Accessibility

Ed Talks Stuff is a reading site. If you cannot read the page the usual way, you should still be able to get the article. That is the standard we hold the site to.

EdTalksStuff.com is fully ADA compliant. We built it that way, and we keep it that way. The technical target is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.2, Level AA. That is the measure we use when we add a page, a form, a player, or a graphic.

This statement covers the pages on edtalksstuff.com. It does not cover Spotify, Amazon, an email program, or any other site a link sends you to. Those companies publish their own statements.

What you should be able to do

Read an article in text, or hear the finished piece read aloud.

Move through the site with a keyboard, not only a mouse. A skip link at the top of the page jumps past the navigation to the content.

Resize the text. The page should still work when the type is larger.

Tell a link from a button, and tell where a link goes. Article links name the piece. They do not say “click here.”

Hear the page with a screen reader. Headings are in order. The language of the site is English.

Get the point of a picture from the text around it, and from alternative text where the image carries meaning. Decorative graphics are not announced as if they were a second article.

Use the newsletter form without a trick. The label says what it is. We do not spam. The privacy policy is linked from the form.

The audio

Each article is narrated from the final draft, so the spoken version is the piece as published. The voice is Orion, generated by Grok. It is not Ed. Ed had a stroke in 2021 and has cut back on recording for his health. The words are his. The voice is not.

We left a text-to-speech plugin because the features were limited and the controls made listening harder for people who rely on audio. The read is Orion. The player is Spotify, because pause, scrub, and coming back later actually work.

There is no music under the narration. One voice, one article.

The full account of the voice, the stroke, and the player is on About the Audio.

What is still imperfect

A claim of compliance is not a claim that nothing ever breaks.

Spotify’s player is a third-party tool. We use it because the controls are better than the plugin we had. Spotify’s own accessibility is Spotify’s. If the embed fails, the article text is the record.

A new piece may be on the page before its audio is attached. The text is the article until the player is there.

Affiliate links, share buttons, and embedded players are other companies’ code sitting on our page. We choose them carefully. We do not control their markup.

Graphics made for a column are built to be readable at a glance. If a graphic repeats the headline, the headline in the article is the accessible version.

If any of that fails for you, it is a bug, not a feature we are defending.

Tell me

If a page will not read, a player will not start, a form will not submit, or the contrast fails in your browser, write to hello@edtalksstuff.com. Name the page, what you were trying to do, and the browser or screen reader if you know it.

I would rather hear about a broken control on a Tuesday than discover it from a stranger. Accessibility that only works on a good day is not accessibility.

We answer accessibility mail at that same address. If we need a change, we make it on the page. We do not ask you to accept a workaround as the fix.

This page

This statement was published on October 8, 2026. We revise it when the site changes in a way that matters to access: a new player, a new form, a dropped tool. The About the Audio page is the detail on narration. This page is the promise for the rest of the site.