Alena Nikolaeva

A good rule of thumb: If the press release (or stenographic news reporting masquerading as journalism) says that an "AI" did something, that's deliberate obfuscation. Software doesn't do anything of its own accord, but folks sure like to talk about it as if it does: >>

tengo ganas de estudiar magisterio infantil

when your company is using gitlab 🫠

What's the best use of AI for accessibility you've tried in real projects beyond "fix this" working on production projects? I've only done `a11y-review` skill, generating some tests for CI, document accessibility issues at Linear when found, and that's pretty much it. Looking for creative ideas.

My baby is almost 1.5 and she is passionate about her piano, pushing buttons, dancing, drawing on the walls, picking leaves from the floor and Peppa Pig. By now she's the most interesting person I know 😆

Free feature idea I have for Slack: allow to turn off DMs, so people work in public channels

Just as SECURITY.md defines how to handle vulnerabilities, ACCESSIBILITY.md defines the inclusive state of a project. It is a human and machine-readable manifest that tracks a project’s commitment to a11y through metrics, guardrails, and automated enforcement. ❤️ github.com/mgifford/ACC...

Fresh in the mailbox ✨

Okay so today someone was talking to themselves and Claude in the thread. We need a break.

It's been YEARS (more than a decade) for me not working with Russian speaking folks and my new PM speaks Russian. Fun fact, my brain is wired up differently for Spanish, English and Russian and wow speaking automations and agents in Russian is really hard 🫠

I got to use the autocomplete bookmarklet I wrote in a real audit this week. It’s nice doing more web #accessibility work again. racheleditullio.com/blog/2023/11...

I raise

Really sweet website for when your baby wants to help you to work tinyfingers.net

the best parenting hour is 15:00 on Sunday, when the baby is asleep, and you are not too dead, to do a little portfolio work/coding/playing/researching

I've been a little quiet online but active offline. I'd be travelling with my baby to Barcelona (her for the first time) and will be teaching accessibility at LCI (Visual Arts and Design School) in English and Spanish 🚀

Next week 🚀 www.deque.com/axe-con/

"Nothing replaces the time with the customer"

I got married last Saturday and was completely disconnected from the world. I still have a week of marriage leave left, and I'll spend it preparing material for an a11y workshop for a design school in BCN. I love teaching young designers: forms, labels, color contrast, and all of the fun things ❤️

Por primera vez las empresas privadas tienen la obligación legal de garantizar que sus productos digitales sean accesibles. uifrommars.com/european-acc...

The end of the year was really fun

“In the practical, this means designers will have more LLM-based features integrated into their tooling. These tools will promise to do their job for them […]. This will further widen the divide between the work and its human-facing impact.” mantisandco.com/resources/gu...

One of my goals for bsky has been to rebuild Design Twitter. But what we got instead was something better: Design Bsky.

“In the coming year, I expect WCAG 2.2 to become the default expectation in procurement language, RFPs, and accessibility evaluation.” 🔗 2026 Predictions: The Next Big Shifts in Web Accessibility webaim.org/blog/2026-pr...

Cognitive research often highlights foundational issues like clarity, predictability, hierarchy, and friction points that affect all users but become visible sooner with the cognitive audience. Cognitive accessibility toolkit by Fable ✨ makeitfable.com/tutorial/cog...

We are getting to the season of end-of-year reflections, so it’s time to post my annual reminder. If you helped someone this year or let someone else help you, then you’ve had a good year. That’s enough.

“Automated tools can quickly flag non-descriptive link text such as “click here” or “read more” […] But automation alone can’t determine whether context makes a vague link meaningful or if a link’s purpose is truly clear to users.” www.dennisdeacon.com/web/accessib...

Fit width text in 1 line of CSS `text-grow: per-line scale;` nerdy.dev/css-text-grow (prototype in Canary 165+)

Ramp table UI is honestly so good. Fully functional with the keyboard (not fully accessible as there are a few color contrast failures, but it’s functional), and the focus ring is styled. ✨

“we hear often we must make special solutions for people with disabilities, that accessibility is expensive and that it hampers innovation… that's all wrong: we can do inclusive design, it can be cost effective and lead to lots of innovation”—Alejandro Moledo del Rio of the European Disability Forum

@cassidoo.co writes: "I’ve been thinking a lot about the internet lately, like as a concept. I don’t know where everyone went... When the algorithms are determining everything we should be seeing, it’s a much less personal internet" In response I made powrss.com to rediscover the personal web.

“The standard back button is the best way to do this as it is familiar to the user. Many users will try the back button first.”

Magic Patterns isn’t doing what I need, Claude prototypes feel off, and Figma Make isn’t there yet for handling complex interactions. What else is there?

Anthony and I shared our favorite design assets on Complementary this week. After trying to define what a design asset is, of course. creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/...

“Accessibility is not optional. It’s required. We all know that. But we still have to tell other people that.” — @xirclebox.com #A11yTOconf #a11y

Getting back to work from maternity leave, design engineering (more engineering than design), organizing my wedding, helping my mom to come to Spain 🫠 beyond TIRED

No conocía este término, pero me gusta bastante. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majorit...

I’ve been mulling my own WCAG3 post, but my TL;DR on Karl’s post is essentially the same as I would have written: “WCAG 3 is not ready for you to use as a compliance framework. Not even close.” afixt.com/why-now-is-n... #accessibility #WCAG #a11y

Let me tell you that the birth and pregnancy was not traumatic, what is really traumatic is leaving your 4 months old and sitting infront of the screen for 8 hours instead. Back to work on Monday 💔

Fought my way through to level 35 and for now I'm like, nope! Fun though: neal.fun/not-a-robot/ Thanks @neal.fun 😄

Here's where accessibility reveals its hidden superpower: it forces you to understand the purpose of everything in your product. 🔗 “Accessible by Design: Building Inclusive Digital Products from the Ground Up” www.nira11y.com/post/accessi...

Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Reduce Transparency For those who updated to #iOS26 today

True story: my friend actually got vibe coding cleanup specialist freelance job www.404media.co/the-software...

We were 🤏 this close to having 4 days workweek in Spain. Can’t get over the fact that due to some votes it’s no longer happening 💔

“How often users will see an animation is a key factor in deciding whether to animate or not.” emilkowal.ski/ui/you-dont-...

Generally we think of alt-text as the domain of those with accessibility needs. However alt-text is useful for many reasons, which benefit your viewers, as well as you, the creator!

good chill day plan: open the wikipedia app, tab over to 'places', find articles about stuff near you that don't have photos. walk there, take some photos, learn about the stuff, improve the pages.

Parece una locura que diga esto y que sea verdad: he descansando estas vacaciones con un bebé de 3 meses y he dormido más que nunca en mi vida 😳

What 15 years of design debt looks like