A bold first sentence that draws you in. A steering second sentence to set you further down the path. A third sentence that tantalizes and alludes to content to follow.
Following is an initial explanatory paragraph. It serves to help back up the...
Say you’re working with a LLM and training it to write good frontend code. Good frontend code is accessible code, so of course you want to instruct the LLM to produce it.
However, the bulk of frontend code on the web is inaccessible to some degree....
Hey there, fellow designer! Chances are good you’ve been linked to this after doing some annotation work on a design you've been creating.
First off, I want to thank you for taking the time to address accessibility considerations in your work. No,...
This is another window into the sometimes unglamorous-yet-vital tasks that being an accessibility designer demands.
Keyboard shortcuts occupy a strange area for web design. Most websites don’t have them, and that’s totally fine. However, it makes more...
I was kindly approached by Fable with an offer to evaluate their new pay-per-project model. It is a project-based option for accessibility practitioners, champions, and product teams that delivers quick feedback from disabled people who use assistive...
I am not a big fan of personas. They’re oft-abused tools whose utility is far too frequently not interrogated, and consequently create more harm than good.
Recently, the accessibility arm of a government web services team put their “inclusive...
Full disclosure: I shamelessly stole this idea from Marc Thiele because I like it so much.
Like Marc, I am also motivated by FOMO. Trying to stay on top of things in a fast-paced industry has been made difficult on account of social media...
I shared the following message on a Discord server I participate in with some friends:
having a very normal day where I have to read RFC 3986, as one does
To which a friend quickly replied:
…are you having a linking argument? 😅
I then demanded to...
Like cicadas emerging from the ground, design industry conversations about quality seem to periodically erupt on social media. Also like cicadas, these articles are as predicable as they are irritating.
I can’t count the amount of Medium thinkpieces...
Design systems are organized in an imperative, top-down, hierarchical way.
By this, I mean its maintainers decide on categories of content, and then how that content is ordered. This is done as a calculated bet to best serve the known and unknown...
A thing you should know is that you get put on a lot of lists if you spend a decent chunk of time publishing blog posts on your website.
Your website and contact information will be shared around on these lists, for the purpose of soliciting you for...
I’ve been seeing, and enjoying reading these posts as they pop up in my RSS reader. Dave Rupert tagged me into the chain, so here we go!
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
With the gift of hindsight, I guess I came up being blog-adjacent....
I debuted these principles in my axe-con 2025 talk, It is designed to break your heart: Cultivating a harm reduction mindset as an accessibility practitioner. They are adapted from The National Harm Reduction Coalition’s original eight principles.
My...
I get asked about my opinion on overlay-adjacent accessibility products with enough frequency that I thought it could be helpful to write about it.
There’s a category of third party products out there that are almost, but not quite an accessibility...
A lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces prevented the end of human civilization on September 26th, 1983. His name was Stanislav Petrov.
Protocol dictated that the Soviet Union would retaliate against any nuclear strikes sent by the...
GitHub has updated the page template used to list Commits on a repository. Central to this experience is an interactive list component that I was responsible for architecting. This work was done alongside input from James Scholes, whose guidance was...
Former United States president and war criminal George W. Bush gave a speech in Australia, directing a v-for-victory hand gesture at the assembled crowd. It wasn’t received the way he intended.
What he failed to realize is that this gesture means a...
I have a lightning talk I deliver internally at my job. It is intentionally delivered to non-accessibility practitioners, so mainly engineers, designers, project managers, and product folk.
The talk is about exploring macOS' Accessibility system...
I created the a11y-syntax-highlighting library seven years ago, forked from xiaozi’s solarized-prism-theme for PrismJS.
To not bury the lede, the new update:
Supports Forced Colors mode,
Is encapsulated in a Cascade Layer,
Uses Custom...
This is one of those cases where circumstances at my job led to needing to document expected behavior in order to create “synthetic” links via JavaScript. Sometimes this sort of thing is regrettably unavoidable.
A large part of the effort was...
Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now Thanks to AI Deal - 404 Media
Thread by stillorangecrushed - Thread Reader App
AI models fed AI-generated data quickly spew nonsense - Nature
I played a lot of the pen-and-paper roleplaying game in high school and college. I’m now conceptually more into Dungeon World’s approach, but I digress.
