The Best Of The Internets

Design with Accessibility in Mind

An overview of solid strategies for accessible web design from the UX team at Unum.

  1. Consider the Flow
  2. Provide Good Contrast
  3. Style Your Font Carefully
  4. Avoid Ambiguous Links

Web Design - The First 100 Years

This is fantastic talk was given by Maciej Cegłowski at HOW Interactive in 2014. In it, he elegantly frames what makes the web so awesome and so special. He the identifies three distinct visions for the web and the threat two of those visions pose to it.

Well done, sir!

Combining Section508.gov and BuyAccessible.gov

Consolidating everything a government agency or other entity needs to know about Section 508 compliance and contracting for accessible results was a good idea. Hopefully the net result will be more accessible public websites here in the States.

Will your toaster become WCAG compliant?

This is a really interesting look at the Internet of Things from the perspective of accessibility and how web standards may fit into it all.

While the applicability of WCAG 2.0 would need a high degree of interpretation to apply to a light bulb, web accessibility standards certainly apply to the browsers and apps that we use to centrally control it all. As this space continues to evolve, it’s vital that developers ensure that whatever devices control these products, accessibility is at the heart of them.

NTH-TEST

If you have problems understanding how nth-* selectors work in CSS, this visualizer may help you out.

The Trouble With Preprocessing Based on Future Specs

Lots of gold in this post from Chris Coyier. I agree with a lot of what he’s saying, but this passage really resonated with me:

[T]here are concepts that I think belong in an abstraction of a language and not the language itself. Variables could be an example here again. Preprocessor variables and native variables could co-exist and be useful in their own ways. If native CSS could do everything ever dreamed up in a preprocessor, it would be slow, complicated, and likely wouldn’t have seen the success that CSS has had as a language.

I could not agree more.

Note: I no longer use “native” in this context, but it remains in quoted material.