If you’ve ever struggled to convince someone why they should be making their site or web product accessible, Alice Bartlett has your back.
The Best Of The Internets
What is the Business Case for Accessibility?
When the treatment is worse than the disease
Karl nails it (as per usual):
[A]dd-on accessibility is a sham. … They fail to provide anything beyond a marginal benefit for the end user and are, at best, a band-aid over a gaping wound. … [Companies] would be better off spending their money educating their design and development staff on accessibility than wasting their money on snake oil solutions made by amateurs.
How to improve your website’s accessibility without going crazy
Based on the slides, this looks like it was an excellent talk from Eric Eggert. I wish I’d seen it delivered in person.
Online regex tester and debugger
If you struggle with regular expressions, you should check out this tool. It reminds me a lot of RegEx Buddy, a Windows program that was an immense help in trying to wrap my head around writing regular expressions.
Service Workers: Dynamic Responsive Images Using WebP Images
I really dig this approach to image optimizations for browsers that support the WebP image format. It shows how ServiceWorker can handle site-wide enhancements easily.
Tips for Creating Accessible SVG
An excellent overview of how to make SVGs more accessible, from the incredible Léonie Watson.
Not so micro optimizations
There’s some really interesting performance-related lessons to be learned from Google’s AMP project. This chronicles a few.
I’m gonna give the preconnect & prefetch stuff a whirl on this site to see if it helps speed things up at all. I gave the preconnect & prefetch stuff a whirl on this site, and it sped things up substantially.
The Cost of Frameworks
This is a fantastic investigation of framework performance on mobile by Google’s Paul Lewis. In short: frameworks make things more convenient for developers, but pass the inconvenience on to end users. For more, see Who Should Pay? and Who Should Pay 2: The Hosting.
Introducing EdgeHTML 13, our first platform update for Microsoft Edge
Tons of great stuff in this release. Notably: the picture element, the srcset (with w descriptors) & sizes attributes, CSS initial and unset keywords, a[download], :read-write & :read-only, :in-range & :out-of-range, more ES2015 goodies, and a ton more. Hooray for evergreen!
Hints for successfully managing an open-source project
A nice post from my colleague David Catuhe on what it takes to build a successful open source project.