One of my fondest childhood memories was getting a Nintendo Entertainment System for my birthday. It wasn’t the expensive set with the robot and the gun (we were poor), but my mom somehow managed to scrape together the $199 (over $470 in today’s dollars) for the system. It opened up a whole new world for me. I only recently discovered that this fixture of my childhood was made possible by a Black engineer named Jerry Lawson.
Dispatches From The Internets
Jerry Lawson made home video game systems possible
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Inclusive Design - Spectrum
Loving this easy to follow guide to inclusive design in Adobe’s Spectrum design system docs!
The wondrous world of CSS counters
This is an exhaustive look at CSS counters and is well worth your time.
An Introductory Guide to Understanding Cognitive Disabilities
Oftentimes, if you cannot do something on your own, the common response is “just ask for help.” However, this is not an appropriate response to a person with a cognitive disability, as they should be able to access the web with the same independence as a person without a disability.
Amen!
This is a must-read!
The World-Wide Work
Ethan delivered a powerful talk at New Adventures. It covers a wide range of topics including design, power, inequality, and more. Moreover it offers some suggestions for what we can do to make the web (and the world) better.
Myth Busting PWAs
David does a great job of selling devs on PWA as a viable approach for their projects in this extensive post.
5G Will Definitely Make the Web Slower, Maybe
The bigger the pipe, the more we’ll shove into it. This is an important piece from Scott Jehl. You should give it a read.
This problem is on us. Yes, we need to better prioritize our asset delivery, but most importantly, we need to stop delivering so much JavaScript. We need to audit our script inventory, and scrutinize our 3rd party integrations regularly, as many of these packages are abandoned or meant to be short-lived. … We should do whatever we can to keep our team members aware of their own impact, across all roles.
An HTML Element Potentially Worth $18M to Indiegogo Campaigns
Following up on Jason’s post, Adrian offers some forms advice to Indiegogo.
It was immediately apparent that the fields had no accessible name. Despite the visible text label, nothing was programmatically associated.
C’mon people. It’s 2019. Use a fucking label and associate it with the field using the for attribute. If you can figure out React (or Angular or whatever), you can absolutely figure this out.
An HTML attribute potentially worth $4.4M to Chipotle
Excellent forensic investigation from Jason. Reminds me of the kind of stuff we used to do over on Web Standards Sherpa. You should absolutely read the whole thing, but I’ll give you the key takeaways here as your site may be making the same mistake as Chipotle.
There are three key takeaways from Chipotle’s order form that you should consider:
- Use HTML5 input features
- Support autofill
- Make autofill part of your test plans