[The Accessibility Pond] Issue #3: October 14, 2026
It’s been a while. Issue #2 went out January 28, 2025. Why has it been so long?
The short answer: 2025 was the hardest year of my life. For the medium answer, read 2025: Year in Review on the SFCG blog. It’s getting easier for me to talk about, so maybe I’ll write the long answer before 2026 is up. Or maybe that’ll be part of what I write for 2026’s year in review!
Now that you’ve got that answer, you might be wondering, “What’s the latest for The Accessibility Pond?” Only good things, I assure you!
What’s in store this week
The Pond’s first 90 days
My first 6 months as a W3C Invited Expert
My week in AGWG
The Pond’s first 90 days
First: I spent 3 months focused on dreaming, researching, planning, and building for SFCG. The Accessibility Pond is still a major part of that and I feel SO much more equipped and prepared for it.
I’m launching the landing page soon but for you lovely newsletter readers, here’s a preview of the first 90-days (12 weeks):
6 office hours sessions (weeks 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12)
6 early access articles (weeks 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11)
12 weekly side quests (weeks 1–12)
3 AMA sessions (weeks 3, 7, 11)
What each of those activities entail:
Office hours: a time for you to bring your accessibility-specific questions, problems, and ideas you want to discuss or need help with.
Early access articles: read articles I'm working on a full week before I publish them, with the ability to write any questions, comments, or concerns.
Weekly side quests: an active learning challenge, intended to take 30 minutes or less, designed to give you an opportunity to practice your research skills in the process of learning about less-frequently taught topics in accessibility.
Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions & topic voting: talks focused on a singular topic, with 20+ minutes at the end reserved for live questions and answers. The community gets to suggest and vote on the topics.
Community chat channels: asynchronous spaces for having discussions, asking questions, sharing resources, brainstorming, etc.
My first 6 months as a W3C Invited Expert
Second: I've officially been a W3C Invited Expert for 6+ months! I joined the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (commonly abbreviated as AGWG) in March 2026. Specifically, I started out in the Sign Language subgroup for WCAG 3 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 3.0). I dreamed of joining AGWG for years, and it's an honor and privilege I get to now. It's absolutely my proudest endeavor and accomplishment to date.
I also very recently joined a new Task Force (TF) under AGWG, named WCAG 3 Guidance Documents Task Force. Our inaugural meeting was Monday, October 5th, 2026. In brief, with the disclaimer that I’m not an official spokesperson and more will be publicly available soon, our work will be focused on developing guidance, within the context of WCAG 3, in the following categories:
Policy: for people who set, enforce, and follow policy (such as laws & regulations, company policies); design tests & reports of meeting policy; and want to understand the what/why of policy enforcement.
Testing: for people assessing conformance, planning and scoping for assessment, writing test cases and performing manual tests, developing & maintaining tools for testing accessibility, and documenting these processes (and probably far more!).
Reporting: for people who want to accurately assess, report, and understand a product’s accessibility conformance & compliance, such as product owners, product consumers, consultants and advocates, and standards & regulatory stakeholders.
To get back to my point, how I hope to incorporate this work into The Accessibility Pond, is to share any public updates and links each week for folks’ perusal. As I said, I’m not an official spokesperson, so these efforts are mostly centered on surfacing information that might be otherwise hard to come upon.
My week in AGWG
So to get to it! Here are some links and such from my week in AGWG. It’s not a full list and it’s not official. They’re just things I’m aware of or directly participated in!
Guidance Documents TF
October 12, 2026 meeting minutes
AGWG
October 13, 2026 meeting minutes
Sign Language subgroup
The subgroup is making a big appearance internally! For context: as content is proposed, added, or changed for the WCAG 3 doc, we AGWG members tend to review it internally first. We do this through member-only surveys.
The latest internal survey opened up today (October 15th) and it closes at the end of the month. Out of 12 total items, 8 are for content by the Sign Language subgroup! We’ve been busy. :)
If you have feedback on anything linked, I don’t have a great answer yet as to where you should submit it. Hold on to it for now, and I’ll get back to y’all in the next issue!
There are 4 Supplemental provisions we’re aiming to add to the editor’s draft at Developing status. I’m attaching a preview link to each one if you’re curious to read their content.
Then we have 4 provisions we’re aiming to add to the editor’s draft at Exploratory status. 1 is Core (listed first here) and the other 3 are Supplemental.
Whew! That’s all for now. It felt a little long to me, but you’re the reader and I’m writing for you. :)
What do you think of this issue’s format and content? Would you find it useful if I moved some of this into a blog, and shared a link to the blog?
Reply and let me know!