Unlike Tom Hanks, I avoided turning into a delusional murderer. Instead, I deepened some...
I am the original author of the browser extension Millennials to Snake People. The code that powers this extension is public and transparent.
There is another browser extension called “Snake People 3.0: Slither with a Hiss”. It is made by the highly...
A lot of work goes into making every page and view of a website or webapp look consistent with every other page or view. It’s just good design.
Smaller, newer experiences tend to be more uniform than not. This makes sense in that the bulk of the...
I remember feeling numb learning that my writing had been sucked up by OpenAI. It came out of nowhere and was done without my permission or consent.
I have a lot of ethical issues with contemporary AI productization, notably notions around consent,...
Much has been written about the terrifying privacy implications of Microsoft’s new Windows Recall “feature”.
Talking to even one person who works in cybersecurity, political advocacy, domestic abuse prevention, LGBTQ+ support, etc. would reveal the...
I contributed two pages to Multipage Version, Mat Marquis’ new zine.
The zine is about HTML elements, and is intended to be printed out as physical media. It was a ton of fun to make, and so refreshing to get back to print media design for a bit.
Here...
Browsers are a failure of imagination.
I understand that new browser features and functionality need to be rolled out with care, in that you need to accommodate a wide range of technological literacy and familiarity. This is to say nothing of built-up...
I swear this isn’t a sponsored post.
I impulse bought a TinyTV 2 recently. It serves a weirdly specific need, namely adding to my tiny living room’s tiny living room:
I live in a small place. It’s a whole thing, don’t worry about it.
The...
I spent a decent amount of time last year helping to create a table component.
Tables are complicated to make. They’re even more complicated to make accessible. I’m proud of our efforts here, especially because I think we went about making it the...
Another trend I see from time to time on social media is the idea that images should have alternative (alt) text descriptions included in their metadata. Like a lot of things accessibility-related, the idea contains nuance that needs unpacking.
At a...
A few years ago I made a New Year’s Eve resolution to stop overthinking assholes.
I could delicately, patiently, and painstakingly debunk the gigantic, misplaced swing of a man who is burning others' lived experience as fuel to propel his...
I have worked for two newspapers over the course of my career (three if you count my high school newspaper). One thing I learned there is that the top half of each and every newspaper homepage is a daily battle of priorities.
The idea here is that the...
More than one thing can be true at the same time. For this post, it’s that:
Have recently felt a lack of control in many of aspects of my life,
I’m still technically a designer, and that
I like CSS a lot.
Because of this, I’ve found a new worry...
An uncomfortable truth is that the vast majority of access-related issues are created in the design phase.
Accessibility annotation kits help tackle this problem, and in doing so lower the downstream issues that would be created without their...
I’ve witnessed this phenomenon across enough corporate Slack workspaces that I think I can speak to it with confidence.
What is a zombie Slack channel?
If you use Slack (or Teams, or some other similar app) at work I’m sure you’ve encountered zombie...
An incomplete list:
Most of them are made to make it easier for someone to get to where they want to go.
Some are purely utilitarian, a few are completely decorative, and most are a combination of both.
Some are built by governments, some are built...
A public beta was released for GitHub on Friday the 29th. It allows you to apply or remove an underline effect to links in body content.
The link underlines are present in Issue and Pull Request comments, as well as other areas of the site. We are...
I’ve been taking screen reader lessons. I found someone who is kind enough to offer their time and expertise (and grace in answering the occasional ignorant question) in exchange for payment.
The goal here is to uncover assumptions I carry with me...
Blogs are good at communicating what you’re thinking about a specific topic, but not so great at the larger framework of how someone came to be in the headspace that lead to the posts they share. Because of that, I’ve set up a formative posts...
I buy clothing in sudden bursts of need. I do this because I wear things past the point where I probably should not, and then rush to address the gap so I don’t look strange on a Zoom call or at the grocery store.
This is to say that quarantine has...
There are roughly five types of people you’ll meet doing accessibility development work. They are:
People who create inaccessible code, but do not realize they are doing so.
People who create inaccessible code and realize they are doing so, but do...
display: contents has a long and storied history when it comes to accessibility.
