A stream of consciousness by Laurence Hughes

Hidde is, like me, both an “accessibility nerd” and “a components enthusiast”. So it’s interesting to see him tackle whether it’s sensible for design systems – even really good ones – to “promise accessibility”.

We should definitely test how accessible components are and document what they can and can't contribute to a website's accessibility. And WCAG requirements can help with this. However, I think claiming WCAG conformance about pages or sets of pages, as we do today, approaches it at the right level. I don't think we should want to claim conformity of components by themselves.

He goes on to say:

There's a real risk in overpromising the value of a component if we say it is accessible or conforms to some accessible standard. It could make people believe that they no longer need to worry about accessibility once they use or buy the component. That creates the wrong expectations: accessibility is a continuous process. Like we want to always iterate on user experience, we want to always iterate on accessibility.

Here are my main takeaways.

On Tuesday 29th July 2025, my mother in law Jackie passed away. It was sudden and completely unexpected – she was healthy and taken far too young at only sixty-two years old.

Jackie was dearly loved by all her family and friends for her warmth, kindness and zest for life.

That day and the days thereafter have been have been tough, especially for Clair and her dad.

Jackie was an amazing person, I loved her, and it’s gonna leave a big gap in our lives. We now need to to stick together through the rough times ahead. We should keep in mind how lucky we were to have her, and honour her strong values and kindness.

In my recent post Website updates I said:

I’ve added myself to 11ty’s community and am now listed as an Eleventy author. I hope that some day I’ll find that fuzzylogic.me has been added to 11ty’s Speedlify Leaderboard too – that’d be cool!

Well, about a week ago I noticed that I have been added to 11ty’s Speedlify Leaderboard and not only that I’ve gone straight in at the very respectable rank of #23. I’m among some really talented company there so I’m proud of that!

At work, my talented colleague Anda and I have been taking a fresh look at modal dialogues with a view to modernising relevant design system components. During this project I’ve expanded my knowledge of the HTML dialog element, especially the nitty-gritty of using it in practice.