David A. Kennedy

Acoustic Guitars are Fun

2026-01-17T21:47:08Z

The year ticked over to 2026, and one newer constant has carried through for me: Playing guitar.

Yes, 2025 turned into a doozy for me, like many of you. Working in government last year meant dealing with a lot of changes and lack of information all at once. But I’m thankful to have a job and one that matters. My mom suffered a stroke, but has recovered quicker than we thought. I’m thankful she’s doing well. Both of my brothers made big moves. One across the country and the other across an ocean.

Through all that, I’ve shown up for guitar lessons each week and kept a decent practice routine. That routine hasn’t turned into a full song yet, but bits and pieces of many songs. Like Sweet Home Alabama, Wonderwall and Wish You Were Here. I want to get there this year. It takes more practice. My best bet is a short song by Counting Crows called Walkaways.

I’ve wanted to learn guitar for years, even starting lessons in college. But I worked through school, so making the lessons and practicing fell in priority. A few years ago, I picked up this Gretsch Jim Dandy Parlor acoustic guitar without even playing it. I liked the size, the look of it and its price. In videos of it, I dug the twangy sound. If I failed at learning guitar again, at least I wouldn’t be out a ton of money.

It sat for most of two years. Then I picked it up, trying to teach myself through YouTube. I learned here and there, but I wasn’t practicing enough. In late 2024, I decided to pay for lessons. My rationale? I always wanted to learn, and the regular lessons could provide the accountability I needed to practice more.

It worked! I may put the guitar in my hand for only 10 minutes some days, but that’s better than nothing. Sometimes, that 10 minutes leads to 20 or 30. My guitar teacher, Jay, pushes me while also granting me space to explore what I’m excited about.

After sticking with it for about a year, I decided to treat myself. New guitar! I wanted a full-size, solid-wood acoustic—something that I wanted to pick up every day, keep around for years to come and not want to put down. This time I played a lot of guitars to find the right one.

I landed on a Martin Grand Performance Cutaway 11E. It felt better to me because of its smaller size, compared to a classic dreadnought shape. Plus, it still brought some big sound. I play it most days and reserve the Gretsch for travel or strumming while at my desk during work.

I dig playing guitar for a few reasons:

It’s hard.
It’s not a screen.
You create something with your time.

If you need me, I’ll be practicing.

A Decade of Accessibility Weekly

2025-12-18T02:50:30Z

A decade ago, I started a newsletter called Accessibility Weekly to help people learn about web accessibility. It continues, and I sent out the 478th issue on December 15, 2025. I’d call that a success. It may be one of the most impactful things I’ve made during my career.

Ten years on the web is ancient. After starting Accessibility Weekly, I struggled to keep it weekly. I couldn’t pivot because the name was set. Once people started recommending it, I decided to try again and it stuck. I’ve kept it going because I made it a ritual. Every Sunday, I sit down with a beverage, sift through the links I’ve collected and put together the week’s issue.

Confession time: I started the newsletter as a way to begin writing a book about accessibility. The weekly writing proved more demanding than I expected. I’ve outlined the book, but it remains unwritten. One day though. I got more hooked on curating the good writing others did.

I’ve wanted to stop sending the newsletter more than once over the years. It takes a few hours each week to make something of value for people. It means less time with my family or on other hobbies that take me away from a screen. Doing the work keeps me learning, constantly exposed to new ideas and voices. The occasional email or message that says “I read this every week!” Or “I share links with my coworkers all the time” keep me going.

A decade of weekly curation has taught me a few lessons worth sharing:

In a decade, accessibility on the web hasn’t improved in a large groundbreaking way, but the curiosity around it has changed dramatically. More people talk about it in more places. We should keep leaning into that.
The best post or resource about accessibility is the one you publish, sharing what you learned and/or what you don’t know.
We need more voices writing about accessibility. As blogging has declined and audiences have scattered across siloed platforms, it’s harder than ever to have a serendipitous discovery of someone you’ve never read before. Publish, and do it on a site you control.
I need to include the perspectives of people with disabilities more. I try to do this often in the most prominent spots: the featured article and the “New to A11y” section. However, the more, the better.

