While making some updates to the site, I did a 404 scan of my link blog and the results were… less than awesome. So I decided to work some Eleventy magic to recover from them.
Dispatches From The Internets
Salvaging linkrot with the Wayback Machine
E-Commerce Accessibility: Specifying UI Elements Using “Names”
For users relying on assistive technology such as screen readers, it’s … critically important to have programmatically determined names identifying various UI elements. … Doing so consistently with all interactive page elements will help ensure users using assistive technologies will be able to navigate through a site and complete a purchase successfully.
Could not have said it better myself. This article is chock full of excellent advice, not only on why names are important, but how to ensure your interactive components are properly named.
Designing Better Error Messages UX
As you’d expect, Vitaly’s deep dive into error message UX is a treasure trove of excellent, practical advice to make data entry better for your customers.
Why and How to Create Accessible Social Media and Website Content
This article contains so much excellent advice. It focuses on social media, but the lessons it shares are applicable well beyond social media.
Bring Focus to the First Form Field with an Error
While filling out a long form the other day, I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t submitting. Turns out I’d forgotten to fill in a field, but I didn’t know that because it had scrolled out of the viewport. This is a common problem on the web, but easily remedied with a little bit of JavaScript.
Locking down your GitHub-hosted Domains
The other day someone claimed a hostname on a domain I own and it took me a while to track down how. After a lot of digging around, trying to figure out how the hijack was accomplished, it turns out it was via GitHub Pages.
No Comment 2: The Webmentioning
You can now use webmentions in Eleventy via a plugin rather than rolling the whole thing yourself.
Equality vs. Equity
Over the last few years, I’ve been quietly leading training efforts within Microsoft focused on leveling up folks’ allyship skills. There are a ton of really important lessons to be learned form the curriculum my team and I developed, but one folks ofter struggle with is the concept of “equality” as compared to “equity.”
When Equal Isn’t Equitable
This is an important insight from the Microsoft design research team regarding boosting the signal from historically excluded communities:
The trick is… the system is built on inequity, so finding customers who have been historically excluded means that you can’t expect to find them in the system itself.
A Bittersweet Goodbye
June 3rd was my last day on the Edge team. It’s been an absolute honor and privilege to work with such an amazing team all these years, moving from Internet Explorer (IE) to “Spartan” Edge and, finally, to “Anaheim” Edge.