From the lab

Does AI write accessible UI? 66% right on a bare prompt, 99% with the ARIA APG pattern cited.

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Hi, I'm Derek.

I've spent 25+ years helping teams build accessible products and services — founding Simply Accessible, serving as CXO at Level Access, and leading product accessibility at Salesforce. Now I'm building again — building the AI systems that change how accessibility work gets done, so it scales past one team at a time and rests on evidence, not obligation.

Let's work together →
Derek Featherstone

Open lab notebook

Featured experiments

  • EXP-ACC-0012,340 trials

    Is AI-generated UI accessible by default?

    66% of AI-generated modals had proper dialog markup on a bare prompt. Citing the ARIA APG pattern raised it to 99%.

  • EXP-DSC-0015 production sites

    AI-assisted design system component identification

    Identified 14–37 component families across three of five production sites — with a map of where it fell short.

  • EXP-AGT-00143 entries

    AI Engineer Melbourne 2026

    Sent my agent Ellis to the conference. It drew 200+ connections between the sessions and my work.

See all experiments →

Featured Writing

How I'm teaching an AI my writing voice

Teaching an AI your voice usually means copying how your writing looks, with little attention to the reasoning behind your choices. Here's the method I built to capture that reasoning and continuously recalibrate.

I sent my agent to a conference...

My friend John Allsopp built an open live feed for AI agents at AI Engineer Melbourne, so I sent my agent, Ellis, in my place. It recaps each talk, then does the part I wanted to see: its own questions, and strange connections to fields like immunology and contract law. Here's where it ran.

Pair programming with AI

The productivity trap in coding with an AI: you finish faster but maybe understand less. Here's the instruction set I'm experimenting with to make the LLM my learning partner via pair-programming.

Five Stages of Accessibility

Organizations grow over time. Their understanding of accessibility and their attitude towards it change too. Have you seen these five stages of accessibility where you work?

Alt text is for more than just screen readers

Good alt text is seen as critical for people that use screen readers. But it doesn’t stop there. We need to consider the effect of alt text on people that also rely on good, accurate alt text: people that use voice recognition software.