I’ll keep showing up in people’s inboxes as long as they keep telling me I’m making something useful. Here’s a secret. That’s easier now than it has been before because of the increased use of artificial intelligence to take shortcuts. There’s something unique about a curated list of links. I hope they provide a point of view and help people take action.

See you in the next issue.

Image by Edge2Edge Media.

More on What Makes a Good Accessibility Designer

2025-06-03T01:07:59Z

In my last post on the same topic, I touched on many soft skills that a designer should know working in accessibility. If you want to go deeper on foundational aspects of accessibility for a designer, start here.

Working in accessibility means you’re diving into one of the most complex, challenging spaces for a designer. Buckle up.

Design with Disabled People

I made a glaring omission in the last post: Centering people with disabilities in the work. I didn’t intend for that to happen. I wanted to focus on the less obvious aspects that a designer needs to understand. I should have made that clear.

As a designer who wants to improve how your product works for people with disabilities, you need to think critically about how they participate in your work. Are they leading through participatory design? Who has the power? You or them? Asking these questions and integrating power structures can center them in a “with” rather than a “for” fashion. It means you design for a better experience, rather than compliance alone.

When many designers first dive into accessibility, they try to make a project compliant, with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), or a similar standard or law. You can stop there, but that doesn’t mean you’ve created something that people with disabilities can or want to use. Compliance is an outcome of designing for the experience, not the goal. Designing for compliance means you’re aiming to meet a standard or law. Designing for a good experience means you’re aiming to create something that helps people get a job done and gets out of the way.

That job-first approach can mean you need to shed your preconceived notions of what a designer does. What good design means might be different than what you thought. See “Be Curious” and “Assume Nothing” in the first post. You’re not in control here. You’re a conduit rather than the power source. Good design can be boring and innovative. More often, bad design is exciting, but pointless. Aim for the former, rather than the latter.

Resources:

Design Justice (book)

Learn HTML

I’m not someone who thinks all designers should know how to code. A designer can go in many directions to provide value. However, learning HTML means you understand the final form your designs will take. There’s nothing more valuable than grasping the medium in which you work.

If you’re providing accessibility feedback to product managers, other designers or engineers, you’ll need to understand HTML. The same goes for native code on platforms like Android and iOS, if that’s part of your stack.

Understanding HTML means you can communicate the impact that code choices make for people with disabilities who use what gets designed and created. You can start to analyze a design and spot its weaknesses before a line of code gets written. That provides instant value because the easiest way to make an experience accessible is to prevent bugs before they happen.

Resources:

HTML for People (online book)

Embrace that Accessibility Work is Political and be Prepared to Engage

When you decide to engage in accessibility, you’re saying you want to ensure that people with disabilities have their civil rights met. Accessibility is always political. You can’t avoid that.

I like the way Sheri Byrne-Haber puts it:

You can’t talk about accessibility without talking about disability because accessibility is inherently tied to the experiences and needs of people with disabilities. When we explore accessibility for people with disabilities, we are talking about physical access to buildings as well as digital access to information, technology, education, employment, and every facet of life. Accessibility is a fundamental issue of civil rights and social justice.

Many systems impact whether an experience is accessible or can be made accessible. These include, but aren’t limited to morality, ethics, ableism, capitalism, the law, privilege, employment inequalities, and lived experience. Plus, people are complex and bring intersectionality. If they’re a person of color and have a disability, for example, their journey and lived experience has more challenges.

You’ll hit walls in all those systems, plus more, which I haven’t mentioned. When you do, pause. Remind yourself that you don’t have a lot of control. Interrogate the system to better understand it for the future. When you can, learn from disability justice.

Resources:

The politics of accessibility (blog post)

Learn What Self-Regulation Techniques Help You Continue this Work for the Long Haul

Accessibility work is hard. Complicated. Never ending. Thankless. Frustrating. Burnout inducing.

Accessibility work is also rewarding. Morally and ethically right. A place to learn every day. Capable of making profound impacts on people’s lives.

When you work in this area, you’ll experience all that. Sometimes in the same day. If you’re disabled and do this work, you not only have to fight this in your job, but your everyday life too. If you want to stay in it for the long haul, try to develop self-regulation techniques that can give you the space you need to recharge and be ready for the next challenge.

