2025 Year in Review
This past year has been a lot. I've probably said this every year for the past decade and it's been true every time. It's already true of 2026 and it's only been a week. Everything happens so much and I wish it wouldn't.
Jan Maarten – Design Engineering, Accessibility, and Privacy
Portfolio, writing, and annotation kits from an accessibility specialist helping designers and developers ship more inclusive work.
Latest posts
Newsletters that regularly hit my inbox these days
A curated list of newsletters and how I get them without my inbox filling up.
How NOT to integrate annotations and design systems
While building a new set of design system annotations for GitHub, we found some novel ways to enhance Primer with annotations. Not all of those experiments worked out.
Advanced methods of annotating components (GitHub.blog)
Design system annotations, part 2 — How to build custom annotations for your design system components or use Figma’s Code Connect to help capture important accessibility details before development.
How accessibility gets left out of components (GitHub.blog)
Design system annotations, part 1 — The Accessibility Design team [at GitHub] created a set of annotations to bridge the gaps that design systems alone can’t fix and proactively addresses accessibility issues within Primer components.
Tag, you're it
In which I share my thoughts on writing as well as this blog and its future.
Good sabotage for bad robots (Updated)
A thorough list of AI crawlers you can block on our your website, as well as a few other choice methods to confound the robots who want to steal everything you've ever published online.
How platforms prey on our longing to be known
An up close and personal look into why we should be extremely careful when sharing about ourselves online, no matter how shiny an app or network might be.
Socks, lies, and accessibility
Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) is around the corner. Looking back at last year, I found some troubling things people in this field should be aware of. Because they're likely to be repeated.
Fixing keyboard focus on Ghost bookmark cards
Since moving this site to Ghost(Pro), I've found very few gripes with it. It's not perfect, but it beats platforms like Medium or WordPress by a mile. There are only two things that really bug me.
Announcing a new Web Accessibility Annotation Kit from CVS Health Inclusive Design (Medium.com)
The CVS Health® Inclusive Design team has created new Figma annotation kits for multiple platforms. Today, we are releasing the first of these tools for...
Building a Portfolio in Public
An evolving account of what I'm working on and what I want to change about this site (including all the stuff that's broken or inaccessible).
Moving Beyond the Bare Minimum
Ever wonder who specifically afforded us in Design and Tech the privilege to ignore or pass the buck on Accessibility? I'll no longer be doing that.