One easy thing you can do for the earth is not use “AI” tools. Consider this as a programmer, web developer, web designer, copywriter, webmaster, etc. The tools include anything branded as generative AI, LLMs, computer vision tools, Copilot, ChatGPT, Bard, Grok, Dall-e, Midjourney, and so on. If you are…
TL;DR: Keep your image alternative text brief, devoid of special characters, empty of URLs, and ideally in one language. Here We Go Sometimes you can have too much alternative text, particularly for an <img>. I don’t mean there is a limit to what is allowed, I mean there is a…
Download a 4.4MB tagged PDF of my slides or try the embedded view if your browser displays PDF inline. The text in the slides is set in Atkinson Hyperlegible. The outdoor images are generated from Midjourney. The PDF is exported from PowerPoint, after confirming reading order and alternative text and…
It’s none. Clarification Let me clarify: don’t set a base font size. body { /* font-size: yeah, no */ } Got a linter or code checker or boss-man hassling you that you need to set something? Ok, use something like this: html { font-size: 100%; } Because This approach has…
The world wide web has officially lasted 35 consecutive years, which means it’s catching up to its parent, the Internet, which itself is bearing down on 55. That’s an important distinction. The Internet is not the web; it is the foundation on which the web was born. Prior Years For…
Yes, that is the bear from Jakob’s clearly spurious alternative text example and yes, that is The Fonz after jumping the shark. If you have been following the saga of Jakob Nielsen, there a few quotes I could use here: Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster (Nietzsche).…
Controls that can operate other controls in bulk are not new. One common example is a single checkbox that allows you to check or uncheck a group of checkboxes. Another example is a single button that lets you expand or collapse a set of disclosure widgets. When the user operates…
Photo by studio tdes. Used under CC BY 2.0 Deed. Image cropped and contrast enhanced. A few days ago Benjy Stanton asked about breaking long words in tables. I offered a suggestion, which may or may not have worked. I never asked. My failure to follow up aside, it reminded…
A rambling collection of thoughts from reading through the WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey #10 Results. Most of this was in a Masto thread, but I opted to post it here so I can laugh at myself later. Disability This opening nugget is important for understanding some of my commentary:…
Trying Markdown code indicators in my post title, not because I want it to convert, but because I am curious if people will ping me to tell me it broke their RSS readers. Oh, and so it converts to code when pasted into your GitHub issues. ARIA note Role A…
Just another usability and accessibility pro telling authors not to do the thing they continue to do. It’s Ok to Disable Buttons There are plenty of cases where you want to disable a button until a user takes a conscious action to enable it, such as when launching nuclear missiles.…
This was a thread over on Mastodon and it did some numbers (such as zero), but not everyone is over there and I felt like I might reference this again later. Now it is a post (slightly expanded in parts to reduce ambiguity). This image was generated by Midjourney using…