I once had a CEO tell me accessibility wasn’t my job. I’ve watched designers and developers create career obstacles for themselves when leadership says that they can’t make an experience more accessible, but they kept trying. This comes with power imbalances. You can’t change it all.

The field itself can intimidate even experienced accessibility professionals, myself included. If you start contributing widely to the space, you’ll often get drive-by criticism, valid and invalid. You need to learn how to parse it. If you don’t, you can put too much weight into feedback and ideas that may be less important.

In parsing it, you need to develop a hierarchy that makes sense to you. Is it:

Constructive feedback? Feedback you can use and helps you shape a direction. You can act on it.
Destructive feedback? Feedback you can’t use and puts you off course from your goal. You may struggle to act on it.
From a disabled person? This feedback will often prove most valuable. However, not always.
From a non-disabled person? Still valuable feedback, but you need to weigh how it intersects with your hierarchy.
Opinion? Is this something that someone has shared without backing up their reasoning. It may be weaker in that regard.
An access need? Is what’s offered going to enable someone with a disability to get a job done? This feedback is always valuable.
A change that will work for a wider audience? You have to find balance in this work. A wider audience often gets prioritized over those with disabilities. Is that for the right reasons or not?
Politically fraught? As someone who specializes in accessibility, you may have a limited amount of political capital. Spend it wisely.

You may dive into a problem space and discover the straightforward answer you’re looking for doesn’t exist, and you’ll need to make tradeoffs. It’s easy to feel like you know nothing at times.

My strategies for staying in this work revolve around:

Favoring pragmatism over perfection. I like to aim for small changes, made often vs. big payoffs.
Owning the spaces that I can control and trying to influence the ones I don’t through allies and data. It’s not always perfect, but it helps me delegate the work.
Focus on the people and processes that can and want to be changed. Guiding people and processes toward change will exhaust you, but what gets created will last longer.

Resources:

Yes, accessibility comes with complexity. It takes more than soft skills and the usual bevy of abilities that a designer builds up over time. Focus on these areas though, and you might begin to feel like you can make a difference in the work.

Thank you to Josh Kim and Eric Bailey for feedback on this post. They helped shape it and improved it greatly.

Be a Good Link

2025-05-01T00:20:50Z

I want you to be a good link.

You have a site that:

provides useful information in whatever topic you’re writing about. What’s useful can change, depending on the site or its goal, but aim for accuracy.
brings a perspective to your readers. Tell me a story with a point of view. Demonstrate how you’re changing as you learn something new or go through your life.
lives at its own domain. Sites die or go dormant all the time, but if you’ve laid out money for your URL, there’s a better chance you’re invested in creating something that lasts.
respects a person’s attention and privacy. Skip the ads in every corner and nix heavy analytics that track people across the web. Make money from your work, but be mindful of how that happens.
lacks grift. You bring your perspective, and do it in a way that doesn’t push someone down a path they’ll regret later.
resembles you. It could be a weird URL, a color scheme or the tone in your writing. Make it unmistakably you.

I’d like to think I know what a good link looks like. I’ve run a newsletter for a decade and thought about this before. Like Dave Rupert, I’ve noticed folks continue to rely on platforms like Medium, Substack and the like to get their creative work out there. Platforms give you shortcuts, and compromises. Your site says something about you. It’s a link back to you as much as an avenue for linking to elsewhere. Make sure it sends the right message.

What Makes a Good Accessibility Designer?

2025-01-18T19:20:27Z

Someone asked me recently what skills a designer needs. Since I work in the accessibility space, I started thinking about how the question translates to designers who tackle accessibility every day.

Here’s what I came up with that covers both designers and accessibility designers. Each skill builds on the previous one.

For any designer:

Be Curious

A designer solves problems. To do that, you need to understand how systems work. To gain an understanding of systems, you need to be curious. Unintimidated by roadblocks and unknowns. Even excited and energized by them. This provides fuel for your work. Always ask why.

Assume Nothing

Even if you’re curious, you can still make assumptions. Try to avoid this. A good designer integrates what they think they know. Use it to power your curiosity. A lot of design work happens when you’re trying to understand people, systems or environments. Embrace that.

Ask Questions in the Open

You can be curious and challenge your own assumptions without asking questions in an open, transparent way. That means asking them where others can see them, think about them and try to answer them. Magic happens when one questions spawns an answer and three more questions. A question for a designer is like a hammer for a carpenter.

