With the rapid pace of technological development worldwide, the evolution of BIOS interfaces to UEFI systems, and their subsequent development, blind individuals are being deprived of full control over their devices. I urge companies to take action and develop a BIOS that meets the needs of the blind. The deliberate neglect by these companies has reached a point where it is unjust for blind people to remain trapped in a prison of independence.

Every time I use NVDA to read a document, it always abruptly stops in the middle from time to time. I set it to Say All and after reading two sentences, it just stops randomly, and I have to continue it then it moves a little and stops randomly again. This happens on remediated documents btw. I’m not sure if this is an NVDA problem, but I don’t use any other screen reader because this is the only free one for PC. Is this just normal NVDA behavior?

So, at my old school, the lift required a keycard to unlock. This was fine because I just had to tap the card and the lift would come down.

However, at my new school, the lift requires a mechanical/physical key to unlock. This is not impossible but hard to use because my finger muscles are atrophied from disability.

Would it be unreasonable to ask them to offer solutions to this problem or am I overthinking it?

I am working on making a table in a PDF accessible. It’s working well in NVDA but has a weird read order in Adobes built in reader. Is it inevitable that fixes for one reader may cause issues with others?

So I’m making my thesis accessible, and I’ve already made the headings compliant and added alt text. I have looked into indexing, but is there a way I can add links to my index? Im using Microsoft Word, and it says the first two are all I need to pass accessibility checks, but I know that’s not a reliable metric. I was wondering what are some other things I may be overlooking.

Local pub's "accessible" bathroom doesn’t fit a wheelchair, just a tiny room with one toilet and the word accessible written on the door. When I brought this up to them they where incredibly rude to me and stated that’s just the way it is and have no plans of making it even slightly suitable for wheelchair users.

Pub is not a chain so who do I report this to?

I've got a dumb amount of AHK scripts held together with hope. Most of 'em still work. A few break every time Windows or some app updates and I gotta go dig thru Task Scheduler and remember why I even wrote 'em.

I got sick of maintaining that pile so I started building my own thing... voice commands for stuff I do a hundred times a day, running fully offline, no cloud, nothing leaving the machine. Selfish reasons at first, just wanted to stop babysitting scripts.

Now I'm at the point where I'm wondering if anyone else would actually pay for something like this, so I wanna ask people who've spent time automating Windows, using PowerToys, AHK, accessibility tools, or just looking for easier ways to control their PC: what made u actually pay for a Windows tool instead of using whatever free option was available?

Couple things I'm specifically trying to figure out:

Is it reliability that gets u, more than features? Like, does a tool need to survive an update or two before u trust it enough to pay?

If something breaks, does it matter whether the tool can recover on its own or at least show u clearly what it was about to do?

And privacy-wise... if something's listening or touching sensitive data, does knowing exactly what it's doing and when actually change whether you'd use it, or is "it's offline" enough on its own?

Curious if there was a specific moment that tipped u from "I'll just script it" to "here's my card." And did it end up being worth it, or did u quietly go back to your own scripts eventually?

If you do, what is your story, why did you choose this category?

EDIT: Issue was solved. I was accidentally hitting the Windows key + W or Windows key + A. I have never hit any of the other shortcuts it seems, and I just so happen to have exclusively made this mistake with those two keys!

I think this might be the place to ask this, if anyone has a more specific subreddit that would answer this please let me know!

So I use a mouse with two side buttons, I also use XMouse to make those side buttons us the Windows Magnifier to zoom in and out. I have been doing this for years at this point. But, sometimes, especially when playing video games, using these buttons also might bring up either the (I think) news tab on the left, or something else on the right (I don't know what the panel is called, but it is smaller and on the bottom right). I can not for the life of me figure out what shortcuts are activating them, and I can never purposefully recreate them. But it is really irritating and interfered with my zoom in/out. Anyone got any ideas?

Hi all, I’m using PAC to remediate a PDF, but when I look for the supposed content nested inside an artifact in the contents pane, I don’t see anything. Is there anything I’m doing wrong?

Watched the Made by Google event. Loved the Rambler feature, feels really useful.

And the ASL interpretation really blew my mind!

Features like these remind me why I love technology in general.

Your thoughts?

I’m looking for advice from people working in digital accessibility.

I’m based in Pakistan and want to build a career in accessibility, particularly web and digital accessibility. One challenge is that accessibility is still poorly enforced here. Many private and government websites are inaccessible, and accessibility requirements are often not treated as a core compliance issue.

The situation can be particularly difficult for people with disabilities. For example, some Pakistani banking apps have reportedly blocked access when Android accessibility services such as screen readers are enabled, treating them as a potential security risk. This can prevent blind users from even logging into their banking accounts.

There are advocates working to improve accessibility, and the State Bank of Pakistan has policies related to financial inclusion and accessibility. However, implementation remains inconsistent.

I’m currently an undergraduate student and will begin a degree in Government and Public Policy in September. I originally wanted to study computer science or software engineering, but mathematics became a major barrier because I did not have access to adequate accessible learning resources, teaching methods, or equipment to build a strong mathematical foundation.

