Between Future of Web Design in New York City and Øredev in Malmö, Sweden, I was a busy boy last week. I delivered three talks and a workshop in total and am a bit exhausted.
Dispatches From The Internets
Future of Web Design & Øredev
How Our CSS Framework Helps Enforce Accessibility
I love this post so much. The tab example is pretty much identical to the approach I’ve been using for a while now.
By making our selectors tied to proper semantic choices, we limit the likelihood that poor decisions will be made in HTML and covered up by CSS and JavaScript (which also introduce additional dependencies we aren’t guaranteed will make it to our users).
Read it. Ruminate on it. Implement it.
Accessibility Requires App Developers To Consider Every End User
There’s a ton of great info in this article, but this one little bit is definitely worth calling out:
Android app developers know that there are over 24,000 devices in the marketplace that can potentially run their app. The number of end users that can be reached is staggering and that sheer volume of individuals means that app developers tailor their build for the majority of users and not the minority. iOS developers don’t have the same level of device fragmentation but there are over 1.5 billion apps in the App Store and (again) millions of end users to think about.
Now consider that this is focused purely on platform-specific apps and not products delivered on the Web. We should do everything in our power to deliver positive experiences to our users while simultaneously recognizing that it is impossible to deliver the same experience to each of them.
Dear Microsoft, I’m confused.
A funny love letter (of sorts) to Microsoft from SitePoint’s Managing Editor.
A Brief History of that Time You Used Web Fonts
This looks like an excellent talk from Zach Leatherman. It’s packed with useful recommendations. I hope the video’s posted soon!
Excellent Speakers for Your Next Tech Event
Like many, I’m disappointed that gender—or ethnicity, etc., etc., etc.—should even have to play a role when it comes to selecting awesome speakers, but the reality is that the dais at most tech-related events and conferences is still occupied (largely) by white men. That needs to change. We’ve been very intentional with our programming of Code & Creativity, but it wasn’t like it was hard to find an incredible speaker lineup that also happened to be pretty diverse.
NPR.org Now Twice As Fast
An excellent overview of some significant upgrades to NPR.org along with some advice to web developers.
Net Awards: Outstanding Contribution
No one was more deserving of this award than Molly. No one.
Thank you for all you have done for the Web Mols! And, especially, thank you for all you have done for me.
Crossposting to Medium from Jekyll
Last week, Jeremy Keith posted about syndicating his content to Medium using their new API. Before they added the API, there was no way to automatically publishing to Medium from your own blog. And doing it manually was quite tedious.
Jeremy posted in detail about how to set it all up and provided the PHP code he’s using to make it all work. As I’m running a static site on Octopress, I ported it to Ruby as a Jekyll Generator. I’ve posted it to Github, so you can grab it there if you so desire.
Your computer school sucks
Accessibility is an afterthought in much of our industry. In order to change that, education needs to change and code schools need to change. Karl nails it in this post:
While Hacker You should be applauded for their regular lunch-and-learns, I think that all computer schools should include accessibility embedded in core curriculum. It will create an alumni population better prepared to create interfaces that are universally usable. Their alumni will be differentiated by their ability to consider the user’s needs. After all, if you’re not developing for the user, who are you developing for?