I don’t care for infographics. Their original purpose of visually conveying otherwise complex information has been superseded by their current use as marketing drek with “quirky” illustrations, blocks of prose, and the occasional useful factoid. The love affair with inforgraphics is confounding to me as a web developer. They are…
Social media outlets are practically a dime a dozen. Excluding ones that are pretty stable right now (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), most of them will either fail or get bought. The problem is that your data, your content, typically dies when they do. As an individual you might not care too…
There is a nifty tool at MQtest.io which gives you a breakdown of how your device reports features you might use for media queries. To use the tool’s own explanation: This test isn’t about what media queries your device can or cannot see (but it does show an ‘unsupported’ label…
This post is old and wrong, do not use it. If you want insights from that era about how users interact with tab widgets, go read Danger! Testing Accessibility with real people (yes, it’s on Medium, but folks in 2016 weren’t as grumpy about Medium as I was / am).…
This is one of those posts that might interest only a few people and even then only if you are interested in a very specific aspect of this ongoing standard development. Yesterday I got into a conversation (just one of the messages) on the W3C Responsive Image Community Group mailing…
The web was always a visual medium, but with the addition of sound and video it has locked up two human senses. With development of specifications and techniques around vibration, the internet you “feel” is getting closer, too. That leaves only a couple senses left to cover Ever since the…
An Argument Early last week .net Magazine posted an article Why HTML5 is not the choice for enterprise mobility by David Akka. The article starts off with the statement HTML5 is being hailed as the programming language… That’s as far as I got before I realized this article had a…
The HTML5 specification as managed by both W3C and WHATWG is an unfinished, incomplete specification that can change at any time. That isn’t a criticism, it’s just a statement of fact. It’s a fact often ignored by people and companies who choose to implement it and then cry foul when…
Nearly two weeks ago I wrote up a post outlining the W3C decision to no longer require the alt attribute on images in HTML5: Image alt Attributes Not Always Required in HTML5. I was genuinely surprised to see that was the most popular post on this blog and garnered the…
It has long been accepted that the alt attribute of the <img> element, while not a perfect method to provide a text alternative to an image, is still a necessary attribute to provide at least some level of access to the image content for users who cannot see the image…
This article was originally posted on evolt.org, an online resource for web developers, maintained by web developers. I have granted evolt.org the right to use this article on their web site, and they are the only entity with the right to reproduce it. You may be wondering what this graphic…
For those of us who make a living working with organizations to help make their web sites accessible to users with disabilities, we’ve got it easy — the client wants to hear our recommendations. As users, however, all too often we stumble across an accessibility issue and don’t know what…