Good soil doesn't happen by accident

I'm Brent Passmore. For 25+ years I've worked in higher education, where I've been an army of one, lead fantastic teams and everything in between. I'm also the founder of Had A Farm. (I will overuse farm references like this post's title and I apologize in advance.) The plan is to drop a post every Monday on web accessibility, AI, and the stories behind shipping the ideas that pop into my head.

When I released eiSEO, my accessibility, SEO, and AEO app, I started thinking about what to call the company. eiSEO had me singing "Old McDonald had a farm...eiSEO."

By day, I manage web governance for a large academic medical center. Standards, web accessibility, editor training, and lots of thinking about how AI assistants describe an institution they have never been formally introduced to.

At Had A Farm, I agentic engineer tools like:

I'm a wannabe minimalist who is learning to live in the moment and savor time with family, friends, and a good guitar (or 50).

I want to share what I've learned and what I'm learning. For instance...

It's not a color contrast pass at the end of the project. It's heading hierarchy, semantic markup, real labels on form fields, and a keyboard path through every task on the page. You can't append accessibility to your site. It has to be built from the ground up.

Your website is a building with no signs on the doors, and AI assistants are confident visitors with no maps. They will answer questions about you whether or not you've told them anything.

I have a full-time job. Anything I build has to run without me. It has to meet accessibility guidelines and it must solve a problem efficiently so that I can move on to other items on my task list.

One post, Monday mornings. Over the next six months I'll be writing about the April 2027 compliance deadline and what it takes to be ready, how to write the text files that AI tools honor, what I got wrong about building Pacewell, and occasionally what setting up a good guitar taught me all about it.

What you will not get are growth hacks, ten-times-your-traffic posts, or a mention of my morning routine.

I'm not perfect but I do try to do less wrong. So expect me to contradict myself as I continue to learn.

There are 252 days until April 26, 2027.

That's the date the Department of Justice's Title II rule requires public entities serving 50,000 or more people to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA. If you're smaller than that, or you're a special district, your date is April 26, 2028. Either way, if you run a website for a city, school district, a public university, county clinic, or a nonprofit, one of those two dates is already on your calendar whether you realize it or not.

I believe most organizations are somewhere between "we ran a scanner once" and "we assumed the vendor handled it."

Next Monday I'll lay out exactly what the rule requires, what conformance means, and an eight-month plan for getting there.

Good soil doesn't happen by accident. Neither does a website everyone can use. Both take longer than you want and both are worth it.

See you next Monday.