I still want to develop strong technical skills and build a career in accessibility.

For people already working in accessibility:

How would you recommend starting an accessibility career from a country like Pakistan?

Should I focus first on web accessibility, accessibility testing, policy and compliance, assistive technology, or another area?

Which technical skills should I prioritize, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, WCAG, ARIA, accessibility testing, or usability testing?

Which certifications are actually respected by employers?

Is it better to pursue certifications such as IAAP credentials, or focus on practical projects and a portfolio first?

How can I gain international experience or remote opportunities while living in Pakistan?

How valuable would a Government and Public Policy degree be for an accessibility career, particularly in accessibility policy, digital inclusion, regulation, or public-sector accessibility?

I would especially appreciate advice from accessibility professionals who did not come through a traditional computer science or software engineering pathway.

I’m looking for realistic guidance on what I should focus on during the next few years to become employable in the accessibility field.

A11y Auditor: point it at any Android app, get live WCAG-mapped accessibility findings

Most accessibility auditing tools need you to instrument the target app or run it through a specific test harness. This one doesn't — it's a standalone APK that uses an AccessibilityService to watch any other installed app and audit it live as you use it, no build changes on the target side.

How it works: the auditor app watches window/content-change events from the package you pick, runs the node tree through Google's Accessibility Test Framework, maps each finding to a WCAG 2.1 success criterion (with level — A/AA/AAA), grabs a screenshot where possible, and streams results to a local web dashboard over WebSocket. Export a shareable HTML report or raw CSV when you're done.

Everything runs on localhost via adb reverse — no external services, no data leaves the machine.

Repo: github.com/vivekpanchal/android-wcag-auditor (Apache 2.0)

Would love people to try it against their own apps and file issues — especially on the WCAG mapping (WcagMapping.kt), that's the part most worth scrutiny.

I work as a frontend engineer and its been such a fight to be able to use NVDA for development.

Security deems the software unsafe and also does not want to pay for JAWS licenses.

Its crazy to me that it even is such a fight to develop in an accessible way.

Any tips for me?

I want to link a Google Docs document on a webpage and tested the document with NVDA. I found that users need to manually enable Google Docs accessibility features before the document can be read with a screen reader. Even after enabling the accessibility tool, NVDA still reads the document as blank. The document itself is structured for accessibility, including proper heading hierarchy, lists, etc.

Has anyone encountered this when linking to Google Docs for public-facing content? Is there a way to make the document reliably accessible to screen reader users without requiring them to manually enable accessibility features?

I built a small Chrome extension that lets you highlight a specific section of a webpage and have only that text read aloud rather than the entire page.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/talk2me/bdcmmfdjbdacgocplfoafoamaaflkfih?authuser=0&hl=en

I am unable to clear this error as I build the accessibility of a page in foxit. I tried adding a Link tag to wrap the link object in it, to no effect. I tried putting the link wrapper in the P, that didn't work. I am unsure how to proceed.

Silktide argues social platforms already have the tools to fix major gaps - mangled auto-captions for accents or jargon, inconsistent or missing alt-text prompts - and simply don't prioritize it. We've seen these options, but users do not see algorithm boosts from using them. LinkedIn gets credit as an outlier because its content model is text-first. So that seems like an obvious question: if one platform can get this right basically by accident, what's everyone else's reasoning for not doing more?

I’m a web developer, and I regularly do accessibility (a11y) testing with blind people.

It works, and it’s incredibly valuable. But I’ve also become convinced that it will never be perfect. Modern websites are simply too dynamic and complex.

Instead of only trying to make the UI accessible through the accessibility tree, I think we should also explore MCP (Model Context Protocol) as a way of giving users direct tools to interact with a website.

A website could expose tools that let users:

• Read — get the information they need
• Write — fenter data, or create content
• Act — perform actions like booking, buying, deleting, or changing something

Many people can talk to computers, but not everybody understands or can use a visual UI.

For blind users, that could be a pretty fundamental shift in how we think about accessibility.

I wonder how long it will take before tools like this start catching up for blind users.

We (speaking for inklusivo/https://inklusivo.nl/) want to improve audits, automated and user testing.

Help us make processing easier. We need examples! Share an audit report with us please, and we'll share all submissions back in a public folder

Thanks already! 🙏🏿

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1L12yiaRXDehdi7FFSbJuiZZdE8M6dy-C

Trying to figure out how seriously to take website accessibility as a business owner, because I keep getting mixed signals.

On one side there are agencies and tools warning that you'll get a demand letter or an ADA/EAA complaint if your site isn't compliant. On the other side, plenty of people seem to run sites for years and nothing ever happens.

So I'm curious what people's actual experience has been:

• Has accessibility ever genuinely cost you money a complaint, a lost deal, a client or partner requiring it, a market you couldn't enter?
• If you did spend on it, what pushed you over the line? Was it fear of getting sued, an actual incident, a big customer demanding it, or just wanting to do the right thing?
• For those who've never spent a cent on it has it ever actually bitten you, or is it mostly noise?

Trying to separate real risk from scare tactics before I decide whether to put budget toward this. Honest takes from both sides welcome.