SEO is not accessibility, and we have the data to prove it

Among the many ancillary arguments you tend to hear about why you should care about accessibility is the pitch: “Accessibility improves your SEO!” It’s the sweetener accessibility advocates add add when they suspect compliance alone won’t close the deal. And like most such arguments, it contains just enough truth to survive scrutiny – as long […]

Karl Groves - 11/06/2026

WAI-ARIA 1.3 is shaping up to be useful for rich document editors, annotation systems, complex forms, and interfaces where visible content does not always map cleanly to what assistive technologies need. Please note: ARIA 1.3 is still a draft. The current W3C ARIA Working Group charter lists WAI-ARIA as a Living Recommendation, with ARIA 1.3 […]

Karl Groves - 20/05/2026

How to Turn Accessibility Work Into Evidence-Based Progress Digital accessibility programs often begin with good intentions: an audit, a backlog of issues, a remediation plan, maybe a few training sessions. But sooner or later, leadership asks a harder question: Are we actually getting better? For many organizations, that question is difficult to answer. Accessibility work […]

Karl Groves - 29/04/2026

The Overlay Factsheet describes an accessibility overlay as follows: The fundamental constraint you will notice as you dive into the details below is that post-rendered remediation is working against the framework, not with it. React (and similar frameworks) own the DOM. The framework expects to be the single source of truth for element structure, attributes, […]

Karl Groves - 10/04/2026

A VPAT that claims “Supports” across the board is a red flag, not a success. I’ve reviewed hundreds of VPATs—Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates—over the years, and the pattern is unmistakable: many are filed without substantive testing. Organizations create them to satisfy procurement…

Karl Groves - 07/04/2026

And, even moreso: beware of companies who sell them. I performed my first professional accessibility audit in 2006. Since that time, I’ve performed hundreds of accessibility audits for everything from small websites to massive standalone kiosks in Manhattan. I’ve done audits for small one-person e-commerce stores and massive software companies like Google, Adobe, Microsoft, and […]

Karl Groves - 27/03/2026

A Complete Solution Built on the W3C Accessibility Maturity Model Being successful in accessibility isn’t a one-off project. Like all compliance domains, it’s an organizational capability that must be built, measured, and sustained across every function of a business, ranging from how you recruit employees to how you procure software and from how your developers […]

Karl Groves - 20/03/2026

The W3C published an updated Working Draft of WCAG 3.0 on September 4, 2025, and I’ve spent considerable time pulling it apart. The accessibility community has been tracking this specification since the first public working draft dropped in January 2021, and after years of watching the sausage get made this latest draft finally feels like […]

Karl Groves - 03/03/2026

I’ve been working in the accessibility field for over 20 years. I’ve worked as an expert witness in numerous ADA cases, performed scores of accessibility audits, trained well over 1,000 developers around the world, and consulted for some of the biggest public and private sector organizations on earth. Along the way, I’ve worked for both […]

Karl Groves - 19/02/2026

Your website just passed automated accessibility testing with a perfect 100. Your team celebrates. Your compliance officer marks it as resolved. And none of this matters because you’re still locking out millions of people from using your product. This is the reality of relying on automated accessibility tools, which catch approximately 30% of accessibility issues […]

Karl Groves - 03/02/2026