Journal

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.

(via @jamesmockett)

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.

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.

Essentially the problem relates to Github expecting a personal access token rather than a password (although it provides no helpful hints that this is the case).

This might be because your Github account has 2FA enabled, and/or for security purposes because your account is part of an organisation that uses SAML single sign-on (SSO).

In my case, I had previously created a personal access token with the requisite privileges (in my Github account’s Developer Settings > Tokens section) for the purposes of API access, so I was able to just reuse that. However, if need be I could have created a new one.

Thanks to Ginny Fahs who had the same problem and documented her solution.

Github’s Help page Creating a personal access token for the command line is also useful.

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.

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.

An interesting post from the UK Government listing a host of usability and accessibility problems arising from using <input type="number">.

Now that browser support for the inputmode attribute is sufficient, they have moved to <input type="text" inputmode="numeric">.

I trust GOV.UK’s opinion and think I’ll follow suit.

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.

An excellent, easy to use tool for checking text-against-background contrast for accessibility and sharing your results with others.

(via @paddyduke)

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.

It’s interesting that Chip says that this level of contrast is needed “when we don’t use underlines on links”.

By not using underlines, a design has to rely on contrast alone to achieve this.

So this seems to be yet another good reason to include underlines in links, i.e. if you underline your links then you don’t need to worry quite as much about a third level of contrast.

Indeed, when you toggle on the “Show underlines” option on this tool, it then removes the requirement to ensure additional contrast between hyperlinks and standard body text.

However, even if your links in flowing prose are underlined, there’s always likely to be places (Navigation, Footer, CTAs etc) where you’ve probably disabled underlines on links for design effect, so I reckon this is useful for most websites.

(via https://twitter.com/jamesmockett)

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.

Heydon Pickering (author of Inclusive Components and co-creator of Every Layout) has implemented and documented over 25 of the BBC's design patterns. These are sure to be loaded with best practices and clever tricks for making resilient, accessible modern UI components. (via @heydonworks)

I’m finding Codepen to be more and more valuable not only for testing out new code and ideas, but also – when working on large applications – as a time-saving rapid prototyping environment which sidesteps the overhead of back-end set-up. Here are some tips which I’ve found useful, for future reference.

Control the Editor View layout

Append /left/, /right/, or /top/ to the URL to set the editor layout.

Append ?editors=1111 (change numbers as appropriate) to the URL to set which panels are maximised (in order of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and console).

For example:

https://codepen.io/fuzzylogicx/pen/BEEYQL/left/?editors=1100

References

• https://blog.codepen.io/documentation/url-extensions/
• Adding external resources to a pen
• ES Modules on codepen
• https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/codepen-tips-beginners/