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Adrian Roselli
Outsourced Adversarial State IPA

All Posts Tagged: rant

Semi-Annual Reminder to Learn and Hire for Web Standards

Alex Russell wrote a four-part series a couple weeks ago arguing that modern JavaScript-first framework-focused front-end development is costing the industry and users. Part of his conclusion for organizations: Never, ever hire for JavaScript framework skills. Instead, interview and hire only for fundamentals like web standards, accessibility, modern CSS, semantic…

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Tags: ARIA, html, rant, standards, W3C, whatwg

Mountain Chicken!

I am mis-using closed captions for a gag. The following video has an audio track and four sets of captions (for now?). Each set of captions is in English. Only one set of captions represents the spoken dialog, the other two represent dialog not in the video. The tracks are…

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Tags: ARIA, html, rant

Things to Do Before Asking “Is This Accessible?”

It is not uncommon for someone to message, call, email, or carrier pigeon me to ask if something is accessible. They almost invariably want a “yes” or “no.” However, I need to understand what the heck they mean and what the other-heck prompted them to ask. Yes, I would be…

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Tags: accessibility, rant

What You Can Do as a Web Builder on Earth Day

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…

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Tags: rant

Long Alt

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…

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Tags: accessibility, browser, html, rant, standards, usability, UX

Jakob Has Jumped the Shark

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).…

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Tags: accessibility, rant, usability, UX

My WebAIM 10th SR User Survey Takeaways

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:…

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Tags: accessibility, rant, usability, UX

Don’t Disable Form Controls

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.…

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Tags: accessibility, pattern, rant, usability, UX

Under-supported and Underpaid

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…

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Tags: accessibility, rant, standards

#AudioEye Has Dropped Its Suit Against Me

AudioEye has dropped its lawsuit against me as part of a settlement agreement. The specific legal details are at the end of this post. Index for this post: Joint Statement Impact, Abridged SLAPP Everybody Lost Legal Details Wrap-up Related CAO Hire: 8 February 2024 Talk References (Added 7 July 2024)…

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Tags: accessibility, overlay, rant, standards, UX

2.5.8: Adversarial Conformance

This post is part of RSS Club, rewarding those who still use RSS to read and/or share content. These posts are embargoed from my regular post feed and the socials for an arbitrary period of time. You can see all the RSS-only posts at AdrianRoselli.com/category/RSS. Tell your friends (to get…

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Tags: accessibility, rant, standards, WCAG

2.4.11: Adversarial Conformance

This post is part of RSS Club, rewarding those who still use RSS to read and/or share content. These posts are embargoed from my regular post feed and the socials for an arbitrary number of weeks. You can see all the RSS-only posts at AdrianRoselli.com/category/RSS. Tell your friends (to get…

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Tags: accessibility, rant, standards, WCAG