Making simonpainter.com WCAG 2 AA compliant, and keeping it that way with CI
I had one of those mildly awkward moments that only bloggers and other people who publish opinions on the internet seem able to engineer for themselves.
I had just been accepted on the Microsoft MVP Accessibility Vanguard, a new MVP engagement group for people who care deeply about building more accessible technology. The scope is exactly the sort of thing I want more of in the community: product accessibility, AI and disability, and the way disabled people are represented in technology systems. It is a space for MVPs to compare notes, hear directly from Microsoft product teams, and, hopefully, nudge things in a better direction.
Then, this morning, somewhere between jetwashing the patio and enjoying the sunshine on a rare day off, I had the uncomfortable thought: I should probably make sure my own blog is not an accessibility bin fire before I start sounding clever about any of this.
That thought was annoyingly well aimed. I had already written about visiting the Microsoft Inclusive Tech Lab, and more recently about writing inclusive language rules in Copilot instructions. Both posts were sincere. Both made arguments I still stand by. Neither would carry much weight if the site they lived on was quietly doing the web equivalent of mumbling into the carpet whenever a screen reader turned up.
So I ran an audit on simonpainter.com.
It was not catastrophic. Nobody had committed an autoplaying carousel with white text on a yellow background. But it also was not good enough. I had contrast failures, links that relied on colour alone, a missing level-one heading, vague "Read more" links, and Mermaid diagrams that looked fine to sighted readers while saying next to nothing to assistive tech.
This is how I went about fixing that lot, and of putting a GitHub Actions check in front of the site so future Simon does not casually undo present Simon's work the next time I get overconfident with a theme tweak.