The Best Of The Internets

The way we discuss people’s capabilities and disabilities is rife with ableist language and concepts. This piece from NPR offers a starting point for talking about disability without being offensive.

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.

As you’d expect, Vitaly’s deep dive into error message UX is a treasure trove of excellent, practical advice to make data entry better for your customers.

This article contains so much excellent advice. It focuses on social media, but the lessons it shares are applicable well beyond social media.

You can now use webmentions in Eleventy via a plugin rather than rolling the whole thing yourself.

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.

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.

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.

This 4 part series walks through the various levels of Hell you must traverse to actually achieve solid web performance on a large e-commerce platform. What is most amazing to me is how things continue to align pretty directly with the philosophy of progressive enhancement.

Building (and improving) PWAs in VSCode just got even better. Many thanks to the PWA Builder team for all their hard work!