Hi, I’m Laurence. I’m a Glaswegian web developer using modern web standards to create user-focused, responsive websites. I also make music, play records and ping pongs. This is my online home; a playground for coding fun and place to share thoughts on the web, music and more.
Accessible names are used by assistive technologies to refer to elements on a web page. Hidde tells us how to word them so that they are more useful.
Because of how we use accessible names, we want to keep them functional and avoid naming controls after what they look like. Ideally, you do this in the imperative form, that makes it easiest to quickly grasp what a thing is going to do.
By day I’m currently working on our Design System’s Table component. In order to achieve a design spec where the table has no bottom-border I needed to set:
<tfoot> to have no bottom-border; but also<tfoot> then set all cells in the final row of the <tbody> to have no bottom-border.Modern CSS’s support for writing selectors which traverse the DOM up, down and sideways is pretty amazing here.
Although I don’t work on native apps, I’ve recently been wondering about how accessibility considerations for them compare to those for websites. So this is a timely and useful reference.
iOS provides a lot of accessibility behavior for free, so it’s a great start to making a mobile application accessible. Unfortunately, accessibility is more complicated than the iOS behavior can address, and using only default behavior can actually cause the app to have additional issues.
My colleague Anda and I just had a good conversation about tabs, and specifically the company’s tabs component. I’ve mentioned before that our tabs are unconventional and potentially confusing, and Anda was interested to hear more.
Yesterday the Design System team received a tentative enquiry regarding making table cells editable. I’m not yet sure whether or not this is a good idea – experience and spidey sense tell me it’s not – but regardless I decided to start exploring so as to base my answer on facts and avoid being overly cautious.