Many of my clients over the years have relied on fields in tables. Sometimes a checkbox to select a row, sometimes text inputs to update information, sometimes buttons select something. Rarely are they interested in a block of label text above the field, and I cannot disagree with them. The…
Once major browsers started supporting <details> & <summary> developers immediately started to play with them to see what sorts of patterns they could enhance or replace. This is a good thing. Experimentation pushes boundaries, improves understanding. However, we need to be careful of christening this new-to-us interaction as the solution…
Updated Intro Whether you use a <button> or <input type=”checkbox”> for your toggle depends on a few factors: Use <button> if: you can count on JavaScript being available, flipping the toggle has an immediate effect, the toggle will never have an indeterminate state. Go read Under-Engineered Toggles Too. Use <input…
The world wide web has officially lasted 30 consecutive years, which means it’s catching up to its parent, the Internet, which itself is bearing down on 50. That’s an important distinction. The Internet is not the web; it is the foundation on which the web was born. In honor of…
HTML5 gives us form field validation for free. The problem is that the default messages browsers provide are not always useful and typically do not work with assistive technology. I made an example on CodePen that uses an email field (type=”email”), is required (required), and uses a pattern to restrict…
The pun in the title is that some people pronounce the a11y numeronym as “alley”. That makes the full title sound like uncanny valley, the concept of human-looking things seeming almost, but not quite, human and therefore creepy. In accessibility, the same thing can happen. Developers can try so hard…
A few years ago I made a Venn diagram using floats and absolute positioning. It was fine. Nothing to really brag about, but it got the point across. I had use for CSS shapes in a project and wanted to play around beyond what the project itself allowed. I decided…
Web developers around the world have celebrated Saturnalia solstice Isaac Newton’s birthday Christmas with advent calendars covering web-related topics. As a result, you may recognize some of the ones listed below. Every year I miss a few on day one, so add a comment or tweet me if you have…
I should qualify that I started writing this script and CSS, based on another experiment of mine, before I saw Aaron Gustafson’s 2005 ALA post Improving Link Display for Print. He uses similar techniques 12½ years ago that I use here, but with different syntax. Because scripting and styling has…
It is easier than ever to follow web standards and be confident that, for the most part, modern browsers will render it the same. Accessibility standards are enshrined in law the world over, making standards-based semantic and structural mark-up the safest and easiest path. If you do HTML correctly then…
WordCamp Europe has wrapped up in Belgrade. I presented a (not quite) three hour workshop on accessibility, specifically designed to be computer-free. I may have re-used a few slides from my presentation at last year’s WordCamp, but overall this is new material with some WCAG 2.1 references thrown in for…
CodePen created an interesting challenge for May, asking users to come up with styles and ideas for HTML elements that typically come in pairs. It has called this series HTML Buddies and ran a different challenge each week in May for different paired elements. I participated by calling out accessibility…