It was late 2020 when I last tested how browsers use CSS display properties to break the semantics of elements. I had been waiting for Safari to fix how it handles display: contents for four years now, and was excited when the announcement came in June. Then I started testing…
I have spent a few years banging on about ensuring scrolling areas on a page are accessible to keyboard-only users. This is partly because the term “keyboard” maps to other input types that we distill to “keyboard” for ease of reference (speech input, sip-and-puff, on-screen keyboards, scanning software, etc.). When…
This post serves no purpose other than to demonstrate the fidelity of screen readers when announcing non-emoji Unicode characters when using default settings. There is no judgment on which is correct. This is simply for reference. I grabbed the following tweet and recorded it across common screen readers (WordPress ate…
The <dl> has existed since HTML+, or 1993, when it was called definition list. VoiceOver on iOS has existed since 2009, when it was introduced with the iPhone 3GS. Neither VoiceOver on iOS nor iPadOS had support for this core feature of HTML that was in existence for 16 years…
Heading this off early: uniquity uniq·ui·ty; \ yüˈnikwətē, -wətē, -i \Uniqueness; quality of being unique. There is a place where accessibility practitioners hang out and try to out-do each other with niche knowledge of nuance. While loitering in one, a question came up about text fields that have the same…
CSS resets are a collection of CSS styles that undo the default browser styling of many or most HTML elements. Recently I have seen cases of developers using display: contents on lists and headings to remove the margins and padding, and generally to visually do what a CSS reset might…
This weekend I read a post about techniques to get Apple’s new San Francisco font into your CSS. Since San Francisco is only just being added to iOS and OS X, it can be a bit tricky to get hold of it in Safari. What struck me was the use…
Make sure you view this on Google’s flavor of Chrome, otherwise, well, I have no idea what will happen. Sometimes it’s frustrating being a developer who’s been around to see Mosaic supplanted by Netscape Navigator supplanted by Internet Explorer supplanted by Chrome/WebKit. Developers just love dumping one platform for the…
Jacob Rossi from Microsoft put together an article for Smashing Magazine that discusses Microsoft’s Project Spartan web browser, Inside Microsoft’s New Rendering Engine For The “Project Spartan”. Unlike other click-bait efforts that only speculated that perhaps Spartan was going to be WebKit-based, showing their own preference instead of any real…
This post isn’t proposing any solutions (although I do toss out a hack). This post is a rant that I hope helps influence browser makers. Background Much of my web work isn’t for public facing web sites. Often it’s for enterprise-level software that is deployed via the web and used…
It’s old news by this Thursday morning, but in case you had not heard, Google is forking WebKit to make its own rendering engine, Blink. Opera will be using the Blink fork of WebKit as its rendering engine. A combination of people who are far smarter, far more well connected,…
Web developers have been looking to call everything the new Internet Explorer for a while now. With Opera’s recent move to WebKit as its rendering engine (replacing Presto), even more developers are suggesting that WebKit is becoming the new IE. I think they are right, but for the wrong reasons.…