Accessibility Industry Update: September 2025
As summer winds down and the pace of fall projects picks up, the accessibility world is anything but quiet. From global conferences sparking fresh ideas to plug-and-play mind-controlled devices, tools/standards updates, AI prompts and resources, assistive technology innovations, and a whole lot more, we’re certain you’ll find something to pique your interest. Feel free to grab a coffee, settle in, and explore what’s shaping accessibility right now.
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 Conferences and Events
- Inclusive Design 24 (#id24) will be held on September 25. It celebrates inclusive design and shares ideas from analogue to digital, from design to development, from planners to practitioners, and everything and everyone in between. Attendance is completely free, requiring no sign-up or registration. All sessions are streamed live on YouTube – perfect for learning something new between meetings or on-the-go.
- The 6th annual Design + Accessibility Summit will run from September 16 – 19. Join to learn practical techniques for building accessible assets with InDesign, Acrobat, PowerPoint, and other tools widely used by creative professionals. Costs are available under the “Pricing” section of the event homepage.
- The Deaf and Hard of Hearing Accessible Technology conference, hosted by Gallaudet University’s Technology Access Program (TAP) will take place from September 16 – 17 in-person at Gallaudet University, Washington, D.C. and online via Zoom. Registration is free and open to all.
Legal Stuff
In the U.S., it’s been a rather quiet month in terms of legislative action, in part due to congressional recess. That said, court cases abound (accessibility lawsuits continue to trend in an upward direction), and there’s a lot that we can gather from them. In his July 2025 Legal Update, Ken Nakata from Converge Accessibility does a deep dive on them.
South of the U.S., Mexico Proposes Digital Accessibility Reform for Disabilities (per Mexico Business News).
In Europe, there’s an update on recent developments in digital accessibility in Germany – DLA Piper.
What We’ve Been Reading
- Twelve renowned leaders in the digital accessibility space put their heads together to write a practical guide on digital accessibility and inclusive design (applicable to just about any organization and job function). The result is Inclusive Design for Accessibility (also available on Amazon or wherever you get your books). It’s currently listed as #1 in Amazon’s inclusive design category with 5/5 stars, and plenty of glowing third-party reviews to boot.
- The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) has updated WCAG2ICT (officially known as Guidance on Applying WCAG 2 to Non-Web Information and Communications Technologies) to align with the EU-based EN 301 549. You can scroll down to the bottom of the page (section D) for a full changelog.
- The WP Accessibility plugin has been updated to version 2.2.0.
- Take the Attitudes to Digital Accessibility 2025 Survey – AbilityNet
- How to Create Free Audio Description VTT Files for Videos – Maryl Evans
- Adapting ChatGPT to Meet Neurodivergent Communication Needs – AccessAbility: Outlines custom instructions that can be used in the ChatGPT mobile/desktop/web view to make your communications more understandable for certain readers. They may also be used in prompts if you don’t want them on a global level.
- True Disability Inclusion Requires Planning for the Unexpected – AccessAbility
- Horizontal Scrolling Containers Are Not a Content Strategy – Adrian Roselli: Goes into detail about why making horizontal containers (carousels, galleries, toolbars/button bars, or anything too big for the viewport) scrollable might not be the best idea. If it’s too long a read, the bullets under the “So What’s the Problem?” speak for themselves.
- 1.2.5: Adversarial Conformance – Adrian Roselli: The phrase “Adversarial Conformance” boils down to someone implementing WCAG success criteria in a way that would pass on paper but undermine the spirit of why it exists in the first place. And in the case of 1.2.5 (Audio Description) there are plenty of ways to do that, whether you mean to or not. Perhaps one lesser known and seldomly talked about instance of this is the ability to claim that audio description is irrelevant, simply because there are no pauses in the video content.
- All the concerns that make you a boring developer – Dave Rupert: Not limited to accessibility (though the article touches on that) but too good not to share and probably especially relatable to our readers.
- The needs of people with mental health disabilities – AccessibilityOz
- Accessibility pushback – Chris Yoong: Chris Yoong explores the common objections and rationalizations that teams often raise when asked to prioritize accessibility, and why they are incorrect, so you are better equipped to identify and refute them. He categorizes pushbacks like “Everyone else does it,” “Accessibility can’t be a bottleneck,” “We have to live in the real world,” “This WCAG advice is from 2017?!”, “If we’re sued we’ll revisit it,” and “This WCAG stuff is too much to read.”
- Avoiding the word “help” – Eric Eggert: How many times have you written or seen the word “help” as in “this helps users…” in an audit report? I see it almost every day and I’ve used it often in my writing, too. This short post is going to make me think twice before doing so again.
- Brain Computer Interface from Synchron and Apple – Centre For Accessibility Australia: Footage was recently released of someone with ALS (Mark Jackson) controlling an iPad using only his mind, literally just by thinking the commands. This is made possible through a protocol Apple added to iOS 18 allowing Switch Access through BCIs.
- How much should you spend on accessibility? – Karl Groves: We’ve talked extensively about “how to pay for accessibility” and “the cost of not being accessible.” This post answers a slightly different question that is no less valid.
- How our dog increased my appreciation for accessibility – Cloud Four
- Conformance vs compliance, accessibility standards edition – hidde.blog: I routinely hear the terms “conformance” and “compliance” used interchangeably in the context of accessibility. They are not the same, this post touches on why that is.
- How a Blind Person Uses Social Media and AI to Drive Accessibility – Equal Entry
- Assistive Technology Device Communicates Facial Expressions to People who are Blind. – Centre For Accessibility Australia
- A closer look at axe MCP Server – Deque: If you haven’t heard of it before, axe MCP uses the model context protocol to analyze your code for issues that could impact accessibility directly within any AI powered IDE by building on top of Axe-core.
- Accessibility and the agentic web – TetraLogical: Explores how autonomous “agent” experiences (like shopping assistants) can create new opportunities for people to access content and participate.
- “Best practice” is just your opinion – Craig Abbott: A nudge to ground recommendations in standards, research, and user needs, not vague “best practices.”
- Why Digital Accessibility Starts Within: Lessons from Crystal Preston-Watson – HackerNoon: Makes the case that internal culture and tooling must be accessible to deliver accessible products externally.
- 10 Life Lessons on Accessibility – Christiane Link: Reflective takeaways from lived experience that translate into concrete design and policy improvements. Some you may have heard before, but all good food for thought.
- A11M – Part I on A11y and LLMs – NirA11Y: Explores the role of digital accessibility in an increasingly AI-based world. In a time when more and more people are getting information via AI overviews, and around 95% of sites on the web still have accessibility issues, perhaps greater pressure should be placed on the builders of AI tooling who could be better positioned to break the accessibility barrier.
- Using AI To Redefine Software Accessibility Testing – Forbes: A high-level view of how AI augments testing efficiency while still needing human validation.
- WCAG vs EAA: Understanding where WCAG stops and where the EAA starts – Stark: Clarifies where WCAG guidance ends and legally enforceable EAA obligations begin for EU-bound products.
- Designing for Intelligence, Efficiency, and Accessibility – HackerNoon: Principles for shipping AI-infused features that stay usable, efficient, and inclusive.
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.