The Best Of The Internets

A great piece covering the various ways we, as web designers and developers, must practice empathy:

Upping the empathy quotient among decision-makers, designers, and developers is integral to ensuring the creation of a digital world for everyone.

Lots of real-world feedback about accessibility issues here. The laundry list of pain points is not insurmountable though:

• Missing captions
• Motion & animations
• Visual clutter
• Walls of text
• Small text
• Sites that don’t play well with magnifiers
• Low contrast
• Text in images
• Bright colors
• Reliance on color to convey information
• Mouse-centric interactions
• Tiny touch targets
• CAPTCHAs

You can address most of these easily.

The goals of this extension are pretty straightforward:

1. Create the code we know we need and only that code;
2. Omit any code that we “might” need in the future;
3. Work for Angular, React, Vue, plain old JavaScript; and
4. Provide simple and functional steps to create a PWA on the major platforms listed above.

Nice.

Let the hum-drum web design shake-up begin!

Just remember that not all browsers support these features, so have a fall-back for those that don’t.

Etsy’s approach for automatic JPEG quality reductions is fascinating!

If you’ve never worked with a screen magnifier before, this is a super-handy piece to quickly boost your awareness.

This is an excellent and well-argued piece from Dieter Bohn. In it, he argues that “the web” is characterized by two things:

1. URLs and
2. Client agnosticism.

Reading this, I’m reminded of a lot of Jeremy’s writings about products being “on the web” rather than “of the web”. It’s an incredibly important distinction in my mind because, as Dieter so eloquently puts it

The openness of the web allowed small companies to become big ones without seeking permission from the biggest ones. Preserving the web, or more specifically the open principles behind it, means protecting one of the few paths for innovation left in the modern tech world that doesn’t have a giant company acting as a gatekeeper. And there’s reason not to trust those giant companies: there’s much less incentive to encourage openness when you have a massive empire to defend.

These are important things to consider when deciding where to invest your time and energy.

Carousel’s and slideshows are the red-headed stepchild of the web design world, but they are still used (and useful) in many scenarios. That said, they are often horribly inaccessible. This article offers a step-by-step walkthrough of common accessibility issues with this interface and details how to address them.

Do you use CKEditor? You should really grab the new Accessibility Checker.

Yes, yes, and yes!