Sadly, the findings aren’t encouraging. The slow progress made in past years is being undone. Not only are we still failing to get the basics right, things have actually gotten worse since 2025.

Homepages are becoming more complex, and with that complexity comes reduced accessibility. In just one year, the average number of elements on a homepage has increased by 22.5%.

When we don’t take accessibility into account, we inadvertently create barriers that exclude many people from using our sites. Those excluded users are our friends, family and neighbours. They are potential customers unable to complete a purchase. We can and need to do better.

A good starting point is to review your own websites for the six most common issues highlighted by WebAIM’s report. These six account for 96% of all detected errors. Addressing these would make a meaningful difference to your users.

On Sunday, clocks go forward an hour at 1am. In other words, we go from 00:59 to 02:00.

It’s easy for us to write code for the ‘now’ and forget that twice a year we shift timezones. This often trips people up, especially early in their careers. Sometimes, the consequences of this oversight can lead to big headaches the day after the clocks have changed.

What things do you need to check ahead of the switch to summer time at the end of this week? Here are some suggestions.

Scheduled jobs

If you have automated jobs scheduled, do these fall within the skipped hour? What will happen when these fail to run? Similarly, when we fall back to GMT in the autumn, what happens if these jobs run twice?

Third-party integrations

If your code talks to remote APIs, are assumptions made about the timezones in the two systems? If the API uses UTC, but you’re passing local times, then you could be an hour different for the duration of summer time. This is unlikely to be the desired situation.

Displayed dates

Regardless of which timezone you store datetimes in your database (it probably wants to be UTC), your users will most likely expect to see dates and times in their local time. If a customer orders something on an ecommerce store at 11pm next week, what weekday will their account show for when the order was placed?

Are you ready for British Summer Time?

The lost hour of sleep this weekend is unavoidable, but bugs in code relating to the shift don’t have to be.

The statistic was being used to make a fairly bold claim. I hadn’t come across this ‘fact’ before, so decided I’d dig a little deeper.

A bit of searching revealed multiple articles repeating the same claim; some even citing the original research it supposedly came from.

After jumping over a few hurdles, I finally managed to get hold of the original white paper. To my surprise, the statistic didn’t represent what the many articles claimed it did. In fact, it told a very different story.

It turned out that several sites had taken the statistic and skewed its meaning to support their own arguments.

The fact that so many sites repeated the same misinterpretation suggests they hadn’t checked the original research at all. They were simply copying each other, much like a game of Chinese Whispers.

The Internet is rife with misinformation. My time in physics research taught me the importance of verifying sources. As professionals, we need to be confident that what we share is accurate; that means going back to the original evidence whenever we can.

Let’s help break the cycle of misinformation.

When I was younger, my dad used to love the game Trivial Pursuit. My main memory of this game was the frustration of everyone else around the table. My dad would sweep the board collecting the cheese wedges for each category; whilst the rest of us were desperately trying to get a single wedge. The game’s questions might have been trivial to my dad, but they weren’t to the rest of the family.

Trivial is an adjective we use to imply something has little value or importance. We often describe problems as trivial to imply they are easy to solve. Herein lies the danger.

When we use the word ‘trivial’ we make a couple of assumptions: firstly, the knowledge and experience of the recipient; and secondly, their current state of mind. If someone is stressed, the word ‘trivial’ is likely to contribute to their existing state of anxiety.

• ‘Trivial’ can make people feel like imposters if something falls outside their experience
• ‘Trivial’ can over simplify a problem that in the details is actually complex
• ‘Trivial’ can imply something is going to be quick — in Tech, things are rarely quick to implement
• ‘Trivial’ risks bringing a discussion to an abrupt end, preventing questions and considerations of alternative solutions

Our choice of words can make a real impact on those listening to us. Next time I reach to use ‘trivial’ in a sentence I will try and remember those games of Trivial Pursuit and the inbalance in trivial knowledge. Using the word ’trivial’ doesn’t have to be problematic, but the context needs to be considered. Perhaps, alternative language would suit the situation better.

In many regards this site has gotten accessibility right. They’ve generally used good colour contrasts, images have alt text, there are skip links in helpful places and form inputs are labeled. However, visually impaired customers using a screen reader will be getting a very different shopping experience to sighted users.

Every product with sizes has a visually hidden label that reads ‘Variant sold out or unavailable’. That means if you are using a screen reader, it will appear that the store is completely out of stock. Have they really sold out? No, visually all sizes are shown as available and can be added to the cart.

To double check this, I looked for a product on the same site that had reduced availability. I found one where certain sizes were out of stock. Visually these sizes appear crossed out and faded (the colour contrast here is not good). You can still select these out of stock sizes, but can’t add them to the cart. Instead you are presented with a 'Notify me when available' button, a familiar e-commerce design pattern.

So, this website is clearly well stocked if you are a sighted user, but not if you use a screen reader. I'm sure this wasn't the developers intention or the message the business wanted to give.

The developers for this website have clearly cared about accessibility in terms of the build. However, it appears that they haven’t fully tested their approach to ensure it works as intended. As a result the store is potentially losing customers without realising why.

I know from my own accessibility journey, that we can easily start incorporating accessibility considerations into our work without fully understanding the impact. We go off and learn about how we can programmatically make a page accessible, but this is dangerous if not paired with testing. Without both, we risk introducing new barriers.

Accessibility is important. Testing our work is accessible is more so.

Work

Last year, I returned to public speaking after a bit of an extended break. I was eager to continue this and 2025 was full of opportunities.

This year, I delivered talks at Front End Sheffield, Leeds PHP and dot Net Sheffield. I was also invited to speak on a panel about digital accessibility at a11y North.

I attended a couple of tech conferences. First as a backup speaker for Front End North; then later in the year I got my chance to deliver my first conference talk at Tech Mids.

