Adactio: Links

Van11y: Accessibility and Vanilla JavaScript - ES2015

Van11y (for Vanilla-Accessibility) is a collection of accessible scripts for rich interfaces elements, built using progressive enhancement and customisable.

Chrome exempts Google sites from user site data settings

Collusion between three separate services owned by the same company: the Google search engine, the YouTube website, and the Chrome web browser.

Gosh, this kind of information could be really damaging if there were, say, antitrust proceedings initiated.

In the meantime, use Firefox

Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing - The Correspondent

A devastating deep dive into the hype of blockchain, written by Jesse Frederik and translated by Hannah Kousbroek:

I’ve never seen so much incomprehensible jargon to describe so little. I’ve never seen so much bloated bombast fall so flat on closer inspection. And I’ve never seen so many people searching so hard for a problem to go with their solution.

My chatbot is dead · Why yours should probably be too · Adrian Z

The upside to being a terrible procrastinator is that certain items on my to-do list, like, say, “build a chatbot”, will—given enough time—literally take care of themselves.

I ultimately feel like it has slowly turned into a fad. I got fooled by the trend, and as a by-product became part of the trend itself.

Boring by default

world smallest office suite

I like this idea for a minimum viable note-taking app:

data:text/html,<body contenteditable style="line-height:1.5;font-size:20px;">

I have added this to bookmarks and now my zero-weight text editor is one keypress away from me. You might also use it as a temporary clipboard to paste text or even pictures.

What is the Web? - Web Directions

To be blunt, I feel we, the folks who have been involved with designing and developing for the web for a significant period of time–including me as I feel a strong sense of personal responsibility here–are in no small part responsible for it falling far short of its promise.

Web Histories

Rachel is doing her dissertation project on the history of web design and development:

I intend this site to become a place to gather the stories of the early efforts to create an open web.

Take the survey to help out!

People Problems | CSS-Tricks

I’d maybe simplify this people problem a bit: the codebase is easy to change, but the incentives within a company are not. And yet it’s the incentives that drive what kind of code gets written — what is acceptable, what needs to get fixed, how people work together. In short, we cannot be expected to fix the code without fixing the organization, too.

List of Physical Visualizations

A timeline showing the history of non-digital dataviz.

The (extremely) loud minority - Andy Bell

Dev perception:

It’s understandable to think that JavaScript frameworks and their communities are eating the web because places like Twitter are awash with very loud voices from said communities.

Always remember that although a subset of the JavaScript community can be very loud, they represent a paltry portion of the web as a whole.

How To Protect Your Privacy Online In 8 Tips : Life Kit : NPR

Take a look at your smartphone and delete all the apps you don’t really need. For many tasks, you can use a browser on your phone instead of an app.

Privacy-wise, browsers are preferable, because they can’t access as much of your information as an app can.

Progressier | Make your website a PWA in 42 seconds

This in an intriguing promise (there’s no code yet):

A PWA typically requires writing a service worker, an app manifest and a ton of custom code. Progressier flattens the learning curve. Just add it to your html template — you’re done.

I worry that this one line of code will pull in many, many, many, many lines of JavaScript.

Ambient Reassurance – disambiguity

Ambient reassurance is the experience of small, unplanned moments of interaction with colleagues that provide reassurance that you’re on the right track. They provide encouragement and they help us to maintain self belief in those moments where we are liable to lapse into unproductive self doubt or imposter syndrome.

In hindsight I realise, these moments flowed naturally in an office environment.

Google font to SVG path

Cassie pointed me to this very nifty tool (that she plans to use in your SVG animation workshop): choose font from Google Fonts, type some text, and get the glyphs immediately translated into an SVG!

How-to: Create accessible forms - The A11Y Project

Another five pieces of sweet, sweet low-hanging fruit:

Always label your inputs.

Highlight input element on focus.

Break long forms into smaller sections.

Provide error messages.

Avoid horizontal layout forms unless necessary.

Modern JS is amazing. Modern JS is trash. | Go Make Things

My name is Jeremy Keith and I endorse this message:

I love the modern JS platform (the stuff the browser does for you), and hate modern JS tooling.

BBC Radio 4 - Under the Cloud

James made a radio programme about “the cloud”:

It’s the central metaphor of the internet - ethereal and benign, a fluffy icon on screens and smartphones, the digital cloud has become so naturalised in our everyday life we look right through it. But clouds can also obscure and conceal – what is it hiding? Author and technologist James Bridle navigates the history and politics of the cloud, explores the power of its metaphor and guides us back down to earth.

Feds may target Google’s Chrome browser for breakup - POLITICO

The unfair collusion between Google AMP and Google Search might just bite ‘em on the ass.

5 most annoying website features I face as a blind person every single day by Holly Tuke

Five pieces of low-hanging fruit:

Unlabelled links and buttons

No image descriptions

Poor use of headings

Inaccessible web forms

Auto-playing audio and video

Links

Wednesday, October 21st, 2020