QualityLogic logo, Click to navigate to Home
QualityLogic logo, Click to navigate to Home

Accessibility Industry Update: June 2025

Home » Blogs/Events » Accessibility Industry Update: June 2025

Welcome to the QualityLogic industry update for the month of June 2025!

Last month was packed with announcements, events, and intriguing takes—to the point that this may very well be the most substantive newsletter we’ve published since starting them about a year and a half ago. 

That having been said, given the sheer number of things floating around, it is possible that we have missed something. Should this be the case, we consider it a good problem to have and want to hear from you! 

As always, let us know if you think we’ve missed something, or share the link with your colleagues or partners who may benefit from some or all of this information. You can also sign up to receive these accessibility updates via email.

Contents:

Upcoming Deadlines

  • For the one you already knew was coming and have probably been seeing everywhere… the countdown is on for the European Accessibility Act. It goes into effect on June 28. If you’re a webinar person, we hosted one with our partners at Lumar. If you’re not, we wrote an article to help you Prepare Your Website for the European Accessibility Act (EAA). 
  • The grace period for compliance with the Colorado Laws For Persons With Disabilities (HB 21-1110) is ending at the end of June. Starting on July 1, state and government institutions need to ensure that they comply with WCAG 2.1 at level AA. More information can be found on the OIT accessibility law page. OIT (The Office of Information Technology) amended and published the final version of the rule this month, with enhanced guidance around how to implement it, and what it actually means to be “compliant”. Even if you don’t reside in Colorado, we have good reason to believe that other states could follow in kind. Converge Accessibility expounded on this in a recent post. 

Conferences and Events 

  • The WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind) conference will be held virtually from September 16th to the 17th. Attendance is free and recommended, as there will be good talks for those of all backgrounds and experience levels. 

Accessibility of Emails in 2025 

This month, the email markup consortium published their third annual Accessibility Report. We talk to a lot of people about web, document, and mobile accessibility… but email accessibility all too often falls through the cracks. 

The findings in the report were sourced by collecting and analyzing 443,585 emails (a lot of emails!) and then running them through the Parcel Accessibility Checker. Here’s a quick summary: 

  • 99.89% of emails tested contain accessibility issues categorized as “Serious” or “Critical”, meaning that someone using assistive technology could face significant challenges viewing or interacting with the content. This figure sounds absurd, but as a screen-reader user who has asked other screen-reader users, I am not at all surprised by it. It goes without saying that issues of this nature should be addressed as soon as possible… perhaps we all have a little work to do. 

The most common issues reported were: 

  • Content inside the body should be wrapped in a lang attribute. This is because some email clients strip the lang attribute from the <html> tag in a message when it is opened. It is a good idea to put the lang attribute in both places (on the <body> and the <html>) just to be safe. 
  • Tables used for formatting should have the role attribute set to “presentation” or “none”. When layout tables don’t explicitly specify a layout presentation, screen readers announce a bunch of information about them that users do not need to hear. 
  • Links must have discernible text: this one should be obvious, but links need to specify labels, otherwise users might not know where they point to. A really common version of this is an image (like an icon or logo) without alternative text. Remember, an image which would ordinarily be decorative in nature, and thus not needing alternative text, stops being decorative as soon as it can be clicked. 
  • Element has insufficient color contrast: self-explanatory, but around 60% of the emails that were tested had colors with poor contrast that could potentially be difficult to see for those with low vision. 
  • Images must have alternative text: if the image serves a purpose (it conveys information, adds to the aesthetic of a message, or takes the user somewhere) it should be given a reasonable description. If it doesn’t do any of these, it should be hidden. In either case the alt attribute should be there, otherwise screen readers announce the path to the image, which is annoying and unhelpful. 
  • Documents must have <title>: this aids in navigation as it is shown when the message is loaded in a browser, or as the title of the tab when multiple messages are being shown at once (not all clients default to the message’s subject). 
  • Links must be distinguishable without relying on color: people with low vision or colorblindness might find it difficult to distinguish a link from its surrounding text. These should stand out and make it obvious that they are links. 

A fun (fun for me anyway) exercise is to pull up a random email from your inbox, maybe an advertisement or update, and see what issues you can spot. The key here is to recognize these things when you are doing them and point them out to your colleagues too. If the opportunity presents itself, you might also send around an email accessibility checklist (there are plenty across the internet) so everyone can improve together. 

Big Tech Announces Accessibility Features Coming Later this Year 

During Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which happened on May 15, major tech companies have been announcing incredibly exciting accessibility-related features that are coming soon to their products. Here are some highlights and where to learn more. 

