Eric Bailey

ericwbailey · ericwbailey.website · English

Accessibility advocate, writer, developer, and speaker

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Last post: Sep 18, 2026
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Site title: Eric Bailey – Accessibility advocate, writer, developer, and speaker
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CSS-Tricks could be a co-op
Sep 18, 2026 · original
I owe a lot of my professional identity and success to CSS-Tricks. CSS-Tricks repeatedly gave me the opportunity to write for them. In doing so, the immense popularity and huge reach of the publication helped to both socialize and normalize accessibility as a mainstream frontend concern . I’m deeply thankful to them for this. The team was also a joy to work with, notably Geoff Graham . He’s a mensch, and one of the nicest people you can interact with in the frontend web space. CSS-Tricks as a website has also effectively died twice now due to Digital Ocean’s mismanagement . If you have not been following the news about the site, Kevin Powell has a good video about the whole situation: Skip YouTube video embed. Content skipped. I’m not speaking on behalf of Geoff, Chris , or others involved with running the current version of CSS-Tricks. I’ve got skin in the game as an author—this is my p
A proposal for new Netflix content rating icons
Aug 25, 2026 · original
The lack of nuance you can explicitly express as an individual is one of the many, many things I dislike about the algorithmically-determined content recommendation systems we are trapped inside of. These preferences are instead inferred via system-observed behavior. They are also only as sophisticated as the teams responsible for creating the automation to sort and categorize the inputs and events the system has access to. The complexity of a thinking, feeling person in the world cannot be distilled down into a JSON file. This is immaterial to the systems that compel and collect this data , and I resent this fact. It is difficult to come to terms with these imperfect digital systems, how they evaluate and categorize us, and how they fail to represent who we truly are and what we wish to be. Don’t even get me started on the automated decision-making aspects, either. As an optimist, we wo
Here’s yet another metaphor about tech debt
Aug 4, 2026 · original
The city next to the town I grew up in had a shopping center that was built atop a sanitary landfill. For those unfamiliar, creating a sanitary landfill involves taking landfill waste, spreading it into thin layers, compacting it, then paving over it. It enjoyed popularity as a practice in the 60s and 70s. I’m all but sure this shopping center was built in the mid-to-late 70s. It was the 90s when I was a kid and started going to it. Of note was a Kmart that I’d frequent with my parents when running errands. At some point, the certain parts of the tile floor of the Kmart started to buckle and bubble—their edges tinged with an ominous yellowish brown color. The reason for this is that is that the landfill was sealed improperly—accumulating methane and carbon dioxide gasses was pushing decomposing waste upwards and outwards. The employees put up some warning signage around the worst of it,
The case for an accessibility designer vibe coding when all his coworkers are also vibe coding
Jun 15, 2026 · original
I have complicated feelings about LLMs. I mean, a lot of people I know do. But this is also my blog, so I get to pontificate on those feelings and people… willingly read about them? When it comes to vibe coding, I have to separate my personal thoughts and feelings from my professional. It’s not fun. Emotionally, I feel like someone is holding a gun to the back of my head, and that gun is somehow hooked up to three trillion off-brand diesel engines firing on all cylinders . Intellectually, I know I’m an American and need uninterrupted healthcare. Who is being centered? While the industry races the clock to figure out how to make all this productive or profitable , the question I keep asking myself is: Am I letting my own personal beliefs and biases affect the outcome I ultimately want? For me, the desirable outcome is enabling disabled people to use technology where they previously could
Announcing What Can’t I Press?
