Journal

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!

My backhand is kinda shaky at the moment and I struggle with correct elbow and wrist position so this tutorial video is timely and helpful.

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?

The CSS :has() pseudo-class is a game-changer and can do more than act as a parent selector, as Jhey illustrates.

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.

Previous articles addressed moderating usability testing sessions with people with disabilities, and analysing findings from inclusive user research.

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.

The location

We spent seven nights at Désir de Provence, hosted by owners Sylvie and Igor.

Dining out

La Bastide Bleue restaurant, Séguret.

Hotel Montmirail in Vacqueyras.

Beautiful local wine at Domaine Mathiflo in Suzette (right in the heart of the countryside).

Les Ramparts in Venasque – incredible nighttime view over the mountains

Monsieur Tu at L’isle sur la Sorgue, where we had a lovely meal of fish and wine by the canal.

Chez Serge in Carpentras.

Other highlights

Antiques market at Carpentras.

A day walking around the towns of Gigigondas, Seguret and Vaison La Romagne.

St Remy de Provence on a Wednesday morning for a fantastic market.

Carrieres Lumieres (caves featuring art installations) which was amazing.

Aix en Provence. Vasarely Foundation for Kinetic art. Lovely shops and vibe.

Chateau du Barroux was a stunning hilltop location with a castle, cobbled streets, a chapel and incredible panoramic views of the surrounding region including Mont Ventoux.

L’isle sur la sorgue – a lovely town which had an antiques market that blew Clair’s mind!

If we had more time

Hopefully on a future stay in the area we can visit Gord, Russelet (“the Colorado of Provence”), and Nimmes.

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.

(Note: this post is kinda a journey and work-in-progress. I’ll return to complete it and tidy up. For now it serves as a handy log of my research.)

When this was first mooted without guide designs, I assumed we’d be making a custom select. Filament Group have previously shown how to style one of those, although that only affects the “trigger” part. CSS can’t yet style the options. That then led me to check in on the progress of Open UI’s selectmenu element which does support styling the options however it appears that it’s far from road-ready.

However then I saw the designs and realised that while the outside looks like a select, the options look like a group of checkboxes or (kinda) like radio buttons, rather than typical <select> options. And of course the checkboxes and radio buttons themselves are custom-styled.

This led me to reading the following resources.

• Under-engineered multi-selects
• Under-engineered select menus
• Under-engineered custom radio buttons and checkboxen
• Inclusively Hiding & Styling Checkboxes and Radio Buttons

Léonie Watson’s post Perceived affordances and the functionality mismatch is also looming large in the back of my mind.

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

As Ana’s tweet explains, this offers a number of features and benefits:

• can drag thumb with JS disabled
• receives focus
• keyboard navigation
• clicking track moves thumb there and changes slider value
• seen as slider in Accessibility panel
• no library needed, so less code in total

I really enjoyed The 15 Minute City by Natalie Whittle.

It presents the idea of modern cities in which residents can reach everything they need – shopping, work, school, green space, transport, exercise, culture etc – within 15 minutes on foot or by bike.

This idea is already working (or making good progress) in cities like Amsterdam and Paris.

And during periods of restriction during the Covid-19 pandemic it’s a way of life that people around the world have been forced to try.

There are numerous potential benefits of the idea – for example for physical and mental health, the environment, gaining more family and social time from less commuting, boosting neighbourhood economies through shopping local and so on.

On the other hand the 15-minute idea arguably favours the middle-class over the working-class, leads to diminished interpersonal skills, and ignores the important role of cities (such as London) in performing a wider, globally-connected role.

I enjoyed the thoughtful exploration of what are the important factors that give somewhere a sense of place. And I loved the chapter on Glasgow – Natalie’s home of the last 3 years and mine for much longer. It considers how past planning decisions in relation to new towns and the M8 motorway have become problematic for the city. It also looks at exciting modern projects such as the bridge to better connect the Sighthill estate on the outskirts to the city centre, and initiatives to revitalise the Clyde riverside.

Since reading this book I’m noticing more and more these matters being “in the air”. Just recently The Guardian’s Big Idea feature asked Should cars be banned from cities? If that gave one perspective on traffic in cities, I recently spoke to a taxi driver who offered another. Taxi drivers are being made to change their cars to hybrid models soon, but feel that the combination of increased outlays and lack of necessary technology and infrastructure make the move prohibitive. It was a reminder that we have to consider the potential effects on lots of different people when planning change.

Léonie tackles the prickly subject of “element re-purposing” in web development. This post follows a fantastic Twitter exchange started by Lea Verou regarding whether the common visual design request for “adjacent but mututally exclusive buttons” should be built as radio buttons or using <button> elements.

Using one element or set of elements (usually because of their functionality) and styling them to look like something else is a common pattern […but…] it creates a mismatch between the actions people expect they can take and the ones they actually can.

Relatedly, Lea has also gathered her post-discussion thoughts and decisions into a blog post What is the best way to mark up an exclusive button group? and shared a new button-group web component!

Meanwhile, Léonie already has a theme-toggle web component on her personal website which demonstrates the use of buttons and aria-pressed.

Thank you so much, Lea and Léonie.

(via @LeonieWatson)

Update July 19/7/22

I just had a twitter conversation with Adrian Roselli where I suggested that the reasons for developers considering radio inputs over buttons for Lea’s use case might be more nuanced than simply misunderstanding HTML. I’m not sure we agreed on that one in the end, however Adrian shared some helpful heuristics when choosing betweeen JS-powered buttons and forms:

A checkbox, radio button, select menu are meant to gather information. The submit button sends the form (whether get, post, or an AJAX call). A button (non-submit) causes a change on the page, such as toggling a control, showing or hiding something, etc. Different context/use.

I think it would help to think of form fields as for forms. Forms that users intentionally submit (no matter if processed client- or server-side). Forms that gather info. Buttons that have states (expanded, pressed, etc) are for manipulation of the current view.

Takeaways:

• Pick the HTML solution that is generally intended for your use case.
• Use a form if you’re gathering information but if you’re not, don’t. There will be exceptions like “filter forms” but that’s an edge case and most forms are not like that.
• Forms are ideally things that users intentionally submit, via a submit button. This helps rule out “clever forms” as an option.
• Use a button to cause a change on, or manipulate, the current page.