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Top 10 Accessibility News of 2022

This is a round-up of last year’s “most talked about” accessibility news stories, brought to you by Equal Entry (who also have a newsletter you should subscribe to!).

I won’t regurgitate the whole list, which is quite US-centric, but there are some interesting items that were actually completely new to me. It’s amazing how these passed me by, even while I put a fair chunk of my life into writing these newsletters!

• Meetup.com added an accessibility overlay, receiving a lot of negative feedback from the WordPress and accessibility communities. It later removed the overlay.
• Apple added Door Detection to iOS, to “help those who are blind or have low vision locate a door, know how far they are from it, and hear the door attributes. The user will know if the door is open or closed and whether they can open it by pulling, pushing, or turning a knob”.
• Microsoft created Adaptive Accessories; a large range of mix and match inputs to replace or complement the traditional mouse and keyboard. Follow the link to see pictures of the accessories.
• The Speech Accessibility Project was launched to improve speech technology for people with speech impediments and different speech patterns. It is being led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with support from industry heavyweights Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft.

Spoiler alert: the top news story was Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the subsequent firing of Twitter’s accessibility team.

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