On paper, the declaration alters thedisplay qualities of the element it is applied to. It makes the element “disappear,” elevating its child elements to the next level up...
For each and every Global Accessibility Awareness Day (#GAAD) post a company puts out today, ask:
Does the announcement page support basic accessibility considerations (underlined links, captioned videos, valid markup, etc.)?
Does the announcement...
In the spirit of “everything old is new again,” browsers are once again supporting the ability to style the scrollbar. Much like custom CSS mouse cursors, I feel this is also a mistake.
When you style things on the web, you get control over almost the...
There’s a secret mode that comes with almost all large ovens, refrigerators, dishwashers, and other large kitchen appliances. It is called Sabbath mode, and there is a very specific reason it is provided by the manufacturer.
No, it is not a mode made...
Twitter is currently a lot like one of those spiral coin drop wishing wells you encounter at the mall. The quarter that is its imminent demise is revolving faster and faster and will probably drop out of sight sooner than later.
Part of mourning the...
I know, I know. Yet another “how to Mastodon” post.
That said, I feel like I’ve finally gotten at least a semblance of traction on making my Mastodon feed worthwhile. Reader, it was not easy.
I should also point out that I was incredibly invested in...
I would like to thank Modern Health. It was not their intent, but using their service broke me out of a deep depression by launching me into an incandescent rage.
I’ve read enough on destigmatizing mental health that I feel no shame in discussing...
My sense of identity and community have been challenged in multiple, overwhelming ways recently. I don’t know what to do about it.
Some personal events recently transpired, ones that made me extremely aware of my mortality. They’ve also caused me to...
Swearing is the spice of language. Throw in a little to make that fucking point you want to make pop. Throw in a shitload to create a motherfucking verbal curry, layers of delicious goddamn meaning to unpack.
Swearing is also present in every culture...
The aria-label property is made available to us by the Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) standard. It allows a property/value declaration in HTML as a way of providing an accessible name for an interactive element.
Accessible...
There is a prevailing notion in web development that the frontend—the discipline of creating what someone can see and do on a website or web app—is the only place you need to consider accessibility.
This simply isn’t true. Accessibility is a holistic...
Could spoiling a joke be an accessibility issue? You better believe it.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Success Criterion 2.4.4: Link Purpose (In Context) instructs us to ensure that a link’s accessible name makes sense when separated from its...
Although my fifteen minutes of fame for Millennials to Snake people is long over, I still get the occasional email offering to:
Buy the extension outright, or
Pay me to add their code into it.
The goal of each offer is the same. The solicitor wants...
I changed this website’s domain from .design to .website as part of my redesign. If you subscribe to my RSS feed (and thank you if you do!), the new URL is:
https://ericwbailey.website/feed/feed.xml
Before this website was .design it was a .com. I’m...
Things are in a really bad place right now. It is difficult to think of any aspect of the world that isn’t being strangled by malignant forces. This includes the web.
It's been a long time since the altruistic early web—putting content out there...
Posted on Ad Hoc: Sometimes the problem is that the presence of a gap hasn’t been explained as being purposeful. By auditing the systems we work with, we’re able to both understand the larger context of what is and isn’t present and why..…
Posted on Smashing Magazine: Overcorrecting for one form of disability may unintentionally negatively impact the experience for other forms of disability.…
To frame this post, I’d like to share a tweet by Irina Bednova:
Apparently everyone in our team interpreted "lgtm" in Github reviews differently. The interpretation were:- Lets get this merged- Looks good to me- Legitimate— Irina Bednova...
If you are not familiar, pair programming (pairing) is the practice of collaborating directly with another person to work on a problem. You’ll often hear it in development contexts, but I've also encountered it with design.
In the Before Times, we...
I find myself needing a reference like this more often than not lately. So, here’s a blog acting as augmented memory—I’ll update it as I encounter more user-facing states in the wild.
What user-facing state is
User-facing state is what someone...
This post is in reply to a Tweet from Sara Soueidan about only sharing our best work. It is a conversation how people don’t share negative things on social media, especially in the context of a professional account.
#WorstWorkWednesday, the title of...
One of the coolest things about being someone who creates digital products is sometimes you get to create experiences that have never existed before.