Jun 15, 2026 · original
I made an app! What Can’t I Press? is an app that allows you to: Read, search, and filter through screen reader keyboard shortcuts. Scan open apps and add their keyboard shortcuts to the collection. Copy a keyboard shortcut to your clipboard, with modifier keys to format the keyboard shortcut in different ways. Export the list of keyboard shortcuts in its current state as JSON. It is intended to be both a reference and a discovery tool. Here’s a quick demo of it in action: Video description Two open apps placed side-by-side on macOS: TextEdit and What Can't I Press? TextEdit is open to a blank document. What Can't I Press? shows a search input, an expand/collapse all toggle button, a list of 4 disclosures in a collapsed state, a notification message, a shortcut filter input, a download icon, and two buttons labeled "Scan all open apps" and "Scan last focused app". The disclosures are lab
Evolved antennas, LLM-generated code, and a potential antifuture
May 11, 2026 · original
I think about evolved antennas a lot. If you’re not familiar, an evolved antenna is created when you set an evolutionary algorithm on the task of producing a structure that is as efficient at its intended function as possible. Past that there’s no human input, the algorithm just does its thing. It: Modifies elements of the initial design, Evaluates how well the design would perform according to a set of requirements, Adds or discards the changes accordingly, then Repeats until a success threshold has been achieved via iteration. Some evolved antenna practices also create a series of designs in parallel. They then pit the outputs against each other as a final layer of proving out efficacy. This process mimics natural selection . Here, mutations that are beneficial to surviving in an environment are passed through generations. It also creates absolutely wild, alien outputs: Source: Human-C
A compelling title that is cryptic enough to get you to take action on it
Apr 9, 2026 · original
A bold first sentence that draws you in. A steering second sentence to set you further down the path. A third sentence that tantalizes and alludes to content to follow. Following is an initial explanatory paragraph. It serves to help back up the previous paragraphs, and start to ground it in more applicable information. Expectations are set, and potential skepticism is addressed. A link to prior art is supplied, to provide additional context. There is then a paragraph that serves as a segue. It connects the high-level concepts and begins to draw them down the realm of the practical. A subheading to help segment the content This paragraph begins to answer the questions in the reader’s mind that the segue paragraph introduced. It begins with level-setting. Certain key concepts are bolded to accommodate people who skim. Following that is supplying more context, albeit still at a relatively
Here’s how to instruct a LLM to reference the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide
Feb 16, 2026 · original
Say you’re working with a LLM and training it to write good frontend code. Good frontend code is accessible code , so of course you want to instruct the LLM to produce it. However, the bulk of frontend code on the web is inaccessible to some degree. Also know here that LLMs are trained on the majority of the world’s frontend code. Similarly, many contemporary LLM-friendly UI libraries claim to be accessible, but may have varying degrees of support when manually evaluated. The deck is a bit stacked , folks. Given that, you need to get creative about how to handle the LLM’s training . It might seem like a good idea to instruct an LLM—reference, skill, agent, sub-agent, what have you—to reference the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide ( APG ), because it lists a lot of common UI patterns , right? Well, sorta. The reality of things The APG was created to demonstrate ARIA’s capabilities . Because
You probably shouldn’t be annotating focus order
Feb 4, 2026 · original
Hey there, fellow designer! Chances are good you’ve been linked to this after doing some annotation work on a design you've been creating. First off, I want to thank you for taking the time to address accessibility considerations in your work. No, seriously. I mean it. Accessibility-oriented annotations are still a relatively rare thing in our industry. I applaud your efforts to buck that trend, and hope that this post does not dissuade you from future attempts. On focus order There’s a subtle thing at play here, and it mostly revolves around the notion that adding something demonstrates effort and value. For focus order, you’ll actually want to suppress that urge and just let things be. Yes, many accessibility annotation kits do come with the ability to specify focus order. And yes, being able to place focus on the interactive parts of your website or web app is an important thing. Howe
How an accessibility designer adds keyboard shortcuts to a web app
Jan 28, 2026 · original
