Inclusive design is also future-proofing technology for everyone. Swan noted that many more developers and designers are considering accessibility issues as they age and encounter poor eyesight or other impairments.
A lot of the issues here are with abuses of the placeholder attribute—using it as a label, using it for additional information, etc.—whereas using it quite literally as a placeholder can be thought of as an enhancement (I almost always preface mine with “e.g.”).
Still, there’s no getting around that terrible colour contrast issue: if the contrast were greater, it would look too much like an actual pre-filled value, and that’s potentially worse.
On Ev’s blog, Marcin goes into great detail on theming an interface using CSS custom properties, SVG, HSL, and a smattering of CSS filters.
I was kind of amazed that all of this could happen via CSS and CSS alone: the colours, the transitions, the vectors, and even the images.
These are beautiful!
Featured below is a chronology of various attempts through the last four centuries to visually organise and make sense of colour.
Some colour palette inspiration from films.
A whoooole bunch of links about inclusive design, gathered together from a presentation.
A primer on accessible colour contrast with links to some handy tools for testing.
Go deep, deep down the rabbit hole of Rob’s brain in all its colourful glory. Seriously, this is simultaneously a great write-up of how he came up with his site’s lovely colour scheme(s), and it’s a terrific primer on colour theory and why the HSL value in CSS is so, so wonderful!
Suggestions for small interface tweaks.
A nice clear explanation of specifying colour using HSB (not to be confused with HSL).
Liberally licensed SVG illustrations by Katerina Limpitsouni with customisable colour schemes.
Great advice on keeping your hyperlinks accessible.
Maya Benari provides an in-depth walkthrough of 18F’s mission to create a consistent design system for many, many different government sites.
When building out a large-scale design system, it can be hard to know where to start. By focusing on the basics, from core styles to coding conventions to design principles, you can create a strong foundation that spreads to different parts of your team.
There’s an interface inventory, then mood boards, then the work starts