We Are All Temporarily Abled
Accessibility is filed as a minority concern, but the “normal user” it’s usually sacrificed for doesn’t actually exist — except in the demo.
The Caption Generation
Captions were won by deaf audiences after decades of pressure. Now the hearing majority has discovered them — and a feature built for one population is quietly being rebuilt for another.
The Alt Text Problem Nobody Wants to Solve
Alt text has been a one-attribute job for thirty years, and it is still the second most common failure on the web. The problem was never the typing.
The Website That Would Not Let Her Die
Closing a dead person's accounts means proving a death to systems built for password resets. Every consumer platform is designed for acquisition and retention — and death is the one exit nobody designed.
A Week Online With the Screen Turned Off
Our reporter used the internet the way a blind user does — screen dark, voice only — for seven days. Banking took an hour. Ordering dinner took three tries. Twitter, weirdly, worked.
The Patient Portal Is Not for Patients
The law ended the era of waiting by the phone for your results. In its place: raw pathology reports at 3 a.m., written in the hospital’s native language, with no one left in the room to translate.
Overlay Nation: The Widgets That Promise Accessibility in One Line of Code
Accessibility overlays are a rare product where the customer and the user are different people — and the product only has to satisfy one of them.
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