This is another window into the sometimes unglamorous-yet-vital tasks that being an accessibility designer demands. Keyboard shortcuts occupy a strange area for web design. Most websites don’t have them, and that’s totally fine. However, it makes more sense for web apps to utilize them. Web apps utilize keyboard shortcuts for speedier navigation and operation, for people who want or need to spend extended periods of time using the service. It’s the same as non-web apps. That said, there’s a lot of nuance when it comes to adding a keyboard shortcut . It feels a lot like something akin to navigating through the Swiss Cheese model , but for good. The support table placed later on in this post is the result of research I conducted at work as a result of acknowledging said nuance. The task itself was to figure out how to get better support for Home , End , Page Up , and Page Down behavior for
Evaluating Fable’s pay-per-project offering
Nov 5, 2025 · original
I was kindly approached by Fable with an offer to evaluate their new pay-per-project model. It is a project-based option for accessibility practitioners, champions, and product teams that delivers quick feedback from disabled people who use assistive technology. This service offering addresses a gap left by organizations and individuals who cannot use a more longterm subscription-based engagement. The idea behind this new model is to increase access to feedback from disabled, daily assistive technology users . Pay-per-project targets: Larger organizations with longer procurement cycles, Agencies and consultants with variable-sized clients, as well as Startups and growing businesses who have to be strategic with budgets and resources. I strongly believe in both: Making learning about accessibility more open, approachable, and affordable, as well as The direct representation from disabled
On inclusive personas and inclusive user research
Jul 31, 2025 · original
I am not a big fan of personas . They’re oft-abused tools whose utility is far too frequently not interrogated, and consequently create more harm than good. Recently, the accessibility arm of a government web services team put their “inclusive personas” out onto the internet. These personas were a set of hypothetical people, each with a different disability condition. The goal of this resource was to get people aware of, and designing for accessibility concerns and considerations. Generally-speaking, that’s a great idea! The earlier in the process that you can get people considering accessibility, the better. However, exposing disability-related information in the form of inclusive personas is a misstep . I do not question the experience and proficiency of the accessibility practitioners who created these personas. In fact, I’m sure a ton of research and effort went into the work. Despit
Newsletters that regularly hit my inbox these days
Jul 14, 2025 · original
Full disclosure: I shamelessly stole this idea from Marc Thiele because I like it so much. Like Marc, I am also motivated by FOMO . Trying to stay on top of things in a fast-paced industry has been made difficult on account of social media fragmentation. RSS has its own place in my daily reading rituals. So does doomscrolling. That said, I also really like newsletters . Enough, in fact, that I also put out my own . Email newsletters occupy a comfortable space between the accidental discovery of browsing social media and the intent-driven act of reading a feed of subscribed blog updates. They also break up the tedium of staying on top of email, most of which is regrettably transactional at this point. So, with that established! Here’s a sampling of some of the newsletters I look forward to reading as of late: Accessibility Accessibility Weekly A must-read if you work in digital accessibil
You MUST listen to RFC 2119
Jun 30, 2025 · original
I shared the following message on a Discord server I participate in with some friends: having a very normal day where I have to read RFC 3986, as one does To which a friend quickly replied: …are you having a linking argument? 😅 I then demanded to know if they knew what RFC 3986 was off the top of their head, to which they replied that the only one they knew by number is RFC 2119 . This is to say this Discord is full of delightful web nerds. RFC 2119 establishes language around requirement levels. Terms like “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “SHOULD”, and “SHOULD NOT” are helpful when coordinating with engineers. I reference it a lot for work, as I create a lot of accessible component specifications . Because of this familiarity—and because I’m an ass—I fired back in Discord: I want to hire a voice actor to read 2119 in the most over the top, passive-aggressive way possible wait, this is an achievable
Quality is a trap
Jun 25, 2025 · original
Like cicadas emerging from the ground, design industry conversations about quality seem to periodically erupt on social media. Also like cicadas, these articles are as predicable as they are irritating. I can’t count the amount of Medium thinkpieces I’ve seen come and go where an author accidentally stumbles backwards into the problems that drove Phaedrus to have a nervous breakdown in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . Oftentimes these insufferable diatribes are speaking to, and lauding whatever aesthetic Apple marketing pages are using at the time of publication. This is surface-level faff, likely born of frustration around a perceived lack of creative freedom within their organization. To these individuals: Know that design is a team sport and painting is a great hobby to try. Other times the author will fixate on things like arcane details and inside baseball about the creat