The history of websites, web apps, and native apps is full of countless widgets that let you enter...
Naming things is hard.
One way to go about naming things is via topology, the practice of classifying things by way of their visual characteristics. It is a subtle art.
Topology is a good approach for the naming of design tokens. Unfortunately, in the...
In my ongoing, inadvertent quest to alienate myself from the design industry, I must now tell you all that Comic Sans is a good typeface.
A lot has been written about this much-maligned typeface, both criticizing and defending it. To cover the overall...
Posted on Smashing Magazine: CSS Custom Properties can be used for far more than just color, and their values update in realtime, both via display mode updates and JavaScript logic. This is powerful stuff.…
Tribble, Tribs, Tribby P, little guy, little dude, bud, buddy.
You’re my best friend’s cat, but I’m the next-of-kin on the pet-sitter paperwork. You’re not mine, but I’m definitely a part of you.
You’ve been a presence and a comfort through most of my...
On September 17th, 1956 an atomic bomb was detonated in Maralinga, Australia.
The bomb’s testing program was codenamed One Tree, and utilized a payload comparable to the horrific Little Boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan during World War II. The...
The Chinese room is an argument created by philosopher John Searle. It states that computer programs will never have consciousness, despite appearing so to an external human observer. Arguments about strong artifical intelligence, as well as the...
I work on design systems now. It scratches a lot of itches I have, most importantly organizing and standardizing things, as well as baking accessibility in at both the design and development layers.
My very cool boss is working on updating our grid...
My partner is learning Japanese using the Duolingo app. They’ve been dutifully opening the app and doing daily challenges for over 400 days now. A few days ago, they shared this screenshot with me:
If I could wager a guess, it looks like there was...
Slack went from IRC-but-with-WebKit to critical piece of business infrastructure almost overnight. I’m a big fan. It freed us from the tyranny of passive aggressive email chains, and when practiced with good etiquette quickly became my favorite way of...
My partner is a teacher. One of their students, a sixth grade girl, was recently diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes.
The student is allowed to keep a small purse with her at all times, as it contains a smartphone that runs an app that talks to, and...
Improving The Accessibility Of Your Markdown marks the hundredth post I’ve written. 100 is a bit of an arbitrary number, but we’ve mostly decided to be a base 10 society, so it also represents an opportunity to take pause.
I’ve written ~143,500 words...
Posted on Smashing Magazine: This is a long post that covers different aspects of Markdown and how it interacts with other technology. Know that each tweak and update will have a direct impact on someone’s quality of life when using the web, and that’s huge.…
I wrote this when I was working for thoughtbot. I also was responsible for adding dark mode functionality to thoughtbot.com and Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots, thoughtbot’s blog.
I don’t work at thoughtbot anymore, but...
Forget inverting binary trees, translating or localizing a digital experience is one of the most difficult things you can do with software.
There’s plenty of content out there about how to perform the basic design and development aspects of...
My obsession with food-based taxonomy continues. Here are all the forbidden noodles I am aware of:
Bucatini
The FDA banning the import of this beloved pasta was one of the many tragedies 2020 visited on us. If there is any consolation, know that the...
If you're reading this and have already signed a contract with accessiBe, it unfortunately might be too late to get out of it.
In this scenario it is my recommendation to immediately stop creating harm for the people trying to use your...
A bad accessibility trend I’ve noticed is industries with a lot of gravitas thinking that their use cases are somehow different and special. Somehow, the thinking becomes “our UI component is different because we deal with...
There is a tweet from a suspended Twitter user that shows a “ham biscuit sign” in its dark and lit-up state. Here’s a screenshot of it:
Source: Reddit.
The sign is used to indicate if that particular McDonald’s had Country Ham Biscuits left...
There are a few schools of thought when it comes to organizing your CSS declarations. Each approach uses an underlying concept to impose a specific declaration order.
When I say organizing declarations, I’m talking about the CSS code placed inside...
Posted on Smashing Magazine: Image placement on the modern web is highly intentional, helping to communicate the overall purpose of a page or view. This means that nearly every image you declare needs to have an alternate description…
As the press deadline approached closer and closer, the man became more and more exasperated. Eventually, he wound up pacing in my cubicle, watching me frantically click on things. With the press running in less than an hour, he blurted out something...
