Links

Berlin Typography – Text and the City // Buchstaben und die Stadt

A blog dedicated to documenting the letterforms on display in Berlin.

Testing the accessibility of pattern libraries

Riffing on Rachel’s talk at Patterns Day:

At the Patterns Day conference last month, Rachel Andrew mentioned something interesting about patterns. She said that working with reusable interface components, where each one has its own page, made her realise that those work quite well as isolated test cases. I feel this also goes for some accessibility tests: there is a number of criteria where isolation aids testing.

Hidde specifically singles out these patterns:

• Collapsible (“Show/hide”)
• Form field
• Video player

Web Publications for the Open Web Platform: Vision And Technical Challenges

Given my experience publishing Resilient Web Design as a web book, I think I should take a good look at this nascent spec.

What we envision for Packaged Web Publications is similar to the goals and techniques of Progressive Web Apps: breaking the boundaries between web sites and mobile apps, an emphasis on “offline” paradigms, and so on. The time is right to broaden the scope and power of the web to include publications.

Improbable Botany by Wayward — Kickstarter

Improbable Botany is a brand-new science fiction anthology about alien plant conquests, fantastical ecosystems, benevolent dictatorships and techno-utopias.

This is the book plants don’t want you to read…

The illustrations look beautiful too.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site  : Eulogy for Flash

Web developers aren’t going to shed many tears for Flash, but as Bruce rightly points out, it led the way for many standards that followed. Flash was the kick up the arse that the web needed.

He also brings up this very important question:

I’m also nervous; one of the central tenets of HTML is to be backwards-compatible and not to break the web. It would be a huge loss if millions of Flash movies become unplayable. How can we preserve this part of our digital heritage?

This is true of the extinction of any format. Perhaps this is an opportunity for us to tackle this problem head on.

Progressively Enhancing CSS Layout: From Floats To Flexbox To Grid – Smashing Magazine

A great example of progressive enhancement in action.

You can perfectly use CSS grid layout today if you don’t expect exactly the same appearance in every single browser, which isn’t possible to achieve nowadays anyway. I’m well aware that this decision isn’t always up to us developers, but I believe that our clients are willing to accept those differences if they understand the benefits (future-proof design, better accessibility and better performance). On top of that, I believe that our clients and users have — thanks to responsive design — already learned that websites don’t look the same in every device and browser.

What I’ve learned about motor impairment

James gives—if you’ll pardon the pun— hands-on advice on making sites that consider motor impairment:

• Don’t assume keyboard access is all you need
• • Auto complete/Autofill
• • Show me my password
• Allow for fine motor control issues
• • Don’t autoplay videos
• • Avoid hover-only controls
• • Infinite scrolling considerations
• Be mindful of touch
• • Avoid small hit targets
• • Provide alternate controls for touch gestures

Far from being a niche concern, visitors with some form of motor impairment likely make up a significant percentage of your users. I would encourage you to test your website or application with your less dominant hand. Is it still easy to use?

Against the grain | susan jean robertson

I’m looking for work. I’d prefer to work remotely with a product team and to work in the areas I love: accessibility, CSS, and HTML. But it turns out those three things are considered “easy” in the industry right now. Which is fascinating because if you talk to anyone who uses assistive technology to surf the web or who doesn’t use a mouse, or who is accessing content in a different manner, you’ll find out it isn’t so easy.

Somebody hire Susan already!

100 Demon Dialogues – Lucy Bellwood

This is easily the most relatable 100 Days project I’ve seen:

I began posting a daily dialogue with the little voice in my head who tells me I’m no good.

Now you can back already-funded the Kickstarter project to get the book …and a plush demon.

Videos in “UX London” on Vimeo

The videos from UX London 2017 are available for your viewing pleasure.

codebar.io Donations

Donate money to support Codebar:

By donating to codebar you are helping to promote diversity in the tech industry so that more women, LGBTQA and other underrepresented folks will be able to get started with programming and raise their skills to the next level.

Patterns Day 2017: Rachel Andrew on Vimeo

Rachel’s fantastic talk from Patterns Day. There’s a lot of love for Fractal specifically, but there are also some great points about keeping a pattern library in sync with a live site, and treating individual components as reduced test-cases.

0825 — ericportis.com

Well, well, well …following on from my post about container queries, it turns out that Eric has also been thinking about wrangling custom properties. He’s even written some code.

Beaker | Peer-to-peer Web browser. No blockchain required.

Here’s an intriguing project—peer-to-peer browser and hosting. I thought it might be using the InterPlanetary File System under the hood, but it’s using something called Dat instead.

It’s all very admirable, but it also feels a little bit 927.

Designing The Perfect Slider – Smashing Magazine

If you thought Vitaly’s roundup of date pickers was in-depth, wait ‘till you get a load of this exhaustive examination of slider controls.

It pairs nicely with this link.

Surfing on the Web - YouTube

I wrote this song while my colleague Tim Berners-Lee was inventing something called “The World Wide Web” a few offices away. The song was published in 1993, when less that 100 websites existed.

The first image ever published on the web was of this band, Les Horribles Cernettes …LHC.

Writing Hacks: The Adafruit Guide to Being Excellent to Each Other in Emails « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

Language is a technology. It’s a particularly strange one that’s made of squiggles and sounds and maps of meaning, but like any other technology, it’s hackable.

Good advice on reducing unintended stress via email.

Negativity bias is a tendency for negatives to have a greater effect than positives on our emotional state.

For email this can have radical effects: positive emails seem neutral, neutral emails seem negative, and even slightly negative emails can lead to actual, measurable pain.

Even with the best of intentions we can come off distant — or just plain mean.

Jeremy Keith on resilient web design - UX Chat

In which I have a conversation with a polar bear.

Very well-mannered species …I’ll miss them when they’re gone.

It’s simple

I think “it’s simple” shouldn’t be used to explain something.

SolarBeat

Luke just demoed this at Codebar. It’s a lovely audio/visualisation of the solar system—a sonic orrery that you can tweak and adjust.

Hypnotic.