For those who do accessibility work:

Get the Basics Right

The majority of the accessibility work that happens on a regular basis falls into getting the basics right. Diving into accessibility can prove intimidating because it can be both technical and contextual. Much of the basics end up with straightforward answers though. If you spend time on nailing the basics, you’re ahead of 80 percent of the designers out there.

Don’t Aim for Perfection

Accessibility work has two main goals:

Make the interface work for the widest possible audience, starting with people with disabilities.
Make the interface better than before.

That’s how I’ve approached the work in the decade-plus I’ve done it. If you aim for perfection, nothing may happen that makes an impact. The second point helps you skirt the desire and tendency to make your changes perfect. Remember, accessibility is another design constraint. And constraints often lead to compromises and that’s expected.

Learn Accessibility in Layers

Once you grasp the basics, where do you go from there? The possibilities abound. Take a layered approach. This might mean learning about accessibility laws in one go then focusing on something technical, like ARIA. You might look at your current project and ask, “What do I need to learn here that I don’t yet know?” Learn that. Repeat it on the next project. You’ll feel less overwhelmed than taking a giant course and trying to apply what was valuable.

Conclusion

I realize the skills I’ve advocated for here qualify as soft rather than hard. I’m saying “Learn these approaches,” instead of “Learn this software and these techniques.” The hard skills will evolve as you move through your career. The soft skills stick with you for the long haul.

Wrangler

2024-11-07T23:39:19Z

Over the years, family members and friends learned something that put a big smile on my face. Buying me a Jeep Wrangler. I got a few of them.

Except these weren’t real-life Jeep Wranglers. One friend gave me a Hot Wheels version. A few years ago, my family gifted me a Lego version for the holidays. I even bought myself a photo of a vintage Wrangler.

I get it. Wranglers are expensive and impractical. That stopped me from getting one several times. But not any longer. I finally bought one a few weeks ago, pulling a 2022 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Sport S into my driveway.

I almost got one in college, but I balked because of the horrible gas milage and my long commute at the time. Years later, I needed a dependable vehicle to drive to work. It didn’t have to look good, just had to run. My $5,000 budget had me looking at Wranglers with holes in the floorboards. I didn’t make that purchase either.

However, selling our seldom-used camping trailer meant I had extra cash and no longer needed our Ford Escape for towing. I toyed with going back down to one vehicle for our family, but our schedules have grown busier, making that harder. Plus, my family kept encouraging me to finally get a Wrangler. “Either get one, or stop talking about it,” they said. Fair enough.

I know it’s not practical. To be honest, I’ll rarely take it off-road. I doubt I’ll lift it. To me, it just looks cool. I like its World War II heritage, the way it drives like a small truck and the top’s ability to come off. It makes me happy, and I hope to make some good memories with it. First though, I need a name for it.

Kind Words

2024-05-18T16:32:48Z

Offer someone kind words and they might feel better or move in a positive direction.

That’s all it takes. A few words of encouragement makes them feel seen, appreciated or even courageous.

One example from my professional life: Launching Accessibility Weekly and turning it into a regular newsletter. When I posted about the possibility on Twitter years ago, Marcy Sutton Todd, a frontend engineer I admired in the accessibility space said, “Do it!!!” I did.

Months later after I started the newsletter, and sent a handful of issues, I struggled to keep up with it weekly. Dave Rupert, another frontend engineer and cohost of the popular Shoptalk Show podcast, mentioned it on an episode.

There was an A11y Weekly, but it sort of petered out. But it was pretty good… Good examples of accessibility chatter.

When I heard that, I thought, “Whoa! People are reading this thing.”

I sent a thank you tweet to Dave, and got a reply:

Keep it up! It’s really good. Perfect-sized tidbits.

This became a turning point for Accessibility Weekly. Soon after that exchange, I started to send it out weekly, making it hold up to its name. The newsletter turns nine in September.

We need more kind words out there. If you have something kind to say, do it. You never know the effect it might have.

Working with Kettlebells

2024-04-22T00:34:48Z

Kettlebells appeal to me because of their simplicity and scalability.

They take up little space and you can do easy or grueling workouts with them. They limit you to functional movements that mimic ones you’d do in life. More importantly for me, I’ve stuck with kettlebells for more than a year and my health and fitness has improved.