Posted on thoughtbot: Design Sprints, by their very nature, are flexible. They follow an overall arc that drives towards testing ideas with potential users, but are not constrained to a single dogmatic way to go about that…
I believe that letting CSS load a custom cursor was a mistake. This might seem like a niche complaint, and you know what? It is. But it’s also an important one.
One of the best things about CSS is that it lets us make websites and web apps look like...
One thing I’ve been doing for The A11Y project is managing its social media efforts. Since doing so, I’ve slowly grown its Twitter followers to 10,000+.
Now, before I get into it, there’s some things worth pointing out:
This work was built on top of...
I write a lot, and a lot of my writing is published on other sites. One of the functions of my site is to serve as an archive, so I can keep track of what I’ve done where.
Eleventy is good at a lot of things, and one of those things is getting a blog...
One of the niche things you can do to improve the performance on your website or web app is to subset your fonts.
If you are not familiar, subsetting is the act of removing glyphs and other associated information from a font file. You can cherrypick...
Posted on Shopify Partners: Inclusive design and accessibility advocate Eric Bailey recommends checking your app for common accessibility issues before testing it with disabled people (and paying them for their time)…
404 pages are what a server will show you if you request something that isn’t there. Another way to say this: 404s are a last-ditch effort to help visitors get what they want if a webpage isn’t there anymore.
There’s plenty of articles out there about...
Posted on The A11Y Project: Alternate (alt) text help people who use assistive technology understand images, and are a core part of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). They require a human’s input to be effective…
I got a title change today. I’m now a Senior Designer.
What’s worth noting is that this is the first place I’ve worked that has given me a title change. I’ve been in the industry for 12 years.
Titles are really important if you’re a member of a...
Posted on The A11Y Project: Due to their technical, social, and moral issues, The A11Y Project does not recommend using permanent plugins. We view these kinds of products as actively harmful, and a step backwards for digital accessibility efforts.…
I finished up a research project a couple of weeks ago, and I'd like to share a detail that completely threw me for a loop.
We were conducting user research with a demographic with a high degree of variability in both skill level and technological...
Implicit cultural norms and accessible social media have come up in conversation a few times with different groups in the past week, so I want to talk about it.
Explicit norms are the parameters the social media platform sets for you. Tweets are...
Hidde kindly nominated me to write one of the “typical day” posts that have been making the blogging rounds. I’ve been enjoying reading them, as they give a nice look into how other people are holding up in quarantine.
I’m also all about demystifying...
At its core, an accessibility audit is about determining if a disabled person can use a digital experience. It takes a snapshot of a website, app, kiosk, or other digital experience and provides a summary of:
What isn’t working,
How numerous the...
If you are unfamiliar, blogrolls are a simple list of links to other blogs that the blog’s author finds interesting and worth sharing.
Blogrolls mostly fell on the wayside as the web matured and industrialized. In an era that is obsessed with...
I used to get panic attacks when I had to give a client presentation.
This was before I was really aware of my anxiety and depression—I didn’t know what they were or what caused them. Because of this, I spent way too much time fixating on the...
Posted on The A11Y Project: tabindex is a global attribute that allows an HTML element to receive focus. It needs a value of zero or a negative number in order to work in an accessible way…
This phenomenon indirectly came up recently in an Open UI meeting I was attending. If you’re not familiar, Open UI is a group full of people far smarter than I am working to “allow web developers to style and extend built-in web UI...
It’s exciting and fun, but also comes with a lot of responsibility.
Successfully taking care of it means you’ll need to stick to a routine.
It can bring you moments of both great joy and sorrow.
It costs a little more than you think it will.
It will...
Mega Man games are light on plot, but do a lot of showing not telling. This happens to be my favorite form of storytelling, so of course I spent too much time thinking about the Mega Man universe.
If you’re not familiar, Mega Man is a popular video...
Posted on CSS-Tricks: The important bit I learned this year is the same thing I learn over and over again: When it comes to disability, representation matters…
I just updated this site to use Eleventy.
I don’t update enchilada that much anymore. It’s now more a place to centralize all the little tweaks and gotchas of web work, and less a platform for scaffolding websites.
