Journal

Back in June I attended CSS Day in Amsterdam. One of my favourite talks was The CSS Cascade – A Deep Dive by Bramus van Damme. Bramus covered everything we wanted to know about the cascade but were afraid to ask! And that included an introduction to CSS Cascade Layers – the latest game-changing CSS feature.

At our fortnightly Accessibility Forum at work, we just had a great discussion about modal dialogues. We started by discussing whether focus should be completely trapped within the modal or if the user should at least have access to the browser toolbar (we decided on the former). We then moved onto a general discussion on the pros and cons of modals, which led me to share MODALZ MODALZ MODALZ with the team.

At work we’ve recently been shown a couple of design proposals where truncation was presented as a solution to the perceived problem of long and unwieldy content, for example a long description in a table cell. However following good discussions, as a wider team we’re now leaning towards avoiding truncation as an approach. Truncation can present accessibility issues and as Karen McGrane says truncation is not a good content strategy. I reckon we should just let long content wrap, and design for that to look OK.

And when natural wrapping doesn’t cut it – like when you’re tackling very long words in confined spaces – reach for overflow-wrap: break-word as suggested in Ahmad Shadeed’s excellent Handling Short And Long Content In CSS.

In this video we go over the 3 pro tips from Liam Pitchford that helped transform Dan’s backhand!

The :has() CSS pseudo-class represents an element if any of the selectors passed as parameters match at least one element. But, it's more than a "parent" selector. That's a nice way to market it. The not so appealing way might be the "conditional environment" selector. But that doesn't have quite the same ring to it. How about the “family” selector?

Tetralogical are doing a great series of articles on running inclusive research. Their latest is about recruiting participants and covers whether you should recruit people with disabilities as part of your testing and if so who, and how many, and how to recruit them.

Just had a memorable experience with Jason and Tom catching Herbie Hancock at the Edinburgh Festival. At 82 years old he still has amazing energy and capped his performance with a tour of the stage playing his keytar followed by a scissor jump!

Herbie’s piano playing was mesmerising – the solos really took me to another place and if this is how he plays in his eighties I can only imagine how good his gigs were in his prime. I also loved his warm anecdotes, including one about his friend Wayne Shorter just before treating us to a rendition of Footprints.

Other highlights included Cantaloupe Island, the mindbending Actual Proof and hearing guitarist Lionel Louke coax sounds from a guitar that you wouldn’t think possible.

Like most folks we didn’t holiday abroad during 2020 and 2021, when COVID was at its height. Trips abroad are a luxury and privilege so this was no hardship. However I’ll admit that once restrictions were lifted and things felt safer, we were pretty excited to head for some sun and good food, and set our sights on a first trip together to the south of France.

Our Design System team has recently received “new component requests” for some custom filtering controls. These look like custom-styled <select>s however their “options” appear more like checkboxes and radio buttons. I think the inspiration was Carbon Design System’s Dropdown component and the idea is to bring consistency to filtering controls in forms. Although it’s not yet time to fully explore this and make a yay/nay decision on the request, I’ve been doing some initial thinking.

Ana demonstrates how to achieve a range slider effect accessibly, using web standards and without needing to reach for libraries.