Journal

It's a tool that brings attention and understanding to how color contrast can affect different people with visual impairments.

What’s interesting about this resource is that sheds light on the many different types of visual impairment, from Protanomaly (trouble distinguishing reds) to Achromatopsia (complete colour blindness; only being able to see shades) and how your website’s colour scheme fares for each. (via paddyduke.com)

Although FS Split started out as a project to create a fresh, modern new sans, it has developed into a broad type family that can bring so much variety to everything from magazines and packaging to websites and branding. The conflicting yet harmonising nature of sans and serif should give designers the tools they need to be both bold and subtle, eclectic and ordinary, contemporary and classic.

This interactive, web-based tool which lets you swipe through various space objects to see their relative size is pretty cool, really nicely done, and handy whenever you could use a dose of perspective! (via @adactio)

The story behind Blue Note Records, founded in New York in 1939 by two German Jewish refugees who allowed their musicians complete artistic freedom, revolutionising jazz in the process.

A great watch with a fantastic back story, great interviews and amazing music including this from Art Blakey:

Create a more flexible component which allows the text to wrap based on the content rather than the viewport size.

Here, Mandy Michael explores similar territory to Every Layout in suggesting that not all responsive pattern challenges require, or indeed are best served by, media queries.

The example here is a pipe-separated text pair (I could imagine an author and publish date meta line) which Mandy wants to wrap (with pipe separator hidden) only when the content and container require it, rather than based on the less-relevant viewport width.

She uses a clever combination of flex-wrap:wrap, generated content, padding, transform and overflow-y:hidden to achieve her goal.

(Via @Mandy_Kerr)

A mix of electronic, house and techno records I recorded at home in November 2019.

2019 has been a fairly quiet year for my and Tom’s record label The Nuclear Family. However with a couple of winter events coming up I wanted to share a little teaser mix to whet the collective appetite.

Inspiration

Earlier in the year I joined a fine bunch of pals on a night out at 69 at The Club, Paisley to hear resident DJs Martin and Euan plus a live performance from guest John Heckle. It was a fantastic night and particularly memorable for a couple of stellar tracks played by Euan. I tried to describe them to him afterwards but wasn’t sure if I was making much sense. Cut to a few months later and a mysterious parcel containing records I’ve never heard of arrives at my door. I was convinced that someone must have sent them to me in error until dropping the needle on the grooves and realising they were the tracks from that night at 69! Channeling Sherlock Holmes, I deduced that Euan – being the all-round good guy that he is – had bought and posted them to me as a souvenir of the night. What a guy!

And they are brilliant.

The first is Ricochet by Bambooman (a new name on me) on Matthew Herbert’s label, Accidental Jnr. It features a stuttering, percussive riff complimented by searing synth stabs – proper machine funk but with a heart. The second is a double-pack by the more familiar name of i:cube, with my favourite track Fractal P a dark, winding, bass-heavy trip reminiscent of ’91 classic Pressure Dub by Ability 11 but with its own distinct flavour.

I knew I definitely wanted those tracks in the mix.

Around those touchstones I added recent favourites from Joy O (under his Sin Falta alias), Phillip McGarva (the artist formerly known as Microworld) and Dego, plus a few oldies including Isolée’s Hermelin and Modern Tribe by Jellybean (AKA Glenn Underground).

In terms of kit, I recorded the mix on a pair of Technics 1210s and an Isonoe 420 mixer.

The featured article in this week’s Accessibility Weekly newsletter was on recent improvements to the WAVE suite of accessibility testing tools.

I can’t remember using WAVE before, however just one quick test of fuzzylogic.me using their online tool revealed an accessibility issue with the linked SVG logo in the header. A great catch, now fixed, from which I learned something new. I’ll certainly be adding WAVE to my accessibility testing toolbox from here on in.

WAVE is a suite of evaluation tools that help authors make their web content more accessible to individuals with disabilities. WAVE can identify many accessibility and Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) errors, but also facilitates human evaluation of web content. Our philosophy is to focus on issues that we know impact end users, facilitate human evaluation, and to educate about web accessibility.

Following the recent watershed Domino’s Pizza case, BBC News reports that retailers in the USA & Canada are struggling to make their websites accessible and consumers are taking them to court.

"We've even been told by businesses before that they understand, but the fact is blind people are not a very big market," Mr Danielson says. "That's what we are dealing with."

Skinning your prototypes just got easier - colors.css is a collection of skin classes to use while prototyping in the browser.

They also provide ninety examples of “A11Y compliant color combos” which is really handy.

From The Guardian in 2011, shortly after Gil Scott-Heron’s sad death, here’s a beautiful and moving account of how the musical legend offered hope and mentorship to a young man from Liverpool and in so doing turned his life around.

Thanks to Nick Peacock for sharing.