Accessibility journey – Oops

March 13, 2024

In December, I shared my accessibility journey. I hoped that my story might encourage other developers to take accessibility more seriously in their work. I recently contacted David Kennedy who curates the Accessibility Weekly newsletter. I thought it might be of interest to the readers of the newsletter. I had read a similar story about another developer from the newsletter earlier that week. David shared a link to my story in this week’s newsletter.

I woke up this morning to an email from Lina at Adnovum. She thanked me for my honesty in sharing my experiences in accessibility. She told me that she had recommended the post to several of their developers who are just starting their journey.

She also shared with me a not-so-accessible part of my post. I have a callout in the post that links to a resource I mentioned in the post. Since writing that post, I did a site refresh where I introduced a light and dark theme. But in the post, I had added inline styles to the callout.

The text color was coming from my new theme but the background color was being applied from the inline styles I had added when I wrote the post.

I am so glad that Lina made me aware of the problem. Of course, I was embarrassed by the issue, especially since it was on a post about accessibility. And many people had linked to the post from the Accessibility Weekly newsletter. The irony of it all.

But this too is part of my accessibility journey. I still make mistakes and choose to learn from them. I am writing this to encourage others not to get discouraged in their accessibility journey. It is a process. We are all growing in this together.

Thanks again Lina for taking the time to reach out and make me aware of the problem.

I think it is important to be vulnerable. I didn’t have to share this. But I hope that doing so will encourage others to embrace where they are at in the journey and keep pushing on so that we can make the Web more accessible to everyone.

I did not realize that David had shared a link to my story in the newsletter until after I read Lina’s email. I had not yet read through the links he shared on Monday. But I had a feeling that might have been how Lina found my post.