Sara Soueidan

When I see somebody post on how useful they find generative "AI", an angry, defensive post is sure to follow like clockwork Any circulation of a pro-"AI" post on a site with artists, writers, illustrators or the like, will reach the ears of somebody whose life has been severely hurt by the tech

CSS-Tricks is back in good hands. 🙌🏻 Happy to see this and happy for you @geoffgraham.me !

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some of you have never fought for the user and it shows

New newsletter issue will be hitting your inboxes shortly. It's a while since I last checked in, but you can start expecting more frequent emails (but too many) starting today. ✨

It's the time of year where decisions on investment for 2027 are being formulated so it would make a lot of sense to pull all AI spend and invest that money on stuff that actually will produce growth for your organization. There's no point in waiting for the pop. Get ahead of it instead.

For anyone who thinks AI is new, *MY MOM* wrote a bibliography of the literature on AI in 1959. Yes, MY 93-YEAR-OLD MOM. Yes, I'm proud of her. www.google.com/books/editio...

I bought this course today and, only a short way through it, I am absolutely convinced of its quality. I can't wait to continue with it!

A highly recommended course for all developers creating web pages.

“Accessibility-first screen reader prediction” is not a solution, folks. Parsing a DOM and building your _own_ accTree to then *emulate* how desktop screen readers _might_ announce a page as if *maybe* using read-all just ends up putting more burden on human testers. …

This is a top tier course. I learned *a lot* from it and still go back to reference it on a regular basis. So much valuable information. Get it for 25% off while you can.

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

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

Do we need a `<poster>` element? Scott thinks so and is yet again on the journey of extending the web. Scott was also part of bringing lazy loading to videos, and he's on to the next topic: responsive images in video elements. https://scottjehl.com/po...

🎙️I talked with @sarasoueidan.com by the fire. I hope you enjoy as much as I did. #a11y #webDev rss.com/podcasts/fir...

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.

What do you want us to work on in 2027? Here's a web app where you can rank the Interop proposals you care about, giving us data we can use to prioritise feature development. interop-rank.fxdx.dev

we need to be having conversations about Google's influence on web standards because it's increasingly apparent they are using their influence to cause harm as long a number goes up

Plenty of people will refuse to buy a product that used AI (whether as a feature or just a promo). But no one out there will refuse to buy it because there's no AI in it. The profitable choice is not to use AI.

Excited to see we'll eventually have responsive iframes. It's a one-liner in CSS with `frame-sizing: content-height;` but it does require a meta tag to opt-in from the embedded doc as well. Currenly only behind a flag in Chrome, but will be nice to have once it starts landing.

Paperback is a fast, fully accessible reader for ebooks, documents and audio books, written by a blind developer and tested with NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver and TalkBack. Desktop are free downloads; iOS and Android apps are paid (source is MIT licensed if you would rather build them yourself).

Yay!

There's a defeatist vibe rn and I think there's an inevitability feeling washing over us. There is no inevitability. If you're in a position to speak up against the direction the industry is taking, I'd say now is the time to do that. I certainly try because I cannot be fired and it does help!

Have an ACCESSIBILITY.​md file in your GitHub repo? It now shows up on the project root! Don't have one? Why not take some time today to create one. #a11y ericwbailey.website/published/gi...

We're only a handful of tickets to making it bigger than last year (which was our biggest year since I can't remember when). BUY BUY BUY

Can Your AI Pass The Accessibility Test? is another good read about this, and emphasises including feedback from disabled users. In the era of "synthetic user research", I do worry that developers might use agents in place of user research with real people. www.aaron-gustafson.com/notebook/can...

I already have the new “Accessible UX Research” book by Dr Michele A. Williams, classics such as the „Web Accessibility Cookbook“ by @matuzo.at, and “Inclusive Components” by @heydonworks.com and having an eye on the “Practical Accessibility” course by @sarasoueidan.com 👀

If you’d have some education budget to blow before end of the year, what #web #accessibility related things would you spend it on? 💸 Any #courses, #books, etc. to recommend? (Conferences excluded unfortunately)

Funny, one of the reasons I left GitHub is because the powers that be think they can "solve" it by automating it away. That completely ignores the "functional but unusable problem." This creates a scenario where bots can operate something and the people that need the accessible experience cannot.

State of this dev 2026: 🫩

Some more reading on this from people smarter than me, if you're interested: www.techpolicy.press/the-web-is-b...

A week ago today, Inclusive Design 24 #id24 was in full swing. inclusivedesign24.org/2026/schedule/ Missed it live? No worries, all videos are available for free on our YouTube channel www.youtube.com/inclusivedes... #a11y #accessibility #inclusiveDesign

"When I do generate content using #AI, I find that the requirement to check it for accuracy negates any time saved during the writing part." This has always been my experience with tools that are aimed to do the work on your behalf, including #CSS frameworks (when they were most popular).

I'm glad they capture disability types. It's a great reminder that screen reader use is not exclusively for fully blind individuals, and also not exclusively for vision-related disabilities. I wish more people knew this. webaim.org/projects/scr...

The State of Devs results are out and the state of devs is more tired than wired: 2026.stateofdevs.com

New on the blog

I do the biggest chunk of my blog and course writing in my code editor, which currently is VSCode. My favorite color theme for writing happens to be an #accessibility-focused theme called "dislexic", created for dyslexics (with optional astigmatism) marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemNa...