Tags: aria

Recursive | Recursive

Play around with this variable font available soon from Google Fonts in monospaced and sans-serif versions.

CSS { In Real Life } | How to Accessibly Split Text

This is why we need an nth-letter selector in CSS .

Meaning without markup: Accessibility Object Model

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.

Truths about digital accessibility | Eric Bailey

Tough, but fair.

Variable Fonts for Developers

A showcase of fun experiments with variable fonts, courtesy of Mandy.

German Naming Convention

Don’t write fopen when you can write openFile. Write throwValidationError and not throwVE. Call that name function and not fct. That’s German naming convention. Do this and your readers will appreciate it.

An Introduction to ARIA States | a11y with Lindsey

A very useful explanation of the ARIA attributes relating to state:

1. aria-expanded,
2. hidden,
3. aria-hidden, and
4. aria-current.

Accessible Icon Buttons — Sara Soueidan – Freelance-Front-End UI/UX Developer

Sara runs through the many ways of providing an accessible name to an icon button, backed up with Scott’s testing.

Making Future Interfaces: Custom Properties - YouTube

Heydon cracks me up—his Patterns Day is going to have you crying with laughter; guaranteed!

Here he is talking about custom properties in CSS as part of his Making Future Interfaces video series.

The web we broke. — Ethan Marcotte

Like Eric, Ethan is feeling rightly glum about the state of accessibility on the web. But…

Right now, I’m trying to focus on this one question:

What’s one thing I wish I understood better about accessibility?

Fighting uphill | Eric Bailey

Eric is down about the current dismal state of accessibility on the web. Understandably so. It’s particularly worrying that the problem might be embedded into hiring practices:

Overwhelmingly, crushingly, we shove new developers towards learning JavaScript single page application frameworks (SPAs). While many of these frameworks pay lip service towards preserving accessibility, if you do your homework you find that the majority of them were built without assistive technology in mind.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Eric also points to initiatives that could really help.

Still, this is a tough question to ask out loud:

What if we’re losing?

Revisiting the abbr element

Ire takes a deep dive into implementing an accessible tool tip.

Make Your ARIA Labels Sing on Key — Knowbility

A good look at the (over)use of the aria-label attribute that confirms the first rule of ARIA.

Stepping away from Sass

I think Cathy might’ve buried the lede:

The knock on effect of this was removing media queries. As I moved towards some of the more modern features of CSS the need to target specific screen sizes with unique code was removed.

But on the topic of Sass, layout is now taken care of with CSS grid, variables are taken care of with CSS custom properties, and mixins for typography are taken care of with calc().

Personally, I’ve always found the most useful feature of Sass to simply be that you can have lots of separate Sass files that get combined into one CSS file—very handy for component libraries.

Using aria-live

A terrific explanation of the aria-live attribute from Ire. If you’re doing anything with Ajax, this is vital knowledge.

Difference between currentColor & Custom Properties | Mike Riethmuller

I had to read through this twice, but I think I get it now (I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer). Very useful if you’re doing theming in CSS.

Jongert

Nick demonstrates the responsive power of variable fonts by recreating a lovely design from Jacob Jongert.

Grab that browser window and get squishin’!

Incomplete Open Cubes Revisited

Art, geometry, and code. Sol LeWitt started it. Rob saw it through.

The Importance Of Manual Accessibility Testing — Smashing Magazine

This is very timely. I’ve been doing some consulting at a company where they are perhaps a little over-reliant on automated accessibility tests.

Automated accessibility tests are a great resource to have, but they can’t automatically make your site accessible. Use them as one step of a larger testing process.

A Tale of Two Buttons

In defence of the cascade (especially now that we’ve got CSS custom properties).

I think embracing CSS’s cascade can be a great way to encourage consistency and simplicity in UIs. Rather than every new component being a free for all, it trains both designers and developers to think in terms of aligning with and re-using what they already have.

Remember, every time you set a property in CSS you are in fact overriding something (even if it’s just the default user agent styles). In other words, CSS code is mostly expressing exceptions to a default design.