Why does the ARIA Practices Guide have such bad guidance? Never use menubars unless it is a menu like in a desktop application: File/Edit/View, that kind of stuff. (APG shows what can be done with ARIA, but does not care if it makes sense in practice.)
Why do some accessibility advocates insist that not having information at all is somehow better than having information with poor accessibility? Flawed information can be made accessible. Non-existent information cannot.
Silicon Valley conspiracy theories might just be capitalism
Theories abound that Silicon Valley executives got together to slash jobs. Or that a cabal of hedge funds conspired and forced them to do it. While I have literally no insight into these companies, I think the reason is “the market” of capitalism. These companies are very similar in how they operate …
So far, I have no public speaking engagements lined up for 2023, and I am quite happy with that. Face-to-face conferences are probably out of the question for me this year anyway. I’ve done enough remote presentations and I don’t really like them. The focus is on training&videos.
What is the magic incantation that I can do to prevent the VoiceOver cursor becoming out of sync with the focus when using the arrow keys in this demo here? I want to jump from button to button using arrows as my main interaction. Any pointers appreciated.
Person 1: “Let’s make something fun on the web!“ Person 2: “Here are 17 ways to overthink this and make it harder than it needs to be!”
Sigh. My self-hosted SimpleID OpenID authentificator broke (Server Error 500). Installing anew also didn’t work. What are the best ways to have your personal Domain authenticate with OpenID these days?
My blog and website uses a new font! Headings are a little more expressive (understatement!), but there is a preference to use a more conservative font choice for them, too. More customization eventually.
Are you an accessibility person? Do you have a website? Join the web ring! a11y-webring.club (Thanks for setting it up, @eric@social.ericwbailey.website!)
I really have to stop going to the hot take factory to “check what’s going on”. It’s not needed.
Lots of web accessibility companies promote their tools and some clients think tooling will solve their accessibility problems. @aardrian@toot.cafe shows how automated tools relate to manual tests.
Ah, with the wind changing directions and cold temperatures, everything smells of burnt wood once you open the window. So many “healthy” carzinogens in the air. In Germany, in the 2020s.
Can anyone explain to me why WCAG WG thought it would be a good idea to have 1.2.1 Audio-only and Video-only (Prerecorded) as one success criterion? It feels to me like it should be two (”audio-only” and “video-only”). 🤷♂️
🏎️⚡️ Formula E Qualifying starting in a few minutes. Roster looks good and the free practice showed the car off well. Qualifying is a unique knock-out format, which is a lot of fun to watch. I can only recommend it. Ways to watch.
Illustrations with flexbox
Data-informed flex-grow for illustration purposes This week, I added a bit of page count-based visualisation for fun. This is what it looks like: rectangles with colours based on book covers. Each relates to a specific book, and its size is based on that book’s page count. Hidde uses clever …
I’m so looking forward to the first Formula E race tomorrow. New car, new drivers, new teams. First free practice today (for me) just before midnight. Second practice tomorrow, plus the shootout qualifying and the race. Here’s the race preview. 🏎️⚡️
Even if a font claims to be “hyper” legible or “for dyslexic people”, actual user testing does not show advantages over other fonts. It’s not generalizable. See Gareth Ford William’s summary, and his talk “Don’t Believe The Type!”.
One of the interesting aspects of being burned out is that you cannot really appreciate or draw energy from downtime. And that feeling sometimes makes you not want to take downtime at all, which makes things just worse.
Expertise is not to know everything. It is to know what is important. It is to know where to look up details. It is to mediate between concurrent needs. It’s to explain and filter the relevant information to others. It’s (especially!) knowing where its limits are.
After a few weeks off the new keyboard, I have switched back to QWERTY from Colemak. It is still an intriguing idea, but I am just not practising enough to make it happen.
Marco Arment explains how much of the Web is terribly over-engineered in the latest installment of ATP.
One of the nice things I have my students do is to watch one of my favorite talks and write a blog post about it. The goal is to broaden their understanding and highlight other voices. Here’s a great example that highlights @whalecoiner@indieweb.social’s 2018 Paris Web talk.
Tiny play.date console is tiny!
I’d like to sell some one-off remote consulting hours and would like for people to just be able to book them through my/a website. I had hoped I could use something like Paddle which takes care of international taxes and stuff for software. Haven’t found anything yet. Ideas?
Pedestrian friendly cities must, of course, also be accessible to disabled people. Accessible transport leaves space for individualized transport for those who need it. I’m sure we can do two things at the same time.