🔗 LLM biased against accessible code (Claude Code issue #56079)
Making accessibility a project requirement and still having the coding model treat a11y fixes as optional? It’s not you. It’s the model.
Aaron Gustafson: Latest Posts & Links
Hi there. My name is Aaron Gustafson and I work on the web.
Latest posts
✍🏻 Can Your AI Pass the Accessibility Test?
Last week at Microsoft Build, Jessie Lorenz , Carie Fisher , and I gave a short talk on a question every AI-enabled product team should be asking: can your AI pass the accessibility test? The core point was straightforward: AI does not fix a broken process; it accelerates whatever process you already have. If accessibility is already in the workflow, AI can help scale inclusion. If it’s not, AI…
📢 Can Your AI Pass the Accessibility Test?
At Microsoft Build 2026, Jessie Lorenz, Carie Fisher, and I explored how to embed accessibility across the software development lifecycle so AI scales inclusion rather than exclusion.
✍🏻 Fixing Accessibility After the Fact Is Too Late
At Ability Summit 2026, I moderated a panel on a question that feels more urgent by the day: how do we prevent accessibility defects before they get baked into AI-assisted workflows and shipped at scale? As AI accelerates how software and content are created, accessibility risks emerge earlier and propagate faster than traditional testing and remediation can handle. This panel explores what…
✍🏻 Easy Data-entry Verification with a Web Component
Sometimes the simplest form pattern is the one you repeat ad infinitum : “Type it once, then type it again.” We do it for password confirmations, email verification, and any flow where a typo creates expensive follow-up work. I released a small web component to handle that pattern cleanly: form-matching-fields .
🔗 Artificial Intelligence Has One Chance To Get Accessibility Right
A pointed reminder that if AI is trained on an inaccessible web, it will reproduce that inaccessibility at scale unless we intervene intentionally.
🔗 Building a general-purpose accessibility agent—and what we learned in the process
A useful look at GitHub’s accessibility agent experiment and a nice complement to my recent posts on accessibility data gaps in codegen models and optimizing codebases for AI coding agents.
📢 Fixing Accessibility After the Fact Is Too Late
As AI accelerates how software and content are created, accessibility risks emerge earlier and propagate faster than traditional testing and remediation can handle.
🔗 AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage
Cory Doctorow offers a characteristically sharp critique of the AI bubble, but what I found most useful here is his framing of how these systems are actually meant to be deployed: not to empower workers, but to turn them into ‘reverse centaurs.’
🔗 Accessible faux-nested interactive controls
Eric Bailey walks through a clever pattern for getting the feel of nested interactive controls without actually violating the platform’s semantics.
🔗 AI-assisted coding transforms PDF to web app using NYS Design System
This is a compelling illustration of what becomes possible when a design system is structured well enough to be usable by both people and machines.
🔗 Modern CSS Feature Support For Shadow DOM
This is a tremendously useful resource for anyone working with Shadow DOM and trying to understand where modern CSS features actually stand in practice, not just in theory.
🔗 AI is locking people out. At Scale.
An important and sharply argued framing of AI-generated accessibility failures as a civil-rights problem, not just a quality-control issue.
🔗 The Incredible Overcomplexity of the Shadcn Radio Button
It’s just a radio button. Paul’s teardown is a good illustration of how far modern front-end practice can drift from the simple, robust platform primitives we already have.
🔗 Accessibility in the End of Deterministic Design (Again)
Accessibility isn’t something generative interfaces will magically solve; it’s the groundwork we need in order to make those systems trustworthy at all.
🔗 Making keyboard navigation effortless
I’m very excited by focusgroup : a declarative way to handle a bunch of keyboard-navigation patterns that currently require a lot of brittle JavaScript.
🔗 The WebAIM Million: The 2026 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages
The latest WebAIM Million is a sobering reminder that, at scale, the web is getting more complex faster than it is getting more accessible.
🔗 Under the hood of MDN’s new frontend
This is a fascinating look at how MDN rebuilt its frontend around server-rendered HTML, web components, and a clear understanding of where interactivity actually belongs.
🔗 Endgame for the Open Web
A sobering but necessary reminder that the open web’s current crisis is not theoretical; it’s already playing out across publishing, open source, standards, and shared infrastructure.
🔗 slideVars
A lovely little utility from Chris Coyier that turns CSS custom properties into a live control panel.