This block of code came across my Twitter timeline today framed as a CSS tip to prevent text selection on a web page: html { user-select: none; } For funsies, I dropped that CSS on this very page you are reading (assuming you are reading it in the browser). It…
Thanks to a tweet from UCL Department of Mathematics, I am one of the many people who stumbled across Cistercian numerals and fell down the rabbit hole. To over-simplify, they are single glyphs that can each represent a number from 1 to 9,999 that were developed by Cistercian monks to…
Table of Contents Example The HTML Live Region Button Decoration Accessible Name The Styles Hide the Live Region Color and Contrast Active Animations Text Resize and Reflow Windows High Contrast Mode The Script The Click Event Manipulate Outcomes Screen Reader Output WCAG Success Criteria What This Does Not Do Wrap-up…
Calendar controls, date pickers, date widgets, whatever you call them, however they are described, they follow the same basic principle — present the user with a calendar to enter a date (and sometimes a time). Chris Blakeley, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 The native implementations come from browsers when authors use <input…
I built this for me. An audience of one. A way to keep sharp the skills that I am not always able to use on a project. My requirements were simple: responsive (print, small screens), accessible (beyond screen readers), and kinda fun. Since it relies on a JSON data source…
When a keyboard-only user or screen reader user comes to page that uses CSS to create a layout, there is a chance that what is on the screen does not match the flow of the page. In the posts HTML Source Order vs CSS Display Order and Source Order Matters…
Original photo by Kevin Hale (photo no longer on Flickr), text added. CC BY-SA 2.0. 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…
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…
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…
Yeah. Another one. Let’s recap: In 2012 I asked that we get back to using HTML tables for tabular data in my post It’s OK to Use Tables, In November I argued that we need to avoid ARIA grid patterns for tables in Hey, It’s Still OK to Use Tables,…
Google Analytics has tracked browser viewport sizes for almost four years, but I found it was imprecise. After doing some recent testing I have decided it works well and have started to dump my own tracking as a result. This post shares some of the history and comparison information. History…
Last week Amit Agarwal posted a great tutorial on making YouTube embeds less of a burden for users, A Better Method for Embedding YouTube Videos on your Website. The abstract: Learn how to embed YouTube videos responsively and without increasing the page load time. The embeds are light and mobile…