Organizing a design system via folksonomy
May 15, 2025 · original
Design systems are organized in an imperative, top-down, hierarchical way. By this, I mean its maintainers decide on categories of content, and then how that content is ordered. This is done as a calculated bet to best serve the known and unknown audiences who consume the design system‘s content. For example, GitHub’s Primer design system divides the world into a Getting Started guide , Primitives , UI Patterns , Components , React Hooks , and guidelines for Contributing . Shopify’s Polaris design system has has a similar approach with its navigation, but includes more options such as Content , Patterns , Tools , etc. Everything in its right place This is the tyranny of category made manifest. Organizing things in this way intrinsically means needing to put each item within the design system in a single location as either a parent or child-level object. Due to sheer probability, this mea
Article pitch for your consideration
Apr 8, 2025 · original
A thing you should know is that you get put on a lot of lists if you spend a decent chunk of time publishing blog posts on your website. Your website and contact information will be shared around on these lists, for the purpose of soliciting you for guest posts. If you’re not familiar with the concept, guest posts are a way for other people to take advantage of your website’s search ranking as a way to divert traffic to other websites. There are benefits to doing this. The most straightforward one is SEO. Here, outward going links serves a heuristic web search engines look to for quality when weighing results. Guest posts can also have some additional gray hat goals, including audience segmenting and identification via things like UTM-driven campaigns . There are also straight-up cons such as linking to spyware, cryptominers and other forms of malware, and browser-based zero day exploits
Tag, you’re it
Mar 18, 2025 · original
I’ve been seeing, and enjoying reading these posts as they pop up in my RSS reader. Dave Rupert tagged me into the chain , so here we go! Why did you start blogging in the first place? With the gift of hindsight, I guess I came up being blog-adjacent. Like Dave, I also had a background in publishing as a youth. I worked for my high school newspaper, and had a part- and then later full-time job at my local newspaper . I also published a weirdo, monkey cheese nerd zine. Its main claims to fame were both pissing off the principal and preventing me from getting dates. Zines are cool and embracing cringe will set you free. I read a ton of blogs, but I never initially thought I’d be be someone who published one. This was due to fear of dog-piling criticism, as well as not thinking I had anything meaningful to contribute. Then I got Kivikoskied . Reader, I strongly encourage you to get Kivikosk
Harm reduction principles for digital accessibility practitioners
Mar 6, 2025 · original
I debuted these principles in my axe-con 2025 talk, It is designed to break your heart: Cultivating a harm reduction mindset as an accessibility practitioner . They are adapted from The National Harm Reduction Coalition ’s original eight principles . My adapted principles reflect philosophical and behavioral changes I’ve been cultivating. This is done to try and offset, and defend against systemic trauma and its resultant depression, burnout, and other negative experiences you can incur when doing digital accessibility work. If you have the time, I’d advise reading the original eight principles . I also recommend watching or reading the talk. I say this not in a self-promotional way, but instead that there is a lot of context that will be helpful in understanding: How these adapted principles came to be, and also The larger mindset shifts and practices that led to their creation. The pri
Evaluating overlay-adjacent accessibility products
Feb 14, 2025 · original
I get asked about my opinion on overlay-adjacent accessibility products with enough frequency that I thought it could be helpful to write about it . There’s a category of third party products out there that are almost, but not quite an accessibility overlay . By this I mean that they seem a little less predatory, and a little more grounded in terms of the promises they make. Some of these products are widgets. Some are browser extensions. Some are apps. Some are an odd fourth thing. Sometimes it’s a case of a solutioneering disability dongle grift, sometimes its a case of good intentions executed in a less-than-optimal way, and sometimes it’s something legitimately helpful. Oftentimes it’s something that lies in the middle area of all of this. Many of them also have some sort of “AI” integration, which is the unfortunate upsell du jour we have to collectively endure for the time being. T

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