Dispatches From The Internets

Some blind fans to experience Super Bowl with tactile device that tracks ball

A few years ago, a couple students at the University of Washington asked me to come to their campus for a visit. They gave me a demo of an early prototype they’d been working on — a haptic feedback device that could allow someone who is Blind or low vision to follow a game. The demo took video data from a tennis match and mapped it onto the haptic tablet. It felt like Pong, but they had a bolder vision — tackling fast-moving and complicated sports like basketball, football, American football, and hockey.

I immediately invited them to pitch us for the AI for Accessibility Grant Program that I ran for Microsoft. With so much focus on assistive technology to enable folks to work and accomplish common life tasks, I loved that the OneCourt team was interested in enabling people with disabilities to enjoy leisure activities like sporting events. Moreover, I saw the potential to enable Blind and low-vision parents to experience their kids’ sporting events, which could be life-changing for them.

Needless to say, they wowed both me and the rest of the seleciton committee. We funded them to expand their prototypes and pursue partnerships with different professional sports leagues, teams, and venues. They were ambitious and it’s paying off.

Fast forward a few years and they’re enabling a handful of Blind & low vision sports fans to exerience the Super Bowl in a whole new way, using their technology. It’s amazing and I could not be more proud of them.

Congrats y’all!

Repeatable Form Fields Made Simple

Sometimes you need users to provide multiple instances of the same information—multiple email addresses, phone numbers, team members, or emergency contacts. The form-repeatable web component makes this straightforward, handling field duplication, automatic renumbering, and seamless form submission via the ElementInternals API.

A Production-Ready Web Component Starter Template

Creating a new web component from scratch involves a lot of boilerplate—testing setup, build configuration, linting, CI/CD, documentation structure, and more. After building — and refining/rebuilding — numerous web components, I’ve distilled all that work into a starter template that lets you focus on your component’s functionality rather than project setup.

Fullscreen Video and Iframes Made Easy

Adding fullscreen capabilities to videos and embedded iframes shouldn’t require wrestling with prefixed APIs or managing focus states. The fullscreen-control web component handles all of that for you — just wrap it around the element. The component handles the rest as a discrete progressive enhancement.

Dynamic Datalist: Autocomplete from an API

HTML’s datalist element provides native autocomplete functionality, but it’s entirely static—you have to know all the options up front. The dynamic-datalist web component solves this by fetching suggestions from an API endpoint as users type, giving you the benefits of native autocomplete with the flexibility of dynamic data.

Lazy Loading Images Based on Screen Size

Native lazy loading and srcset are great, but they have a limitation: they always load some variant of the image. The lazy-img web component takes a different approach—it can completely skip loading images when they don’t meet your criteria, whether that’s screen size, container size, or visibility in the viewport. This is particularly valuable for mobile users on slow connections or limited data plans. If an image is only meaningful on larger screens, why waste their bandwidth loading it at all?

Forrester Research: As technology has evolved, so has the need for accessibility

A recent paper from Forrester (commissioned by Microsoft, my employer), has confirmed my anedotal experiences are not outliers:

This new study, based on a 2025 online survey of 3,901 US consumers, confirms what many of us know: accessible technology empowers everyone. And with the rise of AI, we’re entering a new era of possibility.

One of the stats that’s likely to be surprising to many people is that people who identify as having disabilities and those who don’t both use assistive technology features at nearly the same rate.

Full details of the research report are here: Oh, The Things We Can Do Together — How Assistive Technology Is Unlocking Human Potential In The Era Of AI

Creating a more accessible web with ARIA Notify

I just saw this very exciting announcement on the Edge Dev Blog:

ARIA Notify is an ergonomic and predictable way to tell assistive technologies (ATs), such as screen readers, exactly what to announce to users and when.

In its simplest form, developers can call the ariaNotify() method with the text to be announced to the user.

Here’s what it looks like:

// Dispatch a normal priority notification
document.ariaNotify("Background task completed", { priority: "normal" });

I’m particularly excited by this because of how much it simplifies the update process for engineers. Previously they needed to manage upates to an aria-live DOM node with the appropriate announcement level and hope for the best. This approach was plagued with issues ranging from lag — because, DOM manipulation — to confusion between whether “polite” or “assertive” was the right choice.

The ARIA Notify proposal is clear, concise, and far more likely to get used and — more importantly — used properly.

It’s currently in Origin Trial. Please give your feedback so we can get this into every browser sooner rather than later.