This is incredibly important:
As movie theaters, restaurant ordering, college courses, and more move to online-first delivery, the notion of a corresponding brick-and-mortar venue falls away. If the current pandemic physical distancing measures stretch into the next year as many think, then this blip becomes the de facto new normal.
This is a fan-friggin’—tastic deep dive into accessible names, why they matter, and how to define them. Consider it a must-read!
In a recent blog post, Manuel Matuzović offered a great case study covering how he built Front-end Bookmarks. In the course of developing it, Manuel found that following the progressive enhancement philosophy in his development made it easy to support older/less feature rich browsers and devices: > To my surprise, I only had to reduce some paddings and font sizes to make it look nice. I didn’t have to change much because I follow the Progressive Enhancement principle when I build websites.
This is an awesome collection of front-end development related links, curated by Manuel Matuzović.
Some awesome advice in this piece from Dean Vipond. My favorite recommendation (naturally):
This isn’t the time to get precious about your favourite design and development tools. Use progressive enhancement as your philosophy. Your service might have to be accessed on old devices in hospitals with outdated tech or unsupported operating systems. HTML+CSS is your best bet to ensure that the service can be accessed in unlikely scenarios you’ve never even considered. Do you want to take that risk at a time like this? Nope, me neither.
I wish I could say this came as a surprise, but having worked with state agencies in the past, it does not surprise me at all. That said, this kind of thing should never happen.
Forty-one of the 50 state pages we surveyed contained low-contrast text, which can be challenging for users with low vision, including seniors, who are at higher risk in the outbreak.
Yet another reminder about how we should plan for the ways our users customize our sites for their own needs. Will your site remain usable to folks browsing with an extension that helps them observe hijab?
Excellent analysis by Tim here:
Good frameworks should provide a better starting point on the essentials (security, accessibility, performance) or have built-in constraints that make it harder to ship something that violates those.
That doesn’t appear to be happening with performance (nor with accessibility, apparently).
…
What is clear: right now, if you’re using a framework to build your site, you’re making a trade-off in terms of initial performance—even in the best of scenarios.
Some trade-off may be acceptable in the right situations, but it’s important that we make that exchange consciously.
Do yourself a favor and tuck into the numbers here. He presents a substantial amount of very useful information.
This is why I continue to be so excited about Progressive Web Apps:
[T]his will allow for full feature parity among devices and allow development teams to focus on one project as opposed to juggling multiple updates for all of the different platforms. In addition to this, the way updates happen are in real time as the web site is reloaded. No need to rely on users not updating their apps through the app store, this way all users are on the latest version to ensure the best possible experience.
I am also really encouraged by the way PWAs enable more folks to access “apps.” After all, the state of networks and devices is quite different beyond the bubble we live in. Look at India, China, huge swaths of Africa, Central and South America. Closer to home, I look at the rural United States and less affluent neighborhoods in large cities. The benefits of PWAs (and the web, more broadly) to these folks will be huge. For example, they won’t have to choose between keeping pics of their kids on their phone and being able to easily access their bank account.
This is a great resource for understanding how to use the power of CSS when working in multiple languages.