Dispatches From The Internets

While I am really happy with my choice to move away from a dynamic website/blog to a static one—powered by Octopress, hosted for free on Github—it’s been pretty limiting when it comes to integrating comments and other more necessarily dynamic components.

My good friend Jeremy is incredibly excited about the Indie Web movement and I am right there with him. I love the idea of owning your content and then syndicating it out to social networks, photo sites, and the like. It makes complete sense… Web-based services have a habit of disappearing, so we shouldn’t rely on them. The only Web that is permanent is the one we control.

I gave this speech as the closing keynote at A11yQC, a conference on Web accessibility, on 14 October 2014 in Québec City, Canada. I have published my script here as the slides can’t really convey its message on their own.

We, as an industry, tend to have a pretty myopic view of experience. Those of us who work day-to-day in accessibility probably have a broader perspective than most, but I would argue that even we all fall short now and again when it comes to seeing the Web as others do.

Last night, while we were enjoying a cool evening and a few drinks outside after day 1 of BDConf, Jeremy asked me for some clarification on the ARIA attributes I had demoed as part of my forms presentation earlier in the afternoon. In particular, he was confused by how aria-labelledby and aria-describedby differ.

I’ll level with you: I used to think I wanted variables in CSS.

As a programmer, I love the idea of being able to abstract reusable bits like colors, border widths, font sizes, and the like to obviously named variables. It’s a far more DRY approach and makes maintenance far easier.

In case you missed it, yesterday Pierre Far updated Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. In his post, Pierre lays out their case for progressive enhancement:

Just like modern browsers, our rendering engine might not support all of the technologies a page uses. Make sure your web design adheres to the principles of progressive enhancement as this helps our systems (and a wider range of browsers) see usable content and basic functionality when certain web design features are not yet supported.

I’m incredibly excited to see that Jason Pamental’s fantastic Responsive Typography is finally available. I had the great pleasure of reviewing an early galley and I can honestly say that it’s a book well worth reading. Jason’s natural and friendly style makes for an easy read and it’s chock-full of actionable recommendations and tips you’ll want to start using right away.

Earlier today, Stuart Langridge—who I worked with on WaSP’s DOM Scripting Task Force and have the utmost respect for—published a blog response to my last post. In it, he made some good points I wanted to highlight, but he also misunderstood one thing I said and managed to avoid addressing the core of my argument. As comments aren’t enabled on his site, I thought I’d respond here.