Speaking at a conference hadn’t been on my bucket list at the start of the year. However, I realised I was ready to take public speaking to a larger audience and loved the experience.

I'm excited to see what new speaking opportunities 2026 will bring.

Life

Outside of work, my passion project, Street Art Sheffield, opened up several exciting experiences. Recognised for my knowledge of Sheffield’s street art scene, I was interviewed by ITV News and BBC Radio Sheffield. When I first set up my website, I never anticipated it leading to me featuring in the news.

In 2025, Sheffield hosted its first street art festival; Lick of Paint was organised by a couple of local artists, Peachzz and Alastair Flindall. They invited me to be part of the festival activities, running the official walking tours. I’ve run many tours before, but these felt special. The city buzzed with creativity that weekend and guiding people through the festival sites was unforgettable.

Despite all my personal highs of 2025, at times the world has felt like it’s been in a really dark place. This has impacted my mental health. It’s one of the reasons I have thrown myself into many things this year. Getting out and being part of the community has been really energising.

One other thing I’ve done to combat my anxiety has been to attend lots of live comedy gigs. Being in a room full of people laughing is very uplifting. Highlights have included Rhys Darby, Zoe Lyons, Russell Howard, Angela Barnes and a somewhat chaotic live performance of Johnny Vegas’ Ideal. Attending Sheffield's Crossed Wires podcast festival was also a lot of fun.

2026

2025 has been full of unexpected opportunities. I'm excited to see what 2026 has in store.

Too often, people with disabilities are wrongly perceived as a small minority. In reality, an estimated 1.3 billion people worldwide live with significant disabilities. Here in the UK, almost 1 in 4 working-age adults have at least one disability. These numbers highlight why accessibility cannot be treated as optional.

What makes the Appt findings especially interesting is that assistive technologies are being used far beyond those who depend on them daily. Many people choose accessibility features for convenience, comfort, or to address temporary or situational needs. For example, research by Stagetext in 2021 revealed that 4 out of 5 people aged 18–25 regularly use subtitles; not because they are hard of hearing, but because subtitles make content easier to follow in noisy environments or when multitasking.

This shows that accessibility benefits everyone. Whether it’s larger text for tired eyes, voice control for hands-free use or captions for clarity, for many, assistive technologies are part of everyday life.

Yet, when you enable one of these settings, you quickly discover how inconsistent and fragile the Web can be. Broken functionality, poor support, and inaccessible design are still far too common. As someone who browses the Web with increased text size (according to Appt's research, 26% of people do), this is unfortunately my lived experience.

That’s why it’s essential that we design, build and test apps and websites with accessibility in mind. Accessibility isn’t just about compliance, it’s about creating a web that works for all.

The numbers speak for themselves: accessibility is not a niche concern. It’s the foundation of an inclusive, usable, and resilient web.

The conference

I arrived in Birmingham the night before, ahead of Storm Claudia. Thankfully, I stayed a short distance from the conference venue, the Everyman Cinema, and missed most of Friday's torrential rain. Safely inside the cinema the energy was contagious. This was a very well attended conference and there was a buzz of activity on arrival.

TechMids is a community driven one-day tech conference. There was a wide variety of topics being covered across three separate screens. The quality of the talks was amazing and at times it was difficult to decide which to attend.

Some personal highlights for me:

• Daniel Tallentire’s talk on talking tech to non-technical folk, with some nice use of metaphors
• Guy Barker’s talk on making apps accessible using a game of Patience as an example (it was great to see the room filling up for an accessibility talk)
• Indy Pahal’s talk about leadership and management – he made some great points about balancing personality types within a team
• Oliver Davies’ talk on Nix for PHP developers, this has inspired me to check this out for myself
• Shaun Lawrence’s talk on using .Net to brew beer – I’m not a .Net developer, but it’s great to see people still coding for fun

My talk

Of course, one of the main reasons for my attendance was to get up and speak. A year ago, speaking at a conference wasn’t even on my bucket list; I was quite content talking at ‘local’ meet-ups. That all changed when I was encouraged to submit a talk to Front End North, a Sheffield (therefore super local) conference.

I was selected as a backup speaker for Front End North, and so had a talk prepared and rehearsed. In the end, I wasn’t needed, but attending the conference, and coming close to the opportunity, inspired me to try again.

I submitted my ‘Ulysses versus The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ talk to TechMids and was selected for the conference.

Despite some initial anxiety before the event, when the day arrived that all disappeared. I found myself so engaged with the conference and the talks I was attending that my only fear was forgetting to be in the right screen at the right time!

I deliberately didn’t look at my notes or slides once I was down in Birmingham. I had practiced plenty before and had given the talk at the dotNetSheff meet-up the previous week. I knew my slides. I knew what I wanted to say. I just soaked up the atmosphere and enjoyed the conference for myself.

When it came to my time, I got up and just enjoyed my time in the spotlight. Afterwards, I received lots of fantastic feedback and it was great to hear how my talk had resonated with different people.

The future

The whole experience has been incredible. I have left Birmingham eager to do it all again. I’ve long enjoyed public speaking, but conference speaking hadn’t been on the cards. It is now!

It can be so easy to become isolated in our industry. Community events like this are really important. I’ve learnt a lot from attending TechMids, been inspired, and made some new friends along the way. I’m already looking at which conference I can go to next, whether as a speaker or just an attendee.

Acknowledgements

There’s a few people I want to thank for my experience. Firstly, the TechMids organisers, especially Tom Goodman and James Constantinou for making me feel so welcome (and selecting my talk). Sam Biggins and Katie Fenn for believing in me. Their encouragement has been crucial in getting me here. Finally, my partner Jonathan who’s support throughout the ups-and-downs has been greatly appreciated.