Accessibility Industry Update: October 2025
Fall is officially here and while temperatures are cooling off, accessibility news is heating up. From lively debates on AI’s role in inclusion to new legal challenges, evolving standards, and a surge of fresh resources, there’s no shortage of movement across the field in this month’s newsletter. Whether you’re here to explore the future of agentic AI or to catch up on the latest accessibility insights, our roundup has plenty to keep you thinking.
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:
AI in Accessibility
AI for Access: Hype, Hope, and Hard Truths
On September 30, Venngage hosted a Webinar with Joe Devon (Founder of A11y Audits and cofounder of Global Accessibility Awareness Day), Juan Olarte (Founder/CEO at Digita11y Accessible), and Jillian Fortin Burtnett (Director of Community Programs at Fable). It was packed with answers to a lot of day-to-day questions we get from companies wanting to use AI for their accessibility practice, but who are unsure how to do so responsibly. It also featured a healthy amount of speculation.
The conversation began with prediction about the future of “agentic AI” and “orchestrators,” which are soon to execute commands, plan complex tasks, understand a user’s specific abilities and limitations, and then dynamically render or create information on the fly. When done right, this approach could theoretically cut down on the reliance users have on assistive technology, since AI would be essentially creating interfaces that make the most sense to the person using it.
Want to book a cheap flight? Choose from using your voice, typing the request, signing the request, exploring a dynamically updated real-time generated flight map… the options are limitless. Every time you introduce a new modality, you make things easier for someone. Obviously, we’re a pretty long way from that point, but one can dream.
Right now, Agentic AI comes with its own set of risks that make it a difficult sell for many day-to-day situations. Joe points out the fundamental Information Security (InfoSec) problem where powerful Large Language Models (LLMs) with broad access may be maliciously instructed to steal highly sensitive user data (e.g., credit card numbers or social security details). We have already seen this in the wild, case and point: the prompt injection vulnerabilities found in Perplexities Comet browser.
One thing AI is being used for more and more every day (with a great degree of success) is software and web development. According to recent reports, around 50% of code is written by AI at Microsoft and over 30% at Google. This prompted Joe to create the AIMAC (AI Model Accessibility Checker) Leaderboard, which ranks state of the art models on their ability to generate accessible code.
And then there’s the less technical facet: humans. We still socially struggle to take into account different disabilities and accommodations when it comes to hiring. Jillian asks a valid question: how, then, can artificial intelligence be expected to if it’s relying on us for training data? This concern is timely with the increase in applicant tracking systems (ATS) that use AI for the purpose of screening candidates. A critical failure in the current AI landscape is the lack of human recourse when an AI algorithm makes a mistake, creating a “black box” system that provides no clear path to remediation or repair.
On a high note, embedding AI into products that we use every day like Microsoft 365 and social media platforms will drastically decrease the prevalence of images without alternative text, or with alternative text so useless it may as well not be there.
Legal Stuff
- California showed progress with PAGA — now let’s do the same for ADA – Orange County Register: The Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA) as enacted by California in 2004, created a framework designed to let employees sue their employers on account of labor law violations. Great idea in theory, but what was designed to help lead to a more just workplace became a tool for abuse, with legal action brought for minor technicalities with disproportionate impact to small businesses. Sound familiar? This piece draws parallels between the PAGA and the ADA and what we can do about it.
- The U.S. Department of Justice is reportedly Questioning the New Title II Web Regulation according to their spring 2026 regulatory agenda. There are plans to publish a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) reconsidering whether there are ways to make the provisions of the rule less costly.
- August 2025 Accessibility Legal Update – Converge Accessibility: This month’s legal update mostly covers “intent to return” and how it is considered by the second and third circuits.
- Blind Plaintiff Sues DraftKings Over Website Accessibility Barriers – casino.org: This not the first time the sports betting service has come under fire for failing to making their offerings usable by people with cognitive and physical impairments.
- The Department of Justice is suing Uber for discriminating against people with disabilities by sometimes refusing to pick them up, accommodate service animals, and general harassment. This suit presents a few interesting questions since cars and taxis technically aren’t a “place of public accommodation”, and it doesn’t help that Uber drivers are classified as private contractors (not employees).
- The Unruh Act: Understand the lawsuits and how state and federal regulations could combine to create blockbuster settlements – Deque
What We’ve Been Reading
- For Review: WCAG 3 Working Draft – September 2025 | Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) – W3C: There have been some updates to the working draft for WCAG 3.0 including removal of exploratory content and updated assertions section of the Explainer for WCAG 3.0.
- Reviewing the Logic and Value of the W3C’s Accessibility Maturity Model – AFixt
- HTML/SR Support lookup – tetralogical (GitHub)
- Tell Congress to Keep Bookshare Free for All Students – ACB
- 2025: 0 of the Global Top 200 Websites Use Valid HTML – Jens Oliver Meiert
- Basic Web Accessibility Tests: Turn Your Monitor to Grayscale – Bureau of Internet Accessibility
- Screen readers do not need to be saved by AI – Craig Abbott
- Accessible Content for People with Limited English Proficiency – Equal Entry: Though not typically considered in the context of accessibility, if your content is only made available in English, users are likely to encounter some of the same barriers. This article encourages thinking about things like word choice, reading level, meaningful headings for scanning, outlining the meanings of acronyms, reducing Phrasal verbs and idioms, etc.
- Vibe fixing: How to validate AI-generated code and achieve accessibility at the speed of AI – Deque: Vibe coding seems to be all the rage these days, at least if you’re in the AI sphere, but it has quickly been the cause of some awfully inaccessible software. We’ve mentioned the axe MCP Server before, this post shows a real world example of how to use it.
- Speaking of vibe coding, I have found myself asking a question more and more over the past couple months. How to stand out when anyone can build anything? Not specific to accessibility, but a solid read all the same.
- Why are NHS trusts buying Accessibility overlays? – Chris Yoong
- Godot 4.5 ushers in multiple accessibility features – Game Developers: The wildly popular Godot game development engine has taken a serious leap forward in terms of accessibility by adding screen reader support (including hotkeys) and an international live preview.
- Captioning Videos in Vimeo – Converge Accessibility
- Five years goes fast – they go even faster when it comes to accessibility – Bogdan on Digital Accessibility: A reflection on the digital accessibility landscape five years after the EU Web Accessibility Directive (WAD) mandated that public sector websites across the EU should be accessible by September 23 2020.
- Why Americans with Disabilities Should Consider Entrepreneurship During Economic Upheaval – AccessAbility Newsletter
- Pope Tech, the provider of bulk site-wide scanning technology, has been on a roll publishing and modernizing a bunch of articles and resources this month. Things like accessibility strategy for videos, Learning management system (LMS), websites as a whole, documents, Vendor/3rd party tool accessibility considerations, Communicating with leadership about accessibility, a title II readiness toolkit, and more.
- What Brands Overlook About Web Accessibility (and Why It’s Costly) – CMS Critic
- Why false claims and false positives ruin digital accessibility programs – Deque
- CSS to speech: alternative text for CSS-generated content – Sara Soueidan
- AI1y (AI and A11y) – Part III: Can I Trust AI to Be Right 100% of the Time for Accessibility?
That’s a wrap for this month. 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.