Digital Commodification/Enclosure vs Accessibility

WebAIM: The WebAIM Million - The 2026 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages

For the eighth consecutive year, WebAIM conducted an accessibility evaluation of the home pages for the top 1,000,000 web sites. The evaluation was conducted using the WAVE stand-alone API (with additional tools to collect site technology and category data). The results provide an overview of and insight into the current state of web accessibility for individuals with disabilities as well as trends over time.

AI will kill open source

Rambles from near the front line.

The Web Is Being Made Accessible for AI, Not People

Jonathan Zong and Frank Elavsky critique how AI-driven infrastructure changes obscure accessibility and reveal whose needs society chooses to prioritize.

Substrates via Accessibility

The social model of disability holds that disability is produced by environments, not by bodies — that when software fails to accommodate a person’s needs, the environment is disabling them. We argue that the dominant organization of computing produces such interaction mismatches structurally: the commodity form of software requires a standardized consumer, and everyone whose needs diverge from this imagined subject is disabled by the software environment. The substrates research community has identified properties — disclosure, composability, malleability — that would address this, but the commodity form actively selects against these properties because they dissolve the boundaries on which exchange value depends. This raises a question: how can infrastructure organized against the grain of commodity logic be made durable? We find a precedent in accessibility infrastructure — sustained not by patronage but by the organized counter-power of disability rights movements. Through Allio, a system for cross-application augmentation built on accessibility APIs, we illustrate both what this foundation makes possible and where its limits lie. We argue that the accessibility case reframes the substrates programme’s central challenge as political-economic: the question of who sustains substrate infrastructure, and through what social mechanisms, is as important as the question of what properties it should have.

They finally did it: Reddit made it impossible for blind Redditors to moderate their own sub

3.9K votes, 275 comments. Since the latest "accessibility" update to the Reddit app , the amount and magnitude of new accessibility related bugs has…