Apple 

  • Accessibility Nutrition Labels are coming to the App Store. A few years back, Apple added an accessibility story to make it easier for users to find apps that help them (from vision and learning to hearing and voice control). This feature takes it a step further by allowing developers to showcase accessibility features—in other words, it is now much easier to know whether an app will be accessible before downloading it. We believe this will have the effect of increasing the popularity of accessible apps overall. 
  • The Magnifier app, previously only available on iPhone and iPad, will soon be available on macOS. This will make it possible to recognize text, read documents, zoom in, and detect nearby objects without picking up a physical magnifier. 
  • Braille Access extends the iOS 18 overhaul of braille screen input by turning “iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Vision Pro into a full-featured braille note taker that’s deeply integrated into the Apple ecosystem.” Essentially, features that were historically only available on braille note takers (entering Nemeth math or reading BRF files) will now work natively regardless of whether a braille display is connected. 
  • Accessibility Reader will enhance the already expansive array of features for text customization with new options like font, color, spacing, and speech. 
  • Live listen will support captions on Apple Watch, meaning that users who are deaf or hard of hearing will soon be able to listen to the audio from the microphone on their iPhone while reading the text of these conversations on their Apple Watch. 
  • The Vision Pro is getting something similar to the iOS Magnifier app, supporting magnification of one’s surroundings and object detection/descriptions with VoiceOver. Though we haven’t gotten to test this out, it is our hope that the head tracking combined with 12 onboard cameras will greatly enhance the accuracy of this capability. And since rumors have it that we will soon be getting a smaller and cheaper Vision Pro, chances are this technology will become more practical for every-day use. 
  • Personal Voice is becoming quicker: Apple says it can now “create a smoother, more natural-sounding voice in less than a minute, using only 10 recorded phrases.” It will also support Mexican Spanish. 
  • iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS are adding a protocol to support Switch Control for Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs). Synchron (a New York based BCI startup) has already been testing this out on patients with some degree of success. From an accessibility perspective, these advances are making it possible for people who have limited control over their hands to interact with their devices in a more intuitive way. 
  • Music Haptics on iPhone added more customization options for haptic intensity and vocals only. 
  • Head tracking makes it possible to control iOS with head movements. 
  • Sound recognition can now recognize names and notify those who are deaf or hard of hearing when it has been called. 
  • Accessibility preferences can now be shared across devices. 

More information in the official Apple press release. 

Google 

  • Last year, TalkBack got Google Gemini-backed image descriptions. Soon it will be possible to ask follow-up questions. This works with any type of image, from screenshots to portraits. 
  • SignGemma is the first generative AI model that can translate sign language into spoken language text, and Google has hinted that it will be made available for developers to integrate into their apps. They are actively looking for feedback which can be submitted on the google form at https://goo.gle/SignGemma. 
  • Expressive captions can now capture both what someone is saying, and how they are saying it. The post points out the sample use case of sports announcers saying “amaaazing shot”, which would get picked up as “amazing shot” by conventional speech to text systems. 
  • All of Google’s accessibility options have been made available to test-takers through the College Board Bluebook testing app, eliminating many accessibility barriers historically faced by students taking SAT or advanced placement exams. 
  • Chrome is adding optical character recognition (OCR) to its PDF viewer, so screen reader users will now be able to read through the text in scanned documents. It is worth noting that the reliability of OCR is questionable at best, so scanned PDFs still aren’t and never will be the way to go, but this at least provides a fallback option. 
  • Chrome page Zoom no longer changes page layout on mobile, similar to the existing behavior on desktop. It is also possible to choose whether Zoom preferences apply to all pages or just the current one. 

More in Google’s blog post. 

Meta 

  • On the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, there is now a setting to turn on “detailed descriptions”, which will default to giving more information whenever you ask i.e. “hey meta, what am I looking at?” 
  • On the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, the Be My Eyes-powered Call a Volunteer feature will be rolling out to all eighteen countries where MetaAI is supported. 
  • Meta is doing extensive research on the use of wristband devices to facilitate human computer interaction (HCI). For people who aren’t able to perform large muscle movements, these wristbands can pick up on the intent via control signals and then simulate those actions.  

More on Meta’s blog post. 

Microsoft 

  • An Accessibility Assistant was added to Microsoft 365 web apps, Visio, and OneNote. 
  • The GitHub CLI has been made much more screen reader friendly: just run “gh a11y” in the latest version to try it out. 
  • Copilot PCs now support getting image descriptions for charts, images, and UI controls through Narrator. It is currently only testable on insider builds with Snapdragon X Series processors, but rollout is planned for Intel and AMD. If you’re an insider, you can try it out by enabling Narrator and pressing the Narrator modifier key + ctrl + d. 
  • Microsoft partnered with Founderz to create AI Skills 4 Accessibility, a course designed specifically to help people with visual, learning, and cognitive impairments implement AI into their lives to boost productivity and streamline tasks. 

TikTok 

You read that right. The app that got so many through COVID and that is single-handedly responsible for reals/shorts on all major social media platforms is expanding its suite of accessibility tools. They will soon be rolling out AI-generated alt text for photos, a high-contrast mode, and support for device-level bold text preferences. You can read more on TechCrunch. 

What We’ve been Reading 

As always, let us know if you think we’ve missed something, or share the link with your colleagues or partners who may benefit from some or all of this information. You can also sign up to receive these accessibility updates via email.

Interested in More Information?