The Best Of The Internets

Accessible contrast ratios and A-levels explained

A deep dive into color contrast ratios in relation to the A-AAA compliance levels. Why should you care?

Around the world, about 70% of individuals that have a diagnosed disability experience blurred vision. But working towards full compliance doesn’t just help individuals with visual impairments and disorders—it actually creates a better user experience for everyone.


Survey: Why America Is Obsessed with Subtitles

I began turning on subtitles when my kiddo was born. I spent a lot of time with him sleeping in my arms and wanted to be able to watch programs without waking him. That translated to watching videos with the sound lower and the captions/subtitles on. Six years later, it’s become a fixture of how we watch as individuals and as a family.

Seeing how many other rely on captions/subtitles gives me hope that we’ll continue to see improvements in how the text is presented (and accessed… I’m looking at you Discovery+).



E-Commerce Accessibility: Specifying UI Elements Using “Names”

For users relying on assistive technology such as screen readers, it’s … critically important to have programmatically determined names identifying various UI elements. … Doing so consistently with all interactive page elements will help ensure users using assistive technologies will be able to navigate through a site and complete a purchase successfully.

Could not have said it better myself. This article is chock full of excellent advice, not only on why names are important, but how to ensure your interactive components are properly named.





When Equal Isn’t Equitable

This is an important insight from the Microsoft design research team regarding boosting the signal from historically excluded communities:

The trick is… the system is built on inequity, so finding customers who have been historically excluded means that you can’t expect to find them in the system itself.


Beyond WCAG: Losing Spoons Online

Have you ever considered that your website might be an energy vampire?

This excellent piece from Lē McNamara takes you on a brief tour of design patterns that actively deplete the mental and physical stamina of your users, potentially incapacitating them for days.

You need to read this.


Make Beautifully Resilient Apps With Progressive Enhancement

A good walkthrough on how to build a form that hooks into an API and works either with or without JavaScript.

One note however: Austin in incorrect in that you absolutely can define nested objects in your forms. I’ve done it many times. Your field names just need to use bracket notation like this:

<input name="foo['bar']['baz']">

That will pipe through as the value for the baz property of bar within foo.