In all honestly, enchilada was...
Posted on CSS-Tricks: Focus management is the practice of coordinating what can and cannot receive focus events. It is one of the trickier things to do in front-end development, but it is important for making websites and web apps accessible…
Radium was discovered in 1898 by Polish chemist Marie Sklodowska Curie. To produce radium, you need to extract it from pitchblende, an ore that contains uranium.
Radium was discovered in working with the known properties of pitchblende. Curie noticed...
For better or worse, I spend a decent amount of time on social media.
When you read it regularly, you start to notice that there’s an ebb and flow to the kinds of things that get brought up. People post ideas and observations, followed by reactions,...
Posted on thoughtbot: A common problem I run into with product founders and larger organizations is the idea that their customers will be obsessed with their products…
My two-part piece on equivalent experiences is now live on Smashing Magazine. I have complicated feelings about it.
First off, writing for Smashing Magazine is a great experience, and I encourage you (yes, you) to pitch them. Their team is friendly,...
Posted on thoughtbot: Improving the reading level is often overlooked or downplayed as unglamorous work. Yet it is one of the most effective things you can do to make a product more usable…
Posted on Smashing Magazine: This is the second of two articles on the topic of how digital accessibility is informed by equivalency. Previously, we have learned about the underlying biases that inform digital product creation, what isn’t an...
Posted on Smashing Magazine: If you spend enough time interacting with digital accessibility practitioners, you may encounter the phrase “equivalent experience.” This saying concisely sums up a lot of the philosophy behind accessibility work…
Posted on CSS-Tricks: Like any other programming language, CSS has functions. They can be inserted where you’d place a value, or in some cases, accompanying another value declaration. Some CSS functions even let you nest other functions within them…
Posted on CSS-Tricks: Favicons are the little icons you see in your browser tab. They help you understand which site is which when you’re scanning through your browser’s bookmarks and open tabs…
I’ve seen a fair share of tutorial links floating around in newsletters and Twitter and the like recently. They all promise the same thing, namely how to use React to create a résumé.
I mean, I get it. It’s important to have something to build towards...
Posted on The A11Y Project: Most computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and web browsers have specialized tools to help people read and take action on the content they display…
Posted on CSS-Tricks: Being a pessimist is an easy thing to fall back on, and I’m trying to be better about it. As we close the year out, I thought it would be a good exercise to take stock of the state of the web and count our blessings…
Tired of referencing the same yaks, sheds, and cars over and over again? Here’s a few new metaphors to drop at your next sprint planning meeting:
Winchester Mystery House
A mansion in San Jose, California that was once occupied by Sarah Winchester,...
Creating, maintaining, or evaluating accessible technology? Here are some things to keep in mind (note that identity-first language is intentional):
Each screen reader behaves differently
This is by design. Behavior is a balancing act between a screen...
Posted on CSS-Tricks: Much like their physical counterparts, the materials we use to build websites have purpose. To use them without understanding their strengths and limitations is irresponsible…
Posted on Shopify Partners: Accessibility has come a long way over the last few years. It used to be a niche discipline focused on people with disabilities, but recently this focus has shifted towards inclusive design and the understanding that...
Lighthouse is an open source auditing tool made by Google to help developers understand how well their site is doing in terms of four metrics: Performance, Best Practices, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Accessibility. If you’re feeling...
As someone with a good deal of interest in the digital accessibility space, I follow WebAIM’s work closely. Their survey results are priceless insights into how disabled people actually use the web, so when the organization speaks with authority on a...
Posted on CSS-Tricks: Two years ago, I wrote about prefers-reduced-motion, a media query introduced into Safari 10.1 to help people with vestibular and seizure disorders use the web…
Posted on CSS-Tricks: The open web's success is built on interoperable technologies. The ability to control animation now exists alongside important features such as zooming summary, installing extensions, enabling high contrast display, loading...
Posted on A List Apart: Every adjustment to the appearance and behavior of the features browsers let you manipulate is a roll of the dice, gambling on the delight of some at the expense of alienating others…
Posted on thoughtbot: At the end of the year, thoughtbot sets aside two days for a hackathon called Ralphapalooza. The name is a portmanteau of Ralph, the robot we use for our logo, and the term palooza. During Ralphapalooza, we pitch ideas, form...
