To further their mission of Xbox Accessibility, Microsoft released Xbox Accessibility Guidelines, "a set of best practices that have been developed in partnership with industry experts and members of the gaming and disability community."

Twenty-three guidelines are included, and for each guideline Microsoft provides an Overview, Implementation Guidelines, Applicable personas, and Resources or Tools.

In September, Vimeo announced new accessibility updates to their video player.

The video-sharing platform currently serves more than 90 million creators worldwide. With the recent updates, more people should be able to use the service.

Here are the changes and how they impact accessibility.

People with disabilities sometimes encounter unnecessary barriers that aren’t faced by people without disabilities in both their personal and professional lives. In too many instances, these obstacles have made it more difficult for many people with vision, hearing, motor, and cognitive disabilities from seeking and obtaining gainful employment.

October 29 is World Stroke Day, bringing awareness to the leading cause of disability and one of the leading causes of death in the United States.

The effects of stroke vary, but many of the commonly-resulting disabilities and impairments are some of the key areas for which web accessibility best practices work to solve when it comes to navigating the digital world.

If you're a podcaster, you need to ensure that your material is readily available for all audience members. Here are five ways to make podcasts more accessible.

The 2019 holiday shopping season is almost upon us.

That means there are plenty of potential sale opportunities for your business. But if your website isn’t accessible, it also means you’re going to lose a a lot of those sales.

Redesigning your website offers the perfect opportunity to consider accessibility. Rather than creating your site and trying to implement improvements later, begin with accessibility in mind.

Not only can you work in a timely, cost-efficient manner, but you can also optimize your site from the start, accommodate more users, and integrate accessibility as a top priority in your organization.

As of September 23, 2019, all new websites in the U.K. and any published after September, 23, 2018, must be accessible.

Simon Hart, the Minister for Implementation, said, "This is another positive step in our longstanding commitment to ensuring digital services are accessible for all users and to encourage improved equality of access to public information and services."

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are organized by four main principles, which state that content must be POUR: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust. WCAG is the most-referenced set of standards in website accessibility lawsuits and is widely considered the best way to achieve accessibility.

One of the biggest challenges web designers and content creators face when working to resolve accessibility issues is trying to squeeze accessible solutions back into an otherwise finished design. A much easier, and of course accessible, approach is to consider people with disabilities in the design from the beginning — but asking someone to do this and guiding them on how with actionable ideas are very different things, as it isn't always easy or intuitive.

Here are tips for a smoother, more accessible design approach.

Most businesses rely on third-parties for at least some of their website needs — the website may have been designed by a vendor, it may live on a vendor's platform or use their components and templates, or the content could even be managed entirely or partially by a vendor on an ongoing basis.

Here are 7 questions to ask your vendors about accessibility.

For people who need or want to navigate the web with high contrast enabled, these settings offer a free and pretty reliable way to do so. High contrast also gives you a fast and easy way to identify some accessibility issues on your website you might not catch otherwise.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are often referred to as the gold standard in accessibility and they are widely respected as providing the best path to accessibility compliance — but does the law actually require WCAG compliance?

It's that time of year and millions of students and their families across the country are getting ready for the new school year to begin. Back-to-school shopping, summer homework, and last-minute preparations can be difficult and stressful enough — and even more so when the websites and tools needed to do these things are not built to be accessible to people with disabilities.

Here are five accessibility reminders for back-to-school.

Accessibility may be the furthest thing from your mind when you’re just trying to get your startup off the ground, but it’s actually a crucial piece of the puzzle. Not only can accessibility save you a great deal of time and legal fees, it can also win your business more customers — which is essential when you’re in the growth phase of your startup. Read more…

On July 30, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley, joined by six other senators, sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Barr asking the Department of Justice (DOJ) to clarify how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) applies to web sites. 

Some businesses may wonder if their pockets are deep enough or there is enough value in making their sites and apps accessible, and genuinely have the question, "What if I can't afford accessibility?" Read more…

User agents are software applications that interact with the internet on your behalf. They do things so you don't have to. For example, a web browser is a user agent, in that it displays web content in a way that people find easy to use.

Here's why user agents matter for accessibility.

Tables are a great way to organize and share a lot of data and information. They help content creators and designers present facts and figures cleanly, when describing them in words and sentences may be difficult and tiresome.

While there are many other factors for whether a table can be considered accessible, one of the most common accessibility issues with data tables is the lack of properly-coded headers.

Among other additions, WCAG 2.1 introduced a new Level AA success criterion 4.1.3, also known as “Status Messages.” Here's what you need to know about this new checkpoint, including what it is and how to successfully implement it on your website.

Deafness, hearing loss, and being hard of hearing are some of the most common disabilities in the U.S. and worldwide, yet there are still many misconceptions surrounding hearing disabilities — including that there are many different levels of hearing. Here are 8 facts about hearing impairment and how they relate to web accessibility.

Advocates for digital accessibility and those in compliance and governance roles sometimes say that accessibility should be prioritized at the same level as privacy and security. Absolutely, it should be, but it's time to take the argument one step further — not only should accessibility be prioritized in the same way as privacy and security, it needs to be recognized that accessibility is privacy and security.

The websites of twenty two presidential candidates for the 2020 election were tested for accessibility by the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind, and the results are in: "Not one website – Democrat or Republican – was fully accessible for a blind or visually impaired person to navigate."

PowerPoint is many people's go-to program for creating presentations. It also tends to be highly visual with graphs, images, and infographics. Fortunately, just like Microsoft Word, PowerPoint has many built-in features to help make documents accessible — but this doesn't mean your presentations are automatically accessible.

With so much recent focus on web accessibility, you might find yourself wondering: is it actually just a fad?

A careful review of the evidence suggests that web accessibility is much more than a passing fad. Here are 4 reasons why web accessibility is here to stay.