As digital technologies become an ever-greater part of our lives, it’s more important than ever to understand how they intersect with accessibility. Here are four of the hottest tech trends for 2020, and how accessibility can play a crucial role for each one.

The terms website accessibility and digital accessibility have a lot of overlap and are often used interchangeably, but they can mean different things.

Website accessibility specifically refers to the principle that websites and associated content and technologies should be equally accessible to those with and without disabilities.

Digital accessibility includes web accessibility but also refers to the accessibility of anything digital such as video, audio, electronic documents, animations, kiosks, and mobile apps.

Website accessibility features are the elements of a site designed to improve the ability of people with disabilities to independently use it. Sometimes websites include extra options specifically to enhance some people's use, but usually accessibility features are integrated into a well-coded website that is accessible by default.

Veterans Day is observed every year on November 11 to honor the great veterans who have served. The day is a reminder to say thank you to our service members for their bravery and sacrifice, and for many that includes service-related disabilities.

One way to honor veterans is to ensure that disabilities, like those resulting from military service protecting our nation, don't unnecessarily prevent them from accessing public goods and services, including those online.

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.

Did you know October is Dyslexia Awareness Month? The aim of Dyslexia Awareness Month is, of course, to bring awareness to an often-misunderstood neurological condition. It also offers a prime reminder of how certain web accessibility best practices can make a big difference in making web content easier to use for people with dyslexia.

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.

Eye tracking devices can help people with mobility disabilities meet the challenges of communicating and interacting with the world. The devices allow a computer to be controlled using only eye movements, which can be critical when a person is unable to use a mouse or keyboard. The process, called gaze interaction, uses eye tracking technology to determine exactly where the user is looking on the computer screen or within special eye tracking glasses.

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.

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.

Automated accessibility testing tools, powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and code-scanning technology, can be an important part of an accessibility testing plan — but, they must remain just a part. Automated testing on its own should not replace manual testing by an accessibility expert and should not be used as the only way to show compliance.

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…

According to projections by market research company Coherent Market Insights, the global assistive technology market will reach $26 billion by 2024, nearly doubling from $14 billion in 2015. Zion Market Research is even more optimistic about the industry’s trajectory, with an estimate of $31 billion in 2024 and an annual growth rate of 7.4 percent.

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.

There are a lot of website accessibility testing strategies, but if custom use cases aren't part of your testing strategy, you may be exposed to accessibility vulnerabilities as a result.

Implementing accessibility best practices on your website allows people with disabilities to consume your content and engage with you to the fullest extent. Many businesses are also realizing the many additional benefits of web accessibility.

Digital marketers, for example, are discovering that accessibility improves SEO. There's a related aspect that hasn't received much attention: accessibility improves bounce rates.

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.

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.

Project managers have a level of responsibility for and eyes into all the moving parts of a project. If those projects include websites, apps, or other digital tools, managing accessibility is also one of those responsibilities.

Here are 15 things project managers should know about accessibility (hint: #1 is that you are critical to the process).

May 30 is World MS Day, created to increase awareness, solidarity, and hope for those affected by multiple sclerosis. The campaign for 2019 is “My Invisible MS” and the theme is Visibility, according to the World MS Day website.

The special goal of this year’s theme is to challenge common misconceptions and bring awareness to the invisible symptoms of MS and the impacts of those unseen symptoms on people’s everyday lives.

For some people with various kinds of disabilities, standard computing technologies such as keyboards, monitors, and computer mice can be difficult or impossible to operate and to use to navigate the digital world. Fortunately, there are alternative methods that can help, known as assistive technologies, for using a computer or browsing the web. While the term “assistive technology” can apply to any device used to make tasks possible or easier ―  such as wheelchairs and hearing aids ― this article will discuss only those assistive technologies used to supplement or replace computing devices.

“Accessible travel” is the concept that all people — including people with vision, hearing, mobility, and cognitive impairments — should be able to do what they want to do and go where they want to go without facing unnecessary barriers, physical or digital, that prevent them from enjoying their travel and tourism experiences to the fullest capacity possible.