Building better accessibility primitives
On the need for a way to mark parts of a document as “inert” while the user is interacting with modal content.
Link archive: June 12th, 2016
Man-Computer Symbiosis
J. C. R. Licklider’s seminal 1960 paper. I’ve added it to this list of reading material.
The title should, of course, read “Person-Computer Symbiosis.”
Surveying the Landscape – Peter Gasston
An in-depth, thoroughly-researched look at the threatened health of the web. It’s grim reading, for the most part, but there’s a glimmer of hope towards the end.
Declarative Design Tools | Jon Gold
Jon introduces a new tool with a very interesting observation: up until now, all our graphic design tools have been imperative rather than declarative…
With our current tools we’re telling the computer how to design the vision we have in our head (by tapping on our input devices for every element on the screen); in our future tools we will tell our computers what we want to see, and let them figure out how to move elements around to get there.
Research with blind users on mobile devices | Accessibility
Some interesting outcomes from testing gov.uk with blind users of touchscreen devices:
Rather than reading out the hierarchy of the page, some of the users navigated by moving their finger around to ‘discover’ content.
This was really interesting - traditionally good structure for screen readers is about order and hierarchy. But for these users, the physical placement on the screen was also really important (just as it is for sighted users).