He co-edits the accessibility rules the web is measured against, then quietly translates them back into something a developer can actually use.
// Hidde de Vries. Two decades in, still arguing that CSS is the most honest way to decide what people deserve online.
Ask Hidde de Vries to audit a website and he can usually tell you what is wrong before he opens it. Insufficient colour contrast. Missing accessible names. Buttons that are not really buttons. The same low-hanging fruit shows up in nearly every audit he runs, and that predictability is the quiet tragedy of the modern web: most of what excludes people is not exotic, it is just unfixed.
Today de Vries works on web standards for the Dutch government and sits on the Advisory Board of the W3C, the body that steers the open web. He is a co-editor of WCAG and WCAG-EM, the documents that define what "accessible" legally and technically means, and a contributor to the emerging Web Sustainability Guidelines. If you have ever passed an accessibility check, some fraction of the rulebook has his fingerprints on it.
What makes him unusual is not the credentials. It is the translation. Standards are written in the dense, hedged language of committees. De Vries takes them apart on hidde.blog and rebuilds them in sentences a developer can act on by Friday. He calls the most common objection to ARIA - "don't use it" - too quick a verdict, and spends his energy showing where, used well, it is equivalent to an HTML-only solution.
He is also, by training, a philosopher. Two degrees in it, from Utrecht and then Bristol. He came to the web sideways, through agencies and meetups and the conviction that a technology this important deserves to be argued about carefully. The blog he runs is green-hosted, entirely human-written, and explicitly off-limits to AI training. The medium is the argument.
"I strongly believe in a web that puts people first."
- Hidde de Vries
For a long stretch, the advice kept arriving from people he respected: start a blog. He didn't. Then one day he did, and the small act of thinking out loud in public turned out to be the hinge his whole career swung on. The writing got him invited to conferences. The talks got him into standards groups. The standards work got him to the W3C.
He points to a specific lineage of bloggers who made him believe a personal site could matter - Rachel Andrew, Jeremy Keith, Sara Soueidan, Lea Verou. People who used writing not to broadcast finished opinions but to work out unfinished ones in the open.
The Bristol years were formative in a different way. While finishing a philosophy master's at the University of Bristol he freelanced for local agencies - cxpartners, True Digital, Nomensa - and absorbed a city he still credits for its food, its meetups, and its web community.
De Vries describes most accessibility failures as "low-hanging fruit" - not edge cases, but the basics, recurring across nearly every site he reviews. An illustrative look at the usual suspects:
Illustrative frequencies based on de Vries's public descriptions of recurring audit findings, not a formal dataset.
"Web standards work is a great school for learning how to get groups to solve problems collaboratively."
- On the slow, robust craft of committees
"The 'don't use ARIA' interpretation is too quick."
On accessible rich applications
"Start a blog!"
The advice he ignored, then took
"I strongly believe in a web that puts people first."
His through-line
Making technology work for humans.
The tagline of hidde.blog
Of every language he could pick, he names CSS as his programming language of choice. For an accessibility specialist, the layout layer is where empathy meets the grid.
In his spare time he is assembling a coffee-table book about the video-conferencing applications of the decade. A monument to the windows we all stared into.
Bachelor's in Utrecht, master's in Bristol - both in philosophy. He reasons about the web the way he was trained to reason about everything else.
hidde.blog runs on green hosting, is written entirely by hand, and is explicitly off-limits to AI model training. The site practices what it preaches.
From Mastodon to GitHub to Twitter, he is some compression of his own name - "hdv" or "hidde." Consistency, even in usernames.
In 2019 his "Web We Want" idea took both the jury prize and the audience vote - the rare double that means the experts and the crowd agreed.
Compiled from public sources including hidde.blog, w3.org, Smashing Magazine and Pixel Pioneers. Facts only; where details were uncertain, they were left out.