Posted on CSS - Tricks: As a young nerd, I loved to immerse myself in digital worlds, learning the ins and outs of the rules someone else had created for me (intentionally or not). But the older and crankier I get, the more I find myself losing...
Posted on 24 Accessibility: Web components are an exciting technology that allows developers to create self-contained, reusable code patterns that are easy to control and update. The idea of web components is not new, nor is it unique to JavaScript frameworks…
Posted on 24 ways: Inclusive Design is the practice of making products and services accessible to, and usable by as many people as reasonably possible without the need for specialized accommodations. The practice was popularized by author and User...
Posted on The A11Y Project: A touch target is the total area a person can click or tap on to activate an interactive element such as a link, input, or button…
Posted on thoughtbot: We are working with a client who tasked us with helping them create an Android app that replicates a subset of features on their iOS app. It's an interesting challenge: not every interaction on iOS can directly translate to Android…
Posted on Envato Tuts+: The lang attribute is one of the global HTML attributes developers can apply to any HTML element, and it can really help with accessibility…
Posted on Envato Tuts+: The HTML specification describes six heading elements: h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, and h6. The number in each of these heading elements reflects its priority, with h1 being the most general and h6 being the most specific…
Posted on Smashing Magazine: Automated accessibility tests are a great resource to have, but they can't automatically make your site accessible. Use them as one step of a larger testing process…
Posted on CSS-Tricks: With the web's growth comes new features to better accommodate its new form factors and use cases. One feature I'm excited about is the color-adjust property, proposed in CSS Color Module Level 4. It is an acknowledgement...
Posted on Smashing Magazine: The placeholder attribute contains a surprising amount of issues that prevent it from delivering on what it promises. Let’s clarify why you need to stop using it.…
Posted on thoughtbot: This isn't a post about convincing you of the benefits of user interviews, or the ills of leading questions. Nor is it a treatise on the one true way to conduct a user test. Instead, these are some observations I've made...
Posted on CSS-Tricks: Not everyone uses a mouse to browse the internet. If you’re reading this post on a smartphone, this is obvious! What's also worth pointing out is that there are other forms of input that people use to get things done. With...
Posted on CSS-Tricks: The semantics inherent in HTML elements tell us what we're supposed to use them for. Need a heading? You'll want a heading element. Want a paragraph? Our trusty friend p is here, loyal as ever. Want a download? Well,...
Posted on 24 Accessibility: As more and more services necessary to living life go online, it becomes imperative to ensure that everyone—regardless of ability or circumstance—can use the websites that host them…
Posted on CSS-Tricks: Considering that written words are the foundation of any interface, it makes sense to give your website's typography first-class treatment…
Ever been frustrated because a movie theater plays advertisements before the trailers even start? This is a kind of experience I call “Beholden Design.”
Full of Dark Patterns and pain, Beholden Design is the evil, goatee-wearing twin of Universal...
Posted on CSS-Tricks: Boston, like many large cities, has a subway system. Commuters on it are accustomed to hearing regular public address announcements. Riders simply tune out some announcements, such as the pre-recorded station stop names repeated...
Posted on Cantina: Chatbots are weird. There's no other way to say it. We spent the past month working on a chatbot project and it was one of the most difficult design problems I've faced in my professional career…
Posted on Cantina: If you're not careful, it becomes quite easy to paint yourself into a corner trying to keep up with the visuals of an app as it evolves. Fortunately, there's an approach that helps you manage this compounding complexity…
Posted on Cantina: I won't lie: What I'm proposing is tricky. Part of the challenge of converting an organization and its body of work into an accessible one is deciding where to begin…
Posted on Cantina: It is no longer appropriate to expect your users to sit down at a desktop computer to perform a task in one complete session, especially one that demands ten minutes or more of their full attention…
Posted on Cantina: Remember those Reese's Peanut Butter Cups commercials from the 1980s? A couple of hapless people would be walking down the street, one with a chocolate bar and the other with a jar of peanut butter…
Posted on Cantina: As the browser continues to become more aware of its host device's capabilities the line between website and application continues to blur…
