While in town for You Gotta Love Frontend, I was invited to present this talk at the VilniusJS meet-up. There were only a couple designers in the audience, so I did a little on-the-fly reframing — namely to explain the value of a designer on a team. I only went…
Once major browsers started supporting <details> & <summary> developers immediately started to play with them to see what sorts of patterns they could enhance or replace. This is a good thing. Experimentation pushes boundaries, improves understanding. However, we need to be careful of christening this new-to-us interaction as the solution…
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…
Direct link in case the embed does not work. I also mentioned some resources at the end of my talk: How to Meet WCAG 2 (Quick Reference) Intopia Launches WCAG 2.1 Map Inclusive Design Principles Inclusive Design posters from Barclays Tweets Some people tweeted about my workshop. I also tweeted…
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) does a good job of providing supporting techniques to help reviewers determine if a specific case would violate a given Success Criterion (SC). WCAG 2.0, which became a recommendation at the end of 2008, has carried these techniques over to WCAG 2.1, finalized in…
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…
The pun in the title is that some people pronounce the a11y numeronym as “alley”. That makes the full title sound like uncanny valley, the concept of human-looking things seeming almost, but not quite, human and therefore creepy. In accessibility, the same thing can happen. Developers can try so hard…
Underlines, the standard, built-in signifier of hyperlinks, the core feature of the web, are beautiful. This is objectively true. They are aesthetically one of the most delightful visual design elements ever created. They represent the ideal of a democratized information system. They are a frail monument to the worldwide reach…
Tobie Langel and I have launched a new site called a11y.reviews (spoken as Accessibility Reviews). Today if you want to identify if a tool, platform, service, resource, etc. is accessible you have to ask the broader community for its feedback. This does not scale. The goal of the site is…
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…
Web developers around the world have celebrated Saturnalia solstice Isaac Newton’s birthday Christmas with advent calendars covering web-related topics. As a result, you may recognize some of the ones listed below. Every year I miss a few on day one, so add a comment or tweet me if you have…
Over the last few years more and more conferences have started to provide live captions during talks. This is awesome and inclusive and great for the olds like me. It excites me so much that I even sponsored the live captions at a conference a couple months ago. While I…