A typeface co-designed with a tree over the course of five years.
Yes, a tree.
Occlusion Grotesque is an experimental typeface that is carved into the bark of a tree. As the tree grows, it deforms the letters and outputs new design variations, that are captured annually.
This is a terrific resource! A pattern library of interactive components: tabs, switches, dialogs, carousels …all the usual suspects.
Each component has an example implementation along with advice and a checklist for ensuring its accessible.
It’s so great to have these all gathered together in one place!
Another post prompted by my recent musings on writing alt text. This time Michelle looks at the case of text-as-images.
Prompted by my recent post on alt text, Geoff shares some resources on the right length for alt attributes.
The only person who wants a carousel on your site is you. That’s it. It’s a self-serving vanity project so that you can showcase all of your babies at the same time without telling the world which one is your favorite.
“Be linkable and accessible to any client” is a provocative test for whether something is “of the web”.
People are propelled by their interests, and web developers have a lot of space to be interested in all sorts of stuff. For you, it may be JavaScript ‘n Friends, or HTML and CSS. Maybe it’s all that stuff, but put aside your preferences for a moment and answer me this: what are you helping people to do? If the answer involves any remotely routine or crucial purpose, consider putting aside your personal desire for excitement. Instead, make boring things that are usable, accessible, and fast. Ours is a job done by people for people, not a glamorous rockstar gig.
Excellent advice from Jeremy who wants us to build fast, reliable, resilient websites …even if the technologies involved in doing that don’t feel exciting.
Central to that endeavor is recognizing that the browser gives you a ton of stuff for free. Relying on those freebies requires a willingness to not
npm installa solution for every problem — especially those that are best solved with CSS and HTML. Those technologies may seem boring, but boring is fast. Boring is usable. Boring is resilient and fault tolerant. Boring is accessible. When we rely wholesale on JavaScript to build for the web, we’re inevitably reinventing things. At worst, our reinventions of rock-solid HTML features — such as client-side form validation — break in unexpected ways despite our carefully written tests. At best, a flawless reimplementation of those features adds unnecessary code to applications, and depends on a technology less fault-tolerant than CSS and HTML.
Our mental model for how we build for the web is too reliant on canned solutions to unique problems.
This is very perceptive indeed.
Compounding this problem is that too few boot camps are preparing new web developers to think critically about what problems are best solved by JavaScript and which aren’t — and that those problems that are best solved by JavaScript can be solved without engaging in frivolous framework whataboutism. The question developers should ask more often when grappling with framework shortcomings shouldn’t be “what about that other framework?”, but rather “what’s best for the user experience?”.
This is an excellent initiate spearheaded by Nicole and Sarah at Google! They want to fund research into important web UI work: accessibility, form controls, layout, and so on. If that sounds like something you’ve always wanted to do, but lacked the means, fill in the form.
Eric’s response to Chris’s question—“What is one thing people can do to make their website better?”—dovetails nicely with my own answer:
The two real problems here are:
- Third-party assets, such as the very analytics and CRM packages you use to determine who is using your product and how they go about it. There’s no real control over the quality or amount of code they add to your site, and setting up the logic to block them loading their own third-party resources is difficult to do.
- The people who tell you to add these third-party assets. These people typically aren’t aware of the performance issues caused by the ask, or don’t care because it’s not part of the results they’re judged by.
All of Amy’s writing recently has been absolutely wonderful, some of the best I’ve read in a long while, but I particularly needed this one.
I don’t know where we go from here, with this latest pandemic setback, but I do know that things will keep moving.
And if you feel bad today, feel bad. Feel sad or angry or scared or whatever it is you need to feel. Give yourself to yourself as you are.
Things will keep changing. Life will keep unfolding. We will keep going.
All the talks from this year’s State Of The Browser event are online, and they’re all worth watching.
I laughed out loud at multiple points during Heydon’s talk.
This looks like an excellent (and very reasonably-priced) online event happening on November 12th with three panels:
Do you need a button for your next project but you’re not sure about the right markup? Don’t worry, The Button Cheat Sheet™️ has got you covered.
Spoiler alert: it’s the button element.
This is a terrific and nuanced talk that packs a lot into less than twenty minutes.
I heartily concur with Rich’s assessment that most websites aren’t apps or documents but something in between. It’s a continuum. And I really like Rich’s proposed approach: transitional web apps.
(The secret sauce in transitional web apps is progressive enhancement.)
This speculative version of the internet archive invites you to see how websites will look in 2046.
On the surface this is about the pros and cons of minting a new HTML search element to replace div role="search" but there’s a deeper point which is that, while ARIA exists to the plug the gaps in HTML, the long-term goal is to have no gaps.
ARIA is not meant to replace HTML. If anything, the need to use ARIA as ‘polyfill’ for HTML semantics could be considered as a sign and a constant reminder of the fact that HTML falls short on some semantics that benefit users of assistive technologies.
This is a fascinating deep dive by Léonie on the inner workings of speech synthesis. She has quite a conundrum: she wants fast playback, but she also wants a voice that doesn’t sound robotic. Unfortunately it’s the robotic-sounding voices that work best at speed.
If you’re interested in this topic, I highly recommend listening to (or reading) the accessibility episode of the Clearleft podcast which featured Léonie as a guest giving demos and explanations.
The annual day-long online accessibility event is back on September 23rd.
No sign-up. No registration. All sessions are streamed live and publicly on the Inclusive Design 24 YouTube channel.
Apparently the sentence forms that I kicked off with Huffduffer are making a comeback.