This is an amazing post from Karolina Szczur concerning who we build for. You should read it.
The Best Of The Internets
The Web isn’t uniform
Performance is a feature
Excellent post on the importance of web page performance:
Performance isn’t a technical niggle that “we should get around to fixing”. It is an opportunity to grow your audience, to grow your business, to convert more sales (or whatever it is eCommerce people do).
Performance is an opportunity, and a risk, the same way that a redesigned template is. Or a new logo. Or a change to the colour of a button CTA.
See also: Tim Kadlec’s 2012 post on 24 Ways.
GitHub’s CSP journey
An excellent in-depth analysis of GitHub’s current Content Security Policy including the issues they encountered and lessons they learned.
Software developers keep outdated tech relevant thanks to Chattanooga’s Open Device Lab
Casey Phillips did a nice write-up of the Chattanooga Open Device Lab in today’s paper. It even has the requisite shout-outs to Jeremy Keith and OpenDeviceLab.com
Do you have a role in web accessibility? (Spoiler alert: yes)
Accessibility is everyone’s job. Find out what you can do to ensure your web creations are as accessible as possible.
Designing for the Web: Are There Colors You Should Avoid?
You betcha. Some great advice here!
A Stronger Visual Cue for Text Fields
Simple recommendations for more obvious form fields.
Deque’s Code Library
This is an excellent collection of accessible widgets. You can learn a lot from this code.
How Letterspacing Can Make All Caps Easier to Read
“All caps” text gets abused pretty regularly. This article gets into the details of why proper letter spacing is crucial for the legibility of text in all caps.
Building a more accessible web platform
I’m so incredibly excited about this! Highlights:
- The accessibility tree is no longer a subtree of the DOM;
- ARIA Landmarks and document structure navigation;
- Proper computing of accessible name & description;
- Improved error validity states;
- Accessible
datalist, improvedselect, and improvements to all list type elements; - Keyboard controls for the number field;
- Accessible
input[type=color]; - Improved high contrast mode (no more removing background images, instead, the image stays and a solid color is placed behind the text);
- Speech synthesis API;
- An improved caret on Windows Phone when using an external keyboard; and
- So much more.
Couple this with the F12 dev tools enhancements and Narrator’s Developer Mode and it’s pretty clear how committed Microsoft is to accessibility. I’m so glad I work here!