A ban on tracking-based personalised advertising will provide an incentive to reinforce sustainable alternative models and, in fact, will be a condition for making them viable. The advertising industry already has sustainable, proven concepts for effective online advertising that do not require targeted tracking and personalisation (e.g. contextual advertising).
Every problem at every company I’ve ever worked at eventually boils down to “please dear god can we just hire people who know how to write HTML and CSS.”
So my observation is that 80% of the subject of accessibility consists of fairly simple basics that can probably be learnt in 20% of the time available. The remaining 20% are the difficult situations, edge cases, assistive technology support gaps and corners of specialised knowledge, but these are extrapolated to 100% of the subject, giving it a bad, anxiety-inducing and difficult reputation overall.
This is the transcript of a fantastic talk called “The Tools We Still Need to Build with AI.”
Absorb every word!
Manu’s book is available to pre-order now. I’ve had a sneak peek and I highly recommend it!
You’ll learn how to build common patterns written accessibly in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You’ll also start to understand how good and bad practices affect people, especially those with disabilities.
Another handy accessibility testing tool that can be used as a bookmarklet.
I endorse this message.
This manifesto is intended as a personal response to the current state of the web. It is a statement of intent and a call to arms, inviting you, the reader, to go forth and build humane websites, and to resist the erosion of the web we know and love.
This is good advice:
Write alternative text as if you’re describing the image to a friend.
The bar to overriding browser defaults should be way higher than it is.
Amen!
I think it’s always worth revisiting accomplishments like this—it’s absolutely astounding that we don’t even think about polio (or smallpox!) in our day-to-day lives, when just two generations ago it was something that directly affected everybody.
The annual number of people paralyzed by polio was reduced by over 99% in the last four decades.
Per Axbom quite rightly tears Jakob Nielsen a new one.
I particularly like his suggestion that you re-read Nielsen’s argument but replace the word “accessibility” with “usability”:
Assessed this way, the
accessibilityusabiity movement has been a miserable failure.
AccessibilityUsability is too expensive for most companies to be able to afford everything that’s needed with the current, clumsy implementation.
This is a really lovely little HTML web component from Jason. It does just one thing—wires up a trigger button to toggle-able content, taking care of all the ARIA for you behind the scenes.
I just attended this talk from Heydon at axe-con and it was great! Of course it was highly amusing, but he also makes a profound and fundamental point about how we should be going about working on the web.
Products of all kinds are required to ensure misuse is discouraged, at a minimum, if not difficult or impossible. I don’t see why LLMs should be any different.
Wouldn’t it be great if all web tools gave warnings like this?
As you generate and tweak your type scale, Utopia will now warn you if any steps fail WCAG SC 1.4.4, and tell you between which viewports the problem lies.
Here’s the inside scoop on why Github is making a bizarre move from working web components to a legacy React stack.
Most of what I heard in favor of React was a) it’s got a good DX, b) it’s easy to hire for, and c) we only want to use it for a couple of features, not the entire website.
It’s all depressingly familiar, but it’s very weird to come across this kind of outdated thinking in 2023.
My personal prediction is that, eventually, the company (and many other companies) will realize how bad React is for most things, and abandon it. I guess we’ll see.
I agree with everything that Matt says here. Evangelising accessibility by extolling the business benefits might be a good strategy for dealing with psychopaths, but it’s a lousy way to convince most humans.
The moment you frame the case for any kind of inclusion or equity around the money an organization stands to gain (or save), you have already lost. What you have done is turn a moral case, one where you have the high ground, into an economic one, where, unless you have an MBA in your pocket, you are hopelessly out of your depth.
If you win a business-case argument, the users you wanted to benefit are no longer your north star. It’s money.
Vasilis gives the gist of his excellent talk at the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg. The rant at the end chimed very much with my feelings on this topic:
I showed a little interaction experiment that one of my students made, with incredible attention to detail. Absolutely brilliant in so many ways. You would expect that all design agencies would be fighting to get someone like that into their design team. But to my amazement she now works as a react native developer.
I have more of these very talented, very creative designers who know how to code, who really understand how the web works, who can actually design things for the web, with the web as a medium, who understand the invisible details, who know about the UX of HTML, who know what’s possible with modern HTML and CSS. Yet when they start working they have to choose: you either join our design team and are forced to use a tool that doesn’t get it, or you join the development team and are forced to use a ridiculous framework and make crap.
This online course from Sara looks superb!
I know how overwhelming and even frustrating accessibility may feel at first. But I promise you, accessibility isn’t always as hard as it seems (especially if you know where and when to start!). And my goal with this course is to make it friendlier and more approachable.
Best of all, there’s $100 off if you sign up now—that’s a 25% saving.
