Dispatches From The Internets

We lost a seminal figure in the world of web design this week. And I lost a good friend and mentor. Molly Holzschlag cared deeply for the web and those of us who till its soils.

While it is a bit of an edge case, every now and then I’ll hit a site—yes, even a high profile one—and the CSS will fail to load for some reason. When this happens, inevitably every inline SVG resource on the page will grow to fill the entire width of my viewport, making for a really awkward experience.

One of my favorite web designers, Stephanie Stimac, asked me to write the foreword for her amazing new book, Design for Developers. With her permission, and Manning’s, I’m reprinting it here.

In reading through Joe Dolson’s recent piece on the intersection of AI and accessibility, I absolutely appreciated the skepticism he has for AI in general as well as the ways in which many have been using it. In fact, I am very skeptical of AI myself, despite my role at Microsoft being that of an Accessibility Innovation Strategist helping run the AI for Accessibility grant program. As with any tool, AI can be used in very constructive, inclusive, and accessible ways and it can used in destructive, exclusive, and harmful ones. And there are a ton of uses somewhere in the mediocre middle as well.

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…

Inclusion can take many forms.