Accessibility is one of those rare concepts that almost nobody argues against. Making websites easier to navigate for people with disabilities is a fairly uncontested virtue. Semantic HTML, descriptive links, meaningful image descriptions, and keyboard navigation all help create a web that is more inclusive and usable.

Yet the AI era has introduced an unexpected, deeply ironic wrinkle into this story. The websites doing the most to make information accessible to humans are often the same websites making it easiest for machines to harvest. Obviously, this was never the goal. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were developed to help people, not artificial intelligence.

ColorSym is a free, open-source color-identification system that pairs every color with a unique, memorable symbol. When color alone isn't enough to tell things apart, the symbol does the job, so the roughly 1 in 12 men and 1 in 200 women with color vision deficiency can read your components, charts, or UI with confidence.

• https://github.com/luisfrancisco/colorsym
• https://colorsym.com/

One of the oddest parts of the AI shift is that people are much more willing to do things for LLMs that they should have been doing for human beings all along. Accessibility is clearly an important one: 95% of websites have accessibility flaws, and convincing teams to allocate time for accessibility concerns can be like pulling teeth. But now that similar affordances are required for LLM use, people are leaping over themselves to implement them.

The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced a one-year extension of the compliance dates for web content and mobile app accessibility requirements under Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. The requirements themselves are not new in substance: covered recipients of HHS federal financial assistance must make covered web content and mobile apps conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. What changed is the timeline. Recipients with 15 or more employees now have until May 11, 2027, and recipients with fewer than 15 employees now have until May 10, 2028.