPress community have said publicly that they feel unable to speak freely about these events. A project that depends on volunteer and sponsored contributions cannot build accessible software if the people doing that work fear the consequences of doing it. ### Important Questions In the spirit of openness that the WordPress project has long championed, I respectfully ask you to answer the following questions publicly: 1. Do you consider accessibility a core requirement of WordPress, on equal footing with performance, security and usability, rather than an optional enhancement? 2. What is your plan, and the expected timeline, for making admin notices perceivable and navigable for screen reader and keyboard users, now that the work on ticket #50486 has been moved to a future release? 3. What authority and role will the Accessibility Team hold going forward, and how will its expertise be incorporated into decisions that affect disabled users? 4. What process and criteria were applied in removing Andrea Fercia’s roles, and what process will govern similar decisions in the future, consistent with the project’s Code of Conduct? 5. What commitment can you make to authors, creators, developers and site owners with disabilities that the tools they depend on will remain accessible to them? ### An Invitation to Respond WordPress powers a large share of the web, and its choices shape what millions of people, including millions of people with disabilities, can read, publish and build. Clear answers would go a long way toward restoring trust. Should you choose to respond, Blind Access Journal will publish your response in full and without edits, so our readers can hear directly from you. To our readers, and to everyone in the WordPress community who shares these concerns: I encourage you to read The Repository’s reporting and the ticket history for yourselves, and to add your voice respectfully and constructively. Sincerely, Darrell Hilliker, CPWA Publisher, Blind Access Journal

Eric Bailey reposted

Sara Soueidan
@sarasoueidan.com

Tomorrow, October 16th, marks Practical Accessibility's third birthday. 🎂 To celebrate, I am gifting everybody 25% off for the next 48 hours 🎁 Individual and team licenses alike! The discount is automatically applied during checkout—no code is needed. 👉🏻 practical-accessibility.today Enjoy! #a11y

practical-accessibility.todayThe Practical Accessibility CourseA get-right-down-to-it online course for Web designers and developers who want to start creating more accessible Web user interfaces and digital products today
Eric Bailey
@ericwbailey.website

Another day, another agent-sent email requesting unpaid time reviewing some vibe-coded rent-seeking accessibility service that already exists for free.

Eric Bailey reposted

Ashlee 🤟🏻
@ashleemboyer.com

Dang! Wrote the next issue of #TheAccessibilityPond. I’m sending it out either tomorrow or Thursday! Where to sign up if you want it in your inbox: buttondown.com/the-accessib...

buttondown.comThe Accessibility PondMore than a newsletter. Find community, support, resources, and co-conspirators. From Ashlee at Semantic Fish Creative Group.
Ashlee 🤟🏻@ashleemboyer.com

I think I'd completely forgotten how to blog for a couple years there but the feeling might finally be coming back to me?? I hope, because if so that's a lovely sign from the executive function part of my brain!

Eric Bailey reposted

TetraLogical
@tetralogical.com

Introducing the Accessible Components Library! Common components with accessibility requirements, test scenarios, and automated tests. • Free to use and adapt • Human-readable tests in Gherkin • Mapped to WCAG 2.2, levels A to AAA Dig in! #Accessibility #OpenSource #WCAG #AccessibleComponents

tetralogical.comIntroducing the Accessible Components Library - TetraLogicalWe've open-sourced our Accessible Components Library, and, as you might expect, this includes the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. But, we thought, &quot;Why stop there?&quot; So, we've also published ...
Eric Bailey
@ericwbailey.website

I'm still processing a lot about the move, but it does admittedly feel good leaving every conversation with my new manager not feeling like some sort of inarticulate freak

Eric Bailey reposted

Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social

In the vein of "public libraries could never be created today," a pitch for a calculator would get you thrown out of the boardroom. What do you mean, it just maths? Where are the ads supposed to go? How does it send usage telemetry back if it doesn't even have wifi? There isn't even a leaderboard.

This post is unavailable.

Eric Bailey reposted

Sarah Higley
@codingchaos.bsky.social

Wrote a thing on why we should have interactive lists on the web: sarahmhigley.com/writing/inte... If anyone has their own interactive list use cases that aren't covered, send them to me! I'm putting together an ARIA spec PR this month.

sarahmhigley.comThe web needs interactive lists | Sarah HigleyA plea to developers: if this gets created, let's not fuck it up. This is a slightly more spec-heavy post than usual, but hopefully still useful.

Eric Bailey reposted

Jim Nielsen
@jim-nielsen.com

📝 Really enjoyed this talk. Alex covers lots of great topics, like - When did “modernize” come to mean updating something that’s only ~5 years old? - Do technological choices have values tied to them? (Spoiler: they do) - HTML is amazing. My notes here: blog.jim-nielsen.com/2026/talk-no...

blog.jim-nielsen.com“Getting off the Modernization Treadmill”My notes from this talk by Alexander Petros at Big Sky DevCon 2026 . Alex starts by noting how “modernize” used to mean something along the lines of “update…
Eric Bailey
@ericwbailey.website

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature.” he mumbled to himself, inspecting source.

Eric Bailey reposted

🚲insert into haunted select uid from partisans where party = "R"
@db-user.bsky.social

fwiw lots of tech companies have this clause too for dev/ops too bad software devs are too busy dumping OSS into the wood chipper to unionize and fight similarly for rights over their own work

Michael Iantorno@michaeliantorno.com

"Currently, if an employee makes anything creative in their free time, with their own resources, Hasbro can claim ownership. What we do in our free time should not be dictated by the company, and what we make in our free time should belong to us.“

rascal.newsThe workers at Wizards of the Coast are teaming upWorkers at Dungeons & Dragons and Magic the Gathering demand ownership of personal work made off the clock.

Eric Bailey reposted

Cj
@cjaythecreator.bsky.social

Replying to @knowler.dev

Safari bugs always appear at the exact intersection of: rare enough to ignore and annoying enough to haunt you

Eric Bailey reposted

zeroheight
@zeroheight.com

Undocumented decisions don't stay undecided. They get decided by whoever or whatever is building next. Nathania explores why cognitive accessibility belongs in your design system, and why it's every role's responsibility 👇 https://hubs.li/Q04ydHVV0

Eric Bailey reposted

Stefan Judis
@stefanjudis.com

I took a short break, but now it's Web Weekly time again! 🥂 I'm just about to write edition 200. 😱 If you're into WebDev, Frontend work, and browser "stuff", you should check it out. 👇 webweekly.email