August 26, 2025 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #522
This newsletter issue was sent out to 187,331 subscribers on Tuesday, August 26, 2025.
Editorial
Many people often misread the value and purpose of accessibility. It’s assumed to be a strictly technical or legal concern. It’s perceived as an expensive, limiting, disruptive obligation. But accessibility efforts are a way to reach new markets and reduce barriers to entry.
Yet most people don’t think that accessibility applies to them at all. So instead of debating legal implications of poor accessibility, I always try to visualize it. I showcase mundane challenges people face in their daily lives. E.g., people relying on their eyeglasses, people using subtitles, noise-cancelling, and vibrating alarm clocks.
Everybody can relate to being vulnerable; failing despite your best efforts, or feeling helpless in the moment when you need to get through — because we’ve all lived through the moments of stress, frustration, anxiety, and uncertainty. We relate even if we might be reluctant to admit it at first.
Nothing is more impactful than seeing real customers struggling with a real product in real life. And in this newsletter, we highlight some real-life experiences that I usually explain in those meetings. And perhaps, just perhaps, it will help you make a stronger case for accessibility as well.
On another note, we’re preparing final things for our upcoming events this and next month. We’d love to meet you and your wonderful team there!
- Smashing Meets AI, a free online get-together on Aug 27,
- UX Workshops in Antwerp, Belgium 🇧🇪, on UX metrics and advanced design systems with Brad Frost
- SmashingConf New York 2025 🇺🇸, on design systems, AI, UX, front-end and dashboards,
Until then, wishing you a truly wonderful rest of the week — with a bit less stress, and a bit more time for yourself and your loved ones. And thank you so much for staying around and reading these very words!
— Vitaly
1. Designing For Deaf People
What’s to consider when designing for deaf people? Marie van Driessche, a Dutch designer, who herself is deaf since birth, gave an insightful talk at Awwwards Conference in Amsterdam a few years ago in which she shines a light on deafness, sign language, the deaf community, and what’s important when designing for deaf people.
As Marie points out in her talk, inclusion is not a one-size-fits-all solution but one-size-fits-one, and then eventually others will benefit from it, too. Following this credo, the inclusive design tips and ideas she shares not only improve the experience for deaf people but also for everybody else.
Enhancing readability, providing subtitles, offering multimedia solutions for written content, and providing multiple contact options are some of the aspects that she explores in her talk. (cm)
2. Living With ADHD
Imagine your brain is switching between 38 channels and someone else has the remote. That’s how Jessica McCabe describes how ADHD feels. At 32, ADHD brought her to the darkest point of her life; at 34, she was thriving personally and professionally. To share insights into what it’s really like to live with ADHD, Jessica gave a TEDx talk in which she describes her journey and experience.
As Jessica points out, people with ADHD don’t have a deficit in attention but trouble regulating attention. ADHD also affects planning, prioritizing, sustaining effort toward a goal, and regulating emotions and behavior. On the other hand, people who have ADHD are great at tackling urgent tasks, working with new ideas, and wrestling with challenging problems, as Jessica explains. Her talk offers lots of interesting insights into the challenges and, of course, the potential that comes with ADHD. (cm)
3. Living With Dyscalculia
“Yeah, I’m bad with numbers.” We all have heard, or even said, this sentence before. But needing an extra second when doing mental arithmetic, for example, has nothing to do with the experience that people with dyscalculia have when they are confronted with numbers. Sharing her personal experience of living with dyscalculia, Laura Parker offers a comprehensive view on the topic.
Dyscalculia is a specific and persistent difficulty in understanding numbers — and that affects many aspects of everyday life. As Laura explains, it makes it difficult to handle money, arrange appointments, get quantities right when cooking, remember PINs, interpret data, recognize shapes, gauge how far away you are from an object, and much more.
To help designers, writers, and everyone else who publishes content better support people with dyscalculia, Laura also created a practical guide to presenting numbers and data clearly. A must-read. (cm)
4. Accessibility For Vestibular Disorders
Vestibular disorders are one of the rather “invisible” conditions that are often forgotten when talking about accessibility. They can result in vertigo, nausea, problems with balance, and headaches, and are comparable to the feeling of seasickness or getting off a rollercoaster — with the difference that the symptoms are persistent over a longer period, if not chronic. In the case of Facundo Corradini, his bad case of vertigo lasted over a month and changed his accessibility mindset for good.
As soon as his symptoms got better, Facundo set out on a mission to self-experiment on accessibility for vestibular disorders. The result is a series of recommendations for improving the experience. From creating larger target sizes on all devices to giving users control over animations, as so often when it comes to accessibility, the tips not only help people with vestibular disorders but benefit everyone. (cm)
5. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Accessible Typography for Web & UI Design Masterclass Design
with Oliver Schöndorfer. Sep 11–19 - Behavioral Design Workshop UX
with Susan and Guthrie Weinschenk. Sep 18 – Oct 3 - Dataviz Accessibility Workshop Dev
with Sarah L. Fossheim. Sep 22 – Oct 6 - Smart Interface Design Patterns UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Video + live UX training. - How To Measure UX and Design Impact UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Video + live UX training. - Jump to all workshops →
6. How A Screen Reader User Surfs The Web
How does a screen reader user surf the web? And what’s to consider to make the experience as smooth as possible? Léonie Watson, a blind screen reader user, takes us on a journey through the web, using her screen reader of choice, JAWS.
As you follow along with Léonie as she browses news, e-commerce, governmental, and personal sites, you gain valuable insights into the relationship between screen reader, browser, and the code of a website. You’ll dive deeper into how and why semantic HTML helps screen reader users and learn about some unexpected properties of HTML elements that not only have a huge impact on accessibility but also turn out to be good for performance. (cm)
7. What It’s Like To Be Colorblind
For designers with normal vision, colorblindness is often an afterthought or an unchecked box on an accessibility checklist. To give them somebody to think about when they set that checkmark behind color contrast, Lisa Charlotte Muth asked ten people about their experiences as a colorblind person. Most of them are green-blind, which is the most common type of colorblindness.
The responses provide valuable insights into daily life with colorblindness and its impact on interpreting data visualizations. To give a more complete picture, Lisa highlights both the user’s and the designer’s perspectives: In her post, you’ll also find interviews with two colorblind cartographers as well as the CEO of the data visualization company Datawrapper that explore how colorblindness shapes the way they design. (cm)
8. Meet Accessible UX Research, A Brand-New Smashing Book 📚
In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books. For our newest book, we have teamed up with Dr. Michele A. Williams: Meet “Accessible UX Research.”
“Accessible UX Research” is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Print edition shipping Fall 2025. eBook also available for download in Fall 2025. Pre-order the book, and save off the full price.
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
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