Dispatches From The Internets

You’re Offline

Some very interesting ideas and explorations of how to make your site better when viewed offline. Some very cool ideas here.

Start with empathy

A great piece covering the various ways we, as web designers and developers, must practice empathy:

Upping the empathy quotient among decision-makers, designers, and developers is integral to ensuring the creation of a digital world for everyone.

Accessibility according to actual people with disabilities

Lots of real-world feedback about accessibility issues here. The laundry list of pain points is not insurmountable though:

  • Missing captions
  • Motion & animations
  • Visual clutter
  • Walls of text
  • Small text
  • Sites that don’t play well with magnifiers
  • Low contrast
  • Text in images
  • Bright colors
  • Reliance on color to convey information
  • Mouse-centric interactions
  • Tiny touch targets
  • CAPTCHAs

You can address most of these easily.

Alpha Testers Wanted for Progressive Web App Tools for VS Code

The goals of this extension are pretty straightforward:

  1. Create the code we know we need and only that code;
  2. Omit any code that we “might” need in the future;
  3. Work for Angular, React, Vue, plain old JavaScript; and
  4. Provide simple and functional steps to create a PWA on the major platforms listed above.

Nice.

Adding Paragraphs in Zillow Should Not be This Hard

Kelly and I are in the process of selling our (beautiful) home and I have been amazed at how difficult it’s been for our agents to break up the listing description into paragraphs, especially on Zillow. After a ton of trial and error—after all, I wasn’t gonna let poor software design trump readability—I found a solution. > TLDR; Insert a blank line between the paragraphs and put "  " (that’s a space followed by a tab) on that line.