June 24, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #513
This newsletter issue was sent out to 189,475 subscribers on Tuesday, June 24, 2025.
Editorial
European Accessibility Act is almost here. With this, accessibility is becoming a mandatory requirement for public products and services used by customers within the EU. A while back, we ran a free workshop on accessibility and inclusive design (3h 30 mins), which also dives into the fine details of EAA and inclusive design.
Just a few weeks ago, we also published a detailed guide on how to make a strong case for accessibility in B2B, which hopefully will have you move the needle in the right direction. In this newsletter, we look at the different sides of accessibility — from forms and keyboard use to screen reader setup and accessibility testing.
Big news! We’ve just announced our shiny new design and UX conference: SmashingConf Amsterdam 2026 🇳🇱 (April 13–16, 2026), our very first conference in the Netherlands! With cheese, bitterballen, design systems, UX, and front-end. With a lot of love and tons of friends! Get your early-bird ticket. 🧀
We’d be absolutely delighted to see you in Amsterdam — and please do bring your friends and colleagues as well! We have friendly team bundles as well! And have a wonderful, inspiring, and kind rest of the week, everyone!
— Vitaly
1. European Accessibility Act
This Saturday, June 28, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) will go into effect. The new EU directive aims to ensure digital products and services are accessible for everyone, including persons with disabilities and elderly people. But what does that mean for your product or service?
If you haven’t wrapped your head around the EAA yet, Vitaly summarized useful pointers for small and large companies, and the team at Abra published a helpful guide about what businesses and developers need to know, including practical steps they can take towards compliance.
While the EAA only applies to new digital products and services from June 28 on (existing services have time until June 28, 2028 to comply, unless they undergo major updates), it’s a good idea to launch accessibility efforts early on to explore what needs to be done — not only to comply with the directive but to offer the best possible experience for all your users. (cm)
2. How To Make A Case For Accessibility
“But accessibility is an edge case.” “It’s too expensive.” “We’ll do that later.” Getting buy-in for accessibility can be challenging, particularly since there are still many myths and misunderstandings surrounding the topic. If you’ve ever been brushed off or ignored when you pointed out that something needs to be made accessible, Stéphanie Walter shares practical tips to help you convince people to care and invest in accessibility.
Vitaly’s post “How to Make A Strong Case For Accessibility” is also filled with helpful advice for winning stakeholder support and promoting accessibility in small and large companies. The key takeaway: Ask for small commitments to get the ball rolling. Bringing accessibility testing to your company — even if it’s just a handful of tests — is a great first step to making accessibility relatable, approachable, and visible. Fingers crossed for your accessibility efforts! (cm)
3. Tips For Accessible Forms
Whether it’s completing a purchase, submitting a contact request, or signing up for a newsletter, forms are an essential part of the user experience. However, often they are inaccessible, especially for users with disabilities. Michael Beck shares eight tips and techniques for accessible form design.
No worries, the tips are no rocket science but rather universal best practices — using semantic HTML elements, ensuring proper labeling and keyboard accessibility, and providing clear feedback for validation and errors, for example. By following them, you’ll not only achieve compliance with accessibility guidelines like WCAG but also a more user-friendly experience for everyone. Be sure to bookmark the post so that you can use it as a cheat sheet when designing your next form. (cm)
4. Keyboard Accessibility
Not everyone navigates the web the same way. While most visitors scroll on mobile or click through with a mouse, others only use their keyboard. This can be due to motor impairments that make it challenging to use a mouse, vision impairments, or just personal preference, because using a keyboard feels more comfortable. So how can we facilitate keyboard usage to foster a more inclusive web environment?
Eleanor Hecks wrote a practical guide to keyboard navigation and what it really means for a site to be keyboard navigable. As she points out, keyboard accessibility is straightforward to implement but also easy to miss. To help you ensure keyboard navigability works properly, her guide covers all the fine little details you need to consider: focus indicators, logical tab order, skip links, keyboard-accessible interactive elements, just like tips on how to test keyboard accessibility. (cm)
5. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Figma Workflow Masterclass Design
with Christina Vallaure. July 23–29 - Building Interactive, Accessible Components with Modern CSS & JS Dev
with Stephanie Eckles. Aug 18–27 - UX Strategy Masterclass UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Aug 20–29 - How To Measure UX and Design Impact UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Video course + live UX training. - Jump to all workshops →
6. How To Set Up A Screen Reader Environment
In times of automated accessibility testing tools, it’s tempting to assume there’s no need for manual accessibility testing anymore. However, automated tools can’t catch every accessibility issue, so to be on the safe side, it’s always a good idea to set up a screen reader testing environment and run some manual tests. Sara Soueidan shares tips on how to do so.
Sarah’s guide to testing with a screen reader walks you through the complete process of setting up a testing environment on your computer, from downloading virtualization software to installing screen readers and setting up keyboard configuration. You’ll also learn what screen reader and browser combinations are most relevant for your testing work. A handy resource you might want to keep close. (cm)
7. Contrast Color With CSS
Have you ever wished you could write simple CSS to declare a color (for a button, for example) and then have the browser figure out whether black or white should be paired with that color to provide more contrast? contrast-color() makes it possible.
Jen Simmons wrote an introduction to the new function, how it works, and what you should watch out for, because, as tempting as it might be to believe contrast-color() will solve all contrast concerns by itself, this is not the case. Nevertheless, the new function is a mighty little helper with a lot of potential that goes far beyond choosing whether to display black or white text on a color background. (cm)
8. Accessibility Testing Cheat Sheet
Plugins and services for checking accessibility are great, but have you ever observed a real person with a disability use your site or app? Even if your design complies with accessibility guidelines, it doesn’t necessarily mean the experience is pleasant. Live testing with real people can give you lots of invaluable insights into how the experience can be improved.
To help you prepare and run your first accessibility testing session, Slava Shestopalov wrote a detailed cheat sheet. It focuses on testing with screen reader users and dives deep into why testing is so powerful and what you need to know about recruiting users, preparing the session, and, finally, facilitating it. Happy testing! (cm)
9. Meet Accessible UX Research, A Brand-New Smashing Book 📚
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. For our newest book, we have teamed up with Dr. Michele A. Williams: Meet “Accessible UX Research.”
“Accessible UX Research” is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Print shipping in August, eBook available for download later this summer. Pre-order the book, and save off the full price.
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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