The Best Of The Internets

This brief post offers some great advice for building resilient designs for any time, but which are especially relevant right now. In particular:

This isn’t the time to get precious about your favourite design and development tools. Use progressive enhancement as your philosophy. Your service might have to be accessed on old devices, in hospitals with outdated tech, or unsupported operating systems. HTML+CSS is your best bet to ensure that the service can be accessed in unlikely scenarios you haven’t even considered. Do you want to take that risk at a time like this? Me neither. Save the React squabbles for another time. Make it accessible and robust from day 1. Use the tools and components already at your disposal, and rely on the work others have done, to make them usable by everyone, to get you further more quickly.

Loving this easy to follow guide to inclusive design in Adobe’s Spectrum design system docs!

This is an exhaustive look at CSS counters and is well worth your time.

Oftentimes, if you cannot do something on your own, the common response is “just ask for help.” However, this is not an appropriate response to a person with a cognitive disability, as they should be able to access the web with the same independence as a person without a disability.

Amen!

This is a must-read!

Ethan delivered a powerful talk at New Adventures. It covers a wide range of topics including design, power, inequality, and more. Moreover it offers some suggestions for what we can do to make the web (and the world) better.

David does a great job of selling devs on PWA as a viable approach for their projects in this extensive post.

The bigger the pipe, the more we’ll shove into it. This is an important piece from Scott Jehl. You should give it a read.

This problem is on us. Yes, we need to better prioritize our asset delivery, but most importantly, we need to stop delivering so much JavaScript. We need to audit our script inventory, and scrutinize our 3rd party integrations regularly, as many of these packages are abandoned or meant to be short-lived. … We should do whatever we can to keep our team members aware of their own impact, across all roles.

Following up on Jason’s post, Adrian offers some forms advice to Indiegogo.

It was immediately apparent that the fields had no accessible name. Despite the visible text label, nothing was programmatically associated.

C’mon people. It’s 2019. Use a fucking label and associate it with the field using the for attribute. If you can figure out React (or Angular or whatever), you can absolutely figure this out.

Excellent forensic investigation from Jason. Reminds me of the kind of stuff we used to do over on Web Standards Sherpa. You should absolutely read the whole thing, but I’ll give you the key takeaways here as your site may be making the same mistake as Chipotle.

There are three key takeaways from Chipotle’s order form that you should consider:

1. Use HTML5 input features
2. Support autofill
3. Make autofill part of your test plans

This is an excellent piece on the sometimes awkward, but kind and necessary move toward true inclusion. This passage nails the problems with (typically) conservative thinking in this regard and why it’s a problem:

I was a child of privilege in the small town where I spent my teenage years, but I knew plenty of kids in my public junior high and high school whose dads were “on disability,” that is to say, receiving Supplemental Security Income or Social Security Disability Insurance, really the only working-class welfare benefits left following Bill Clinton and his New Democrats’ disastrous “welfare reform.” We made fun of them, as cruel and thoughtless teenagers are wont to do. They weren’t in wheelchairs. They weren’t crippled. They could walk. They could drive. Some of them even mowed their own lawns! We had been socialized to believe that they were scammers, to be mocked simultaneously for being lazy and poor and for being conniving fraudsters on the make, getting rich off the government. The obvious contradiction of these insults made them all the worse.

Now that I am older, and aside from regretting these childhood cruelties simply for their meanness and lack of charity, I recognize the pain those men (we hardly thought of the women: another sort of insult), who could walk, yes, but could not climb the stairs, who slept upright in the living-room La-Z-Boy because it was too painful to lay flat, who had trouble with their insulin, who couldn’t hear you unless you shouted, or who were rattled by loud noises.