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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
In the post Toggling Animations On and Off Kirupa Chinnathambi does a great job of outlining the value in giving users a choice over seeing animations. Part of that is by honoring preferences users have already made in their operating systems to reduce the amount of animation they see. I…
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…
Related Other posts in this accidental series: Layout as a Clue to Semantics Display: Contents Is Not a CSS Reset Tables, JSON, CSS, ARIA, RWD, TLAs… Tables, CSS Display Properties, and ARIA A Responsive Accessible Table Hey, It’s Still OK to Use Tables When I presented my talk CSS Display…
By now most of you have seen that four panel American Chopper meme. For those who cannot see, it whisked across Twitter as yet another undescribed image in a sea of inaccessible memes. Heck, for those of us whose data plan crapped out, it was just a missing block in…
Two nearly back-to-back tweets this weekend reminded me that you can use CSS filters to mess with the colors of SVGs: Solved With CSS! Colorizing SVG Backgrounds at CSS-Tricks (tweet from Chris Coyier); Filter at MDN Web Docs (tweet from MDN). Generally this technique is not something you would consider…
Perhaps a testament to how little I might value GitHub contributions. GitHub profile pages are, to many, the de facto place to quickly judge the value of a developer. The contributions chart is an at-a-glance visual indicator of that value. I disagree completely with the notion of the chart (or…
This post is building on the post Short note on making your mark (more accessible) by Steve Faulkner at the Paciello Group blog. In that post, Steve answers a very specific question about the <mark> and making it more accessible for screen readers. I saw some follow-up questions on the…