I first started using kettlebells in 2018 after purchasing Simple and Sinister, a workout program in book form by Pavel Tsatsouline. I began with kettlebell swings, pairing 30 swings with five minutes of rowing. After building up those numbers, albeit inconsistently, I started to get more serious last year. I attended a kettlebell training class to help hone my movements. I carved out a small workout space in my garage and hung up a pull-up bar. Then I bought more kettlebells, bringing my total up to five. For the past year, I’ve kept an extensive workout log. That log has held me accountable, building up weeks of consistent workouts. I’ve missed only for illness or travel.

I’ve stuck with kettlebells for a few reasons:

They’re flexible: You can do many kinds of exercises and workouts with them. I haven’t got bored yet.
They scale: I’ve done workouts as long as an hour and as short as 10 minutes. Easy and hard. Pairing them with rowing has meant I’ve found a low-impact replacement for running.
They’re inexpensive: For a few hundred dollars, I can replicate a minimalist gym setup and add to it as ready.

My favorite workouts, beside Simple and Sinister, include pairing kettlebell swings with pushups and Dan John’s Armor Building Complex. These have helped me keep workouts effective and simple. I’ve learned that it’s better to do a short workout each day than nothing at all. You have to “grease the groove” as Pavel says.

I hope to keep at it with kettlebells so I can maintain solid fitness well past middle age.

No One Actually Wants Accessibility

2024-03-24T02:15:55Z

Every year we find out basic accessibility errors litter the web. Many companies, product managers, designers and engineers say they want to release accessible work, but their choices prove otherwise. Some of that comes down to ableism and the rest tracks back to priorities.

Luke Plant made a similar argument about simplicity in web development. I haven’t been able to get the post out of my head since because I saw a parallel with accessibility.

Plant says in the post:

The same is often true of complexity. The real test is the question “what are you willing to sacrifice to achieve simplicity?” If the answer is “nothing”, then you don’t actually love simplicity at all, it’s your lowest priority.

If you keep pushing accessibility down in the backlog, then you don’t value it. Organizations will always have more to do than they can get done. You can counter this by taking accessibility on in small chunks. Many teams want to do an “accessibility sprint,” but instead I recommend taking on a task or two in each sprint. That means accessibility happens near daily. A team or individual can put constant pressure on it, and soon, the progress becomes apparent.

Minimum Viable Blogging

2024-03-16T19:28:10Z

No one has nailed the minimal blogging platform yet.

A few recent entires have sprung up, and I’m watching the space to see how they develop. I can’t help it, as I love seeing how web publishing tools evolve. It takes a lot to make an easy website possible. I appreciate the speed, simplicity and customizability of static site generators, but miss typing into a simple text editor on the web. I moved to Eleventy a few years ago and toyed with Kirby.

I thought it would be fun to share what I’d want in a minimal viable blogging platform:

A managed platform: I don’t want to manage servers, update the software or have to worry about routine site maintenance. When I’ve used a managed platform in the past, I’ve blogged more.

A simple web editor: I want a box I can type words into and push a “publish” button to get it out there. I’d skip a block editor with heavy design or layout customization. It should support Markdown. Static site generators have advantages, but fiddling with the build tools gets annoying if you just to to write.

Accessible markup and tools: The code the editor generates on the frontend should output simple, accessible HTML. The editor itself should also be accessible and usable per web standards.

Design customization and personalization: I don’t mean “theming” here. That implies full customization, and the more access to possibilities I have, the less I write. I’d like a way to change colors, fonts and markup patterns. Those markup patterns could be image galleries, posts lists, site menus and footer content.

Solid performance: The resulting site can build dynamically or statically, but should take performance into account. It should use caching and content delivery networks when possible to make sure content gets to people as fast as possible.

A way to export data: I should be able to get my content out of the platform in a standard format and take it elsewhere. Don’t lock me in and instead, give me a one-click export.

A way to customize URLs and handle redirects: Cool URLs don’t change, except when they do and you need a way to maintain the old ones. I prefer the trailing slash because it many platforms expect it. But give me a way to make sure all my old URLs work, and I’ll manage.

I doubt I’ll ever find the perfect platform, but this would be a great start.