Since the early days of the web, when images could be floated and text would wrap around them, designers have wanted to bring drop caps onto the web. Then we learned how terrible a pattern like <img alt=”M” align=”left”>atthew is for users, and CSS introduced :first-letter, letting us believe all…
The title of this post is a play on Jason Grigsby’s recent post An HTML attribute potentially worth $4.4M to Chipotle. In it he asks: How many other people have failed to finish an order because the form doesn’t support autofill and the error messages aren’t helpful? An HTML attribute…
Others in this sorta-series: Under-Engineered Custom Radio Buttons and Checkboxen Under-Engineered Toggles Under-Engineered Toggles Too This is the latest, and not last, in my informal series of posts on under-engineered controls. Generally I am looking at the minimum amount of CSS necessary to style native HTML controls while also retaining…
If you are working on a custom control, a complex widget, or a novel interface element to integrate into a project, library, or framework, there are some core features you need to build. These represent not just what works for users across the most contexts and preferences, but also what…
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. Continue reading this post. Use <input type=”checkbox”>…
Another case of the headline saying it all. If you have a valid, accessible search field (with a useful, sensible label) then you can probably ignore type=”search” and use type=”text” instead. I made a code sample you can use for testing in your preferred set-up; it is what I used…
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…
Early in 2017 I filed an issue against WAI-ARIA Authoring Practices (APG) requesting a change to the menu navigation pattern. Despite a great deal of feedback in agreement, it languished. In late 2017 I wrote Don’t Use ARIA Menu Roles for Site Nav and started actively campaigning against the APG…
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…
Published in Family Circle magazine, September 1957, Vol. 51 No. 3. CC BY-NC 2.0, by Classic Film. I am no longer active in the start-up community in any meaningful way. I do, however, continue to mentor founders and start-ups. I have recently noticed start-ups set their goal as being first…
TL;DR: Regardless of what accessibility conformance level you target, try to ensure that interactive controls are at least 44 by 44 pixels in size. Links in blocks of text are exempt. Overview In real life there is typically both a visual and tactile component to an interface. You have to…
I am going to propose a way to increase the overall accessibility of the WordPress ecosystem. It requires acknowledging some mistakes and using those as the base for building a better platform. I long for a world where a metric for featuring #WordPress themes and plugins in the repo is…