Journal 2509 Links 7711 Articles 71 Notes 3960
I recently asked a friend who happens to be blind if he’d share some sites that were built really well—sites that were beautifully accessible. You know what he said? “I don’t use the web. Everything is broken.”
Everything is broken. And it’s broken because we broke it.
But we can do better.
Ooh, this is an exciting collaboration! Jon and Brian have teamed up to form a lovely little cooperative.
…and all the fond nothings of daily life should clothe themselves in elemental sparks and shoot with fiery speed in a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere…
— A Thread Across The Ocean
Lunchtime reading on the seafront. 📚 🐟🥪
Checked in at The Bugle Inn
Colour contrast testing on iOS:
Settings: General: Accessibility: Display Accommodations: Colour Filters: On: Greyscale
Toggle it with 3 clicks of the home button:
Settings: General: Accessibility: Accessibililty Shortcut: Colour Filters
Some sensible answers to this question here…
…of which, exactly zero mention end users.
Checked in at British Airways Lounge. Heading home.
Listening to @baratunde talk about toast.
Checked in at Miller’s Downtown. A nightcap with Matthew O’Donnell on accordion.
Playing tunes at a session in Charlottesville.
Great ideas from Addy on where to start with creating a performance budget that can act as a red line you don’t want to cross.
If it’s worth getting fast, it’s worth staying fast.
Checked in at Mudhouse. Caffeinating
Design has disrupted taxis in a massive, almost unprecedented way. But good design doesn’t merely aim to disrupt—it should set out to actually build viable solutions. Designers shouldn’t look at a problem and say, “What we’re going to do is just fuck it up and see what happens.” That’s a dereliction of duty.
A new impressionistic documentary about Space City.
The hits keep on comin’ from Clearleft. This time, it’s Danielle with an absolutely brilliant and thoughtful piece on the perils of gaps and overlaps in pattern libraries, design systems and organisations.
This is such a revealing lens to view these things through! Once you’re introduced to it, it’s hard to “un-see” problems in terms of gaps and overlaps in categorisation. And even once the problems are visible, you still need to solve them in the right way:
Recognising the gaps and overlaps is only half the battle. If we apply tools to a people problem, we will only end up moving the problem somewhere else.
Some issues can be solved with better tools or better processes. In most of our workplaces, we tend to reach for tools and processes by default, because they feel easier to implement. But as often as not, it’s not a technology problem. It’s a people problem. And the solution actually involves communication skills, or effective dialogue.
That last part dovetails nicely with Jerlyn’s equally great piece.
The fascinating results of Brad’s survey.
Personally, I’m not a fan of nesting. I feel it obfuscates more than helps. And it makes searching for a specific selector tricky.
That said, Danielle feels quite strongly that nesting is the way to go, so on Clearleft projects, that’s how we write Sass + BEM.
I quite like this date-picking interface. It would be nice if browsers picked it up for input type="date".
Good tips on prototyping using the very materials that the final product will be built in—HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
The only thing I would add is that, in my experience, it’s vital that the prototype does not morph into the final product …no matter how tempting it sometimes seems.
Prototypes are made to be discarded (having validated or invalidated an idea). Making a prototype and making something for production require very different mindsets: with prototyping it’s all about speed of creation; with production work, it’s all about quality of execution.
A profile of Mark Graham and the team at the Internet Archive.