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Adrian Roselli
Decentralized Generative System ISO

All Posts Tagged: usability

Where to Put Focus When Deleting a Thing

TL;DR: When deleting something you should generally move focus to the prior equivalent control or its grouping container. Why This Is a Thing Plenty of user interfaces let users delete things that are on the screen. It may be an extra address, a calendar item, a message (the same as…

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Tags: accessibility, JavaScript, pattern, usability, UX

Styling Links and Buttons

I made a tutorial for styling links and buttons, something which many developers have struggled with (resulting in links used as buttons and buttons used as links). I have embedded it on this page, but if you are coming in with your RSS reader you can visit the tutorial directly…

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Tags: css, html, usability

Progressively Enhanced HTML Accordion

Does what it says on the tin. Uses <details> and <summary> with a bit of ARIA to create an accordion that works without JavaScript while working better with JavaScript. Mostly. See the Pen Progressively Enhanced HTML Accordion by Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) on CodePen. Visit the standalone version for testing or…

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Tags: accessibility, ARIA, css, html, JavaScript, pattern, print, usability, UX

Blockquotes in Screen Readers

TL;DR: This post does not assert the correct way to code blockquotes, it will only demonstrate how screen readers announce some existing patterns. Test Details The first four examples are lifted from WHATWG HTML’s <blockquote> entry. The next three are from W3C HTML’s 2019 <blockquote> guidance (the W3C HTML spec…

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Tags: accessibility, html, standards, usability, W3C, whatwg

Under-Engineered Comboboxen?

When I wrote Under-Engineered Text Boxen in 2019 I mentioned <datalist> (WHATWG, MDN) but did not dwell on it. Partly because support was poor at the time. Once Can I Use’s <datalist> entry listed Firefox on Android supporting it in version 110, I got excited and started testing to write…

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Tags: accessibility, css, html, pattern, usability, UX

No, ‘AI’ Will Not Fix Accessibility

In recent years, a series of new technologies have provided better experiences and outcomes for disabled users. Collectively branded “Artificial Intelligence”, the two biggest breakthroughs have been in computer vision and large language models (LLM). The former, computer vision, allows a computer to describe an image based on extensive training…

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Tags: accessibility, rant, standards, usability

Brief Note on Popovers with Dialogs

This is not a comparison between popovers and dialogs, nor is it a discussion of support. This is me trying to get ahead of a potential issue for users when developers mix and match the patterns. I will let this 32 second video explain: Sorry, your browser doesn’t support embedded…

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Tags: accessibility, html, usability, UX

Don’t Override Screen Reader Pronunciation

When many devs, testers, and authors first start listening to content through a screen reader, they are surprised to hear dates, pricing, names, abbreviations, acronyms, etc. announced differently than they expect. With the best of intentions (or branding panic) they may seek to force screen readers to announce content as…

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Tags: accessibility, standards, usability, UX

Exposing Field Errors

This post is about exposing field errors programmatically. I have already shared some opinions (such as a caution about displaying messages below fields or avoiding default browser field validation), but this post dives into using ARIA to convey them to screen reader users. With fields that produce error messages on…

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Tags: accessibility, ARIA, browser, html, usability, UX

CSS-only Widgets Are Inaccessible

Usually. I originally titled this InacCSS-onlyible. I even made this typographically, er, distinct image. Then I realized it was silly and will instead use the neologism in a talk so I can hear the groans IRL. Interactive widgets powered with only CSS are relatively common as people are playing with…

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Tags: accessibility, css, usability, UX, WCAG

ARIA vs HTML

Using ARIA instead of HTML is generally fine for content, layout, structure, and other static bits of a page. A <div role=”heading” aria-level=”1″> is the same as <h1> as far users and accessibility APIs are concerned. It is unlikely a user will ever notice the difference unless you use both…

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Tags: accessibility, ARIA, html, standards, usability, WHCM