Journal

Enjoyed this funny and touching film about a Syrian asylum seeker searching for happiness on a remote Scottish island.

I’ve started reading Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel.

Here’s an interesting development in the block link saga: GOV.UK have introduced one (named .chevron-card) on their Homepage, citing how it’ll improve accessibility by increasing mobile touch targets. It’s not yet been added to their Design System while they’re monitoring it to see if it is successful. They’ve chosen the approach which starts with a standard, single, non-wrapping anchor then “stretches” it across the whole card via some pseudo elements and absolute positioning magic. I’m slightly surprised at this choice because it breaks the user’s ability to select text within the link. Really interested to see how it pans out!

Just taking a moment for some musings on which way the front-end wind is blowing (from my perspective at least) and how that might practically impact my approach on the next small-ish website that I code.

A classic talk by Jeremy Keith on progressive enhancement and the nature of the web and its technologies.

Jeremy Keith’s new course for Google’s web.dev learning platform is fantastic and covers a variety of aspects of responsive design including layout (macro and micro), images, icons and typography.

Recently, during a period when pandemic woes were taking their toll and likely making me a little cranky at home, I found some funny and helpful words of wisdom on Adam Buxton’s podcast and when re-watching Ricky Gervais’s interview with Larry David.

On sustaining a happy marriage, Buxton said:

Every now and then you think “they’re not doing what I want them to do and I think it’s important that they do do this thing that I want them to do! (But) you have to think really hard: is this thing actually important? Is it worth getting bent out of shape about?

It’s good advice. He mentioned that he’s slowly getting better at that, and I’m trying my best to, too.

Meanwhile, on the reasons why he got into acting, Larry David said:

it gets you out of the house!

So simple but true—it’s good to get out of the house! We’re now emerging from a period of sustained isolation and I should probably avoid being completely remote (and going stir crazy) and get back into the office occasionally.

A designer colleague recently asked me what course or resources I would recommend for learning front-end web development. She mentioned React at the beginning but I suggested that it’d be better to start by learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. As for React: it’s a subset or offshoot of JavaScript so it makes sense to understand vanilla JS first.

For future reference, here are my tips.

At work, I’m sometimes asked accessibility questions or to provide guidelines. I’m with Anna Cook in considering myself an accessibility advocate rather than an expert however I have picked up lots of tips and knowledge over many years of developing websites. So I thought it’d be useful to gather some general web accessibility tips and tests in one place as a useful reference.

Caveats and notes:

1. this is a living document which I’ll expand over time;
2. I’m standing on the shoulders of real experts and I list my references at the foot of the article; and
3. if I’ve got anything wrong, please let me know!

It’s a few years old now, but this tutorial from Heydon Pickering on how to create an accessible, progressively enhanced user interface comprised of multiple collapsible and expandable sections is fantastic. It covers using the appropriate HTML elements (buttons) and ARIA attributes, how best to handle icons (minimal inline SVG), turning it into a web component and plenty more besides.