I love this portmanteau!
Lableism: The act of intentionally removing web form labels and replacing them with placeholder text. Usually done in an effort to make form fields more aesthetically pleasing, while leaving blind and low vision users out in the cold.
This brief post offers some great advice for building resilient designs for any time, but which are especially relevant right now. In particular:
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 haven’t even considered. Do you want to take that risk at a time like this? Me neither. Save the React squabbles for another time. Make it accessible and robust from day 1. Use the tools and components already at your disposal, and rely on the work others have done, to make them usable by everyone, to get you further more quickly.
Charles Vernon Bush is perhaps best known for holding not one, but two “first” titles. In 1954, Charles became the first Black page of the Supreme Court of the United States. Nine years later, he became the first Black cadet to graduate from the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA). Charles didn’t stop there, however.
When I learned of Sissieretta Jones (a.k.a., Madame Jones), and began reading up on her, I noticed several parallels between her career and Beyoncé’s.
I have to admit that I was a little surprised when I learned that the first Black woman to receive a patent was granted it in 1884. To be clear, I wasn’t surprised because I didn’t think Black women were capable of inventing things—not at all. I was surprised because the process of obtaining a patent is pretty arduous on its own, even without factoring in the very overt racism I’m sure these inventors were dealing with at every step of the way.
In the aftermath of the Watts Riots of 1965, Jerry Varnado and James Garrett looked around and decided they needed to shake things up on the predominantly white campus of San Francisco State University. Together, they created the first Black Student Union and kicked off a campus movement that demanded schools of higher learning take the needs of their Black students seriously.
In 1724, the man who came to be known as Francisco Menéndez escaped his enslavement in South Carolina and sought refuge in Spanish-controlled Florida. His quest for freedom, made alongside a number of other Black slaves, was part of a series of events that led to the legal establishment of the first free Black community in the United States.
If you‘ve heard of Jane Bolin, it’s probably in the context of her becoming the first Black judge in the United States. It’s quite the accomplishment, no doubt, but Jane’s life was quite literally filled with firsts.
Given the often slow way in which systems of oppression—in this case, both white supremacy and the patriarchy—are broken down, it’s relatively surprising to discover that one woman, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, managed to to so much in her 64 years on this earth. She was the first Black woman to enter medical school in the United States and, upon graduation became the first Black woman physician. She was also the first Black woman to write a medical textbook—at a time when few Black people were even admitted into medical school—and the only woman to publish a medical book in the entirety of the 19th century! But even with all of those accolades, the thing that stands out most to me about Rebecca was her commitment to the most vulnerable.
Did you know that the first Black comic book hero debuted in 1947? “Lion Man” was a college-educated Black American sent to the Gold Coast (now Ghana) by the United Nations to investigate a uranium deposit. His story was but one of nine depicted in the first (and only) issue of All-Negro Comics, the first comic book created by an all Black team. That team was led by a journalist named Orrin Cromwell Evans.