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Here’s Dave Rupert, frustratedly rounding up the accessibility shortfalls in browser implementations of native HTML elements.

I’ve always abided in the idea that “HTML is accessible by default and then we come along and mess it up”. But that’s not always the case. There are some cases where even using plain ol’ HTML causes accessibility problems.

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Since November 2019 my day job has involved working on a “Majestic Monolith” coded in Ruby on Rails. I loved this conversation with Rails’ creator DHH in which he speaks with great passion and makes interesting points about finding a programming language that speaks to you; why single page apps and microservices are not for him; and how our working days have too many interruptions.

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On at least two ocassions I’ve found myself scratching my head when an attempted push to a newly-created Github repo is met with authentication failures, despite me being sure I’m using the correct credentials.

Here’s the lowdown on the issue and how to resolve it.

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In the same vein as Jeremy Keith’s recent blog post, Hydration, which calls out some of the performance and user experience problems associated with current Server Side Rendering approaches, I think Jake Archibald is absolutely bang on the money here.

The server and client render should not be 1:1.

Don't render buttons on the server that require JS to work.

Don't ship code to the client that simply repeats what the server has already done.

— Jake Archibald (@jaffathecake) February 20, 2020

Every time I watch nostalgic TV documentaries about Scottish films I see Just a Boys’ Game and Just Another Saturday – both written by Peter McDougall – come up. I just watched Just a Boys’ Game (available on Google Play) and loved it. Set in 1979 Glasgow, this is a gritty story with refreshingly good acting that really captures the finer points of the social and economic mood of the time.

Using <input type="text" inputmode="numeric" pattern="[0-9]*"> (instead of <input type="number") allows for a degree of separation between how the user enters data (“input mode”), what the browser expects the user input to contain (type equals number), and potentially how it tries to validate it.

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Colour contrast and the use of colour is extremely important for certain groups of people with varying levels of visional impairment. Building upon the excellent Colorable, I wanted more context around the result. When you share the outcome with your colleagues, all the results, rules and what you’re aiming for, is easily understandable for when you have those awkward conversations with designers and marketers. Accessibility doesn’t have to be ugly.

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Removing underlines from links in HTML text presents an accessibility challenge. In order for a design to be considered accessible, there is now a three-sided design contraint - or what I call "The Contrast Triangle". Your text, links and background colors must now all have sufficient contrast from each other. Links must have a contrast ratio of 3:1 from their surrounding text. By not using underlines, a design has to rely on contrast alone to achieve this.

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The BBC Global Experience Language (GEL) Technical Guides are a series of framework-agnostic, code-centric recommendations and examples for building GEL design patterns in websites. They illustrate how to create websites that comply with all BBC guidelines and industry best practice, giving special emphasis to accessibility.

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