There’s also the translation angle 🫠
github.com/w3c/csswg-dr...

There are so many people who take the time to really listen and care and do things well.

And then something like CSS carousels comes along and a11y folks end up spending their time and energy on damage control instead of their own a11y spec improvements.

I feel this post deep in my bones, Alice gets right to the heart of why working on a11y in standards can feel like killing your soul by degrees.

And also why it’s hard to stop.
alice.boxhall.au/articles/a-t...

I’m so glad you liked it! It was such a weird experience going last, because I didn’t really get a chance to talk to other folks there about it.

Also you’d be a good pick yourself, and @sarasoueidan.com

It’s also pretty common to just invert the foreground/background tokens for a given control in forced colors.

All of which should provide an accessible approach to state changes, often better than not adding custom color styling.

Color changes that meet 3:1 contrast are not considered “color alone” by wcag.

While you can’t know the contrast of user-selected colors, I think it’s fair to assume they were selected because that user can perceive them.

To be more explicit, as long as this overrides OS-level user caret styles, this is a terrible idea, and really showcases what spec work looks like when a11y isn’t involved at all.

Adrian is wrong about exactly one thing in his post, which is that “when the caret is no longer a stick” is an *excellent* pun.

Added to this: in my experience running user tests with low vision users, customizing the caret is actually pretty common as an accessibility affordance.

To be fair, I only considered it because of all the bugs my team gets because of it 😅

It’s one of those fun instances of tension between writing the most accessible UX *now* vs. writing what will remain an accessible UX 😭

If it’s a bug then it might! I think the Edge team handles a lot of the forced colors issues, and they’re all lovely (my post isn’t a dig at them personally, these decisions are old).

The issue with backplate is it’s functioning as intended, so there’s nothing to fix from the browser’s POV

For anyone who pays attention to high contrast / forced colors mode styles:

I wrote up an explanation of why forced-color-adjust: none is nearly unavoidable and how it sets up your codebase for downstream bugs:
sarahmhigley.com/writing/forc...

That vase is very cool 😍

Carving weird little guys onto mugs to deal with existential angst

I don’t currently, but I’d be interested in case I do in the future!

This is so much fancier than a brush shoved into a pile of clay, which is where I still am 😅

I've been thinking about accessibility overlays and what it means for personalization quite a lot the past couple of years. I've drafted up some thoughts on it:

www.frank.computer/blog/2025/04...

They look great! This makes me want to throw more lidded gaiwans 😊

Dark patterns, literally 🤪

Literally just picked up the ingredients for it, and the miso-caramel pear pie 😁

👋 I work on & write about accessibility in design systems at Microsoft, sometimes with a few of the folks already on the list 😊👉👈

The Accessibility Operations Guidebook is out! devonpersing.netlify.app/book/

I suppose my inaugural post should be about accessibility or something for bRaNdiNg, but I'm going with this lil guy instead: