One of the features I really love about Mastodon is their first-class Content Warning feature. With one additional step, you can add any warning of your choice to your post and it will be hidden by default, showing only the content warning text. It’s a super-simple idea, but so powerful when it comes to reducing potential the likelihood of causing our readers to experience the kinds of trauma that could have severe consequences.
I had the great pleasure of delivering a talk about career opportunities for accessibility devs at axe-con earlier today. You can view the slides or watch the recording of this talk, but what follows is an approximation my talk’s content, taken from my notes and slides.
I finally got around to reading the CSS Tricks piece on “Spicy Sections” and it’s cool how closely what the OpenUI folks are talking about aligns with work I was doing in the mid-to-late oughts.
Back in the early days of the iPhone, I created Tipr, a tip calculator that always produces a palindrome total. This is an overview of the minimal work I did to make it a modern web app that can run without a traditional back-end.
Before I get into this, let me start with this preface: I am not a legal expert by any means. I never even watched Law & Order. That said, I am keenly interested in the law and how it relates to bias and discrimination, particularly if that intersects with technology, especially the web. Which brings me to the subject at hand: 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis. I tweeted about this case, which is currently before the Supreme Court of the United States, the other day, but felt like I owed it a lengthier—and perhaps more enduring—discussion. So here goes…
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Inclusion can take many forms.
Last month, Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) and Representative John P. Sarbanes (D-Md.) introduced the Websites and Software Applications Accessibility Act—I’m gonna call it the WS3A for short—simultaneously in the U.S. Senate (S. 4998) and House of Representatives (H.R. 9021) to explicitly bring websites—and other forms of digital media that didn’t exist when the ADA was signed into law—into the purview of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). I am definitely in favor of this effort as it removes the ambiguity that currently exists in U.S. law as to whether websites are governed by the ADA. The WS3A is a reasonable framework, but there is still a lot of work to be done when it (hopefully) passes.
Are you a web professional (or aspiring web professional) who is looking for career guidance and opportunities? Consider applying for my 2023 mentorship cohort.
A recent post from the Otto JS research team highlighted how spellcheck services can inadvertently exfiltrate sensitive user data, including passwords, from your site. To be honest, I found the post a tad alarmist and lacking when it came to recommending solid protections. Consider this your no-nonsense guide to protecting your users’ sensitive information.
While making some updates to the site, I did a 404 scan of my link blog and the results were… less than awesome. So I decided to work some Eleventy magic to recover from them.