Let us not overlook the fact that a semantic HTML web site is inherently accessible by default. When we bend the web to our will, we break that. So we have a responsibility to correct it. Sure the new technologies are neat, but the end result is usually garbage. This all requires some next-level narcissism that our goals and priorities as developers are far more important than that of the audience we’re theoretically building software to serve.
I think these are great habit-forming ideas for any web designer or developer: a day without using your mouse; a day with your display set to grayscale; a day spent using a different web browser; a day with your internet connection throttled. I’m going to try these!
Nolan writes up what he learned making accessibiity improvements to a single page app. The two big takeways involve letting the browser do the work for you:
Here’s the best piece of accessibility advice for newbies: if something is a button, make it a
<button>. If something is an input, make it an<input>. Don’t try to reinvent everything from scratch using<div>s and<span>s.
And then there are all the issues that crop up when you take over the task of handling navigations:
- You need to manage focus yourself.
- You need to manage scroll position yourself.
For classic server-rendered pages, most browser engines give you this functionality for free. You don’t have to code anything. But in an SPA, since you’re overriding the normal navigation behavior, you have to handle the focus yourself.
I reckon a lot of websites have bad accessibility not because folks don’t care, but because they don’t know there’s an issue in the first place.
The headline is begging the question (I don’t think accessible websites are so hard to build), but I agree with Robin’s idea:
What if our text editors caught accessibility issues and showed them to us during development?
This is something that Hidde has been talking about recently too, looking at content management systems.
A deep dive info focus styles with this conclusion:
The default focus ring works. There are problems with it, but it can be good enough, especially if you can’t dedicate time and energy to create a custom focus ring.
This is why we need an nth-letter selector in CSS .
Performance and accessibility aren’t features that can linger at the bottom of a Jira board to be considered later when it’s convenient.
Instead we must start to see inaccessible and slow websites for what they are: a form of cruelty. And if we want to build a web that is truly a World Wide Web, a place for all and everyone, a web that is accessible and fast for as many people as possible, and one that will outlive us all, then first we must make our websites something else altogether; we must make them kind.
There’s no sugar-coating it—AMP components are dreadfully inaccessible:
We’ve reached a point where AMP may “solve” the web’s performance issues by supercharging the web’s accessibility problem, excluding even more people from accessing the content they deserve.
Hidde gives an in-depth explanation of the Accessibility Object Model, coming soon to browsers near you:
In a way, that’s a bit like what Service Workers do for the network and Houdini for style: give developers control over something that was previously done only by the browser.
This is about designing forms that everyone can use and complete as quickly as possible. Because nobody actually wants to use your form. They just want the outcome of having used it.
Tough, but fair.
This post was originally written in 2015, but upon re-reading it today, it still (just about) holds up, so I finally hit publish.
In some situations, a date picker is overkill:
I have relied on plain text inputs as date fields with custom validation for the site, typically using the same logic on the client and the server. For known dates — birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, etc — it has tested well.
Some excellent explanations for these five pieces of sensible typography advice:
- Set your base font size in relative units
- Check the colour of your type and only then its contrast
- Use highly legible fonts
- Shape your paragraphs well
- Correctly use the heading levels
Greg has done a lot of research into developer frustrations with customising form controls.
My current thinking in this space, and I know some folks will find this controversial, but I think we should completely standardize in-page form controls with no limitations on their styling capabilities. What do I mean by in-page controls? I am referring to any form control or component that is rendered within the content process. This standardization would include the sub-parts and their related states and how these are exposed (probably through CSS psuedo classes or HTML attributes). This will enable the shadow-dom to be encapsulated while providing web developers with a consistent experience to adjust to match their brand and needs of their site/application.
A deep dive with good advice on using—and labelling—sectioning content in HTML: nav, aside, section, and article.
Sit down and listen to a story from uncle Ethan.
A very thoughtful post by Hidde that draws a useful distinction between the “internals” of a component (the inner workings of a React component, Vue component, or web component) and the code that wires those components together (the business logic):
I really like working on the detailed stuff that affects users: useful keyboard navigation, sensible focus management, good semantics. But I appreciate not every developer does. I have started to think this may be a helpful separation: some people work on good internals and user experience, others on code that just uses those components and deals with data and caching and solid architecture. Both are valid things, both need love. Maybe we can use the divide for good?
A very useful explanation of the ARIA attributes relating to state:
aria-expanded,hidden,aria-hidden, andaria-current.Here’s a clever tiny lesson from Dave and Brad: you can use prefers-reduced-motion in the media attribute of the source element inside picture.