Your performance metrics are excluding people

In the article "We need more inclusive web performance metrics" Scott Jehl argues that the metrics we use today have several issues. It's often based on the visual, like the first contentful paint and the largest contentful paint. It also fails to measure when it's interactive to assistive technology. In addition to the article Scott has also opened an issue on the Lighthouse repository and another issue on the WebPageTest repository.

Explaining the European Accessibility Act

In my last newsletter, I had a link to "the big directive" or in longer terms the EU directive 2019/882 on the accessibility requirements for products and service. I also said that I hoped I could soon link to better resources in the future. I sent a tweet to Marcus Herrmann asking if he had any plans on a website? (He made a website for "the web directive" so I thought maybe?)
Guess what? A11y-act.eu is now live! Thank you so much Marcus!

Inclusive Design for 24 hours!

Inclusive Design 24 (often shortened as id24) is a free 24-hour online event that took place on September 17th and the full playlist is now available on Youtube.
Yes, I know all those talks can make you feel overwhelmed but if you are just going to watch one talk and especially if you are building things on the web make sure you watch Debugging broken accessibility with Sarah Higley. It's a great talk that digs deeper than you might think initially. And it features pictures of Aggretsuko!

Buy this book!

Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the 21st Century Edited by Alice Wong came out this summer and it's a great read or to be honest I actually listened to it. Because of course, it's available as an audiobook as well. Why aren't all books? Yes, I'm looking at you, Swedish books, especially non-fiction. 
You might recognize Alice from her podcast Disability Visibility and if you don't please check out that podcast as well.

WCAG 2.2 - what is up?

There is now a working draft for WCAG 2.2. As always(?) it's not really an easy thing to start reading the draft as a whole. But luckily several sites have made summaries. Adrian Roselli is going through the draft by listing what has changed and new criteria. WebAIM has also made a summary and in addition, they also have opinions on which parts of the draft are in need of more clarity.
Personally, I find the success criterion accessible authentication interesting. I'm looking forward to the day when companies stop forcing their users to select an image of dices whose sum amounts to 14, five times in a row, within a set amount of time. Yes, this happens on a real login and you can read more about the "dice challenge" in this Twitter thread (in Swedish).

Joining events everywhere!

I've started to join meetups in other countries. Some in countries I've never been to. The joy of online events!
Some free events that happen in the near or future are:

• October 13th - Philly Content Strategy: Integrating Accessibility through Organizational Culture
• October 22nd - This is HCD - Berlin: Accessibility for UX Designers
• March 10-11th - Axe-con: Building accessible experiences

Building the woke web

Olu Niyiawosusi wrote a great article this summer on A List Apart with the title Building the woke web. It is centered around the UK (where Olu live) but is certainly valid for a lot of people elsewhere.
One sentence that stuck with me was "Accessibility without inclusion is not real accessibility." I'm also really happy that the list of suggested solutions starts with including people instead of listing accessibility requirements.

A ramp does not make a space accessible

This phrase has stuck with me for the last weeks and the more I think about it the more I agree. This was written in the article in Time Magazine by Eddie Ndopu. The title of the article is "It's Time to Rethink the Language of Accessibility. And to Imagine a More Equal World".
Be ready to hit reader mode in your browser though because Time.com is not really nice with all those popups and overlays. Also be ready to view the installation of ramps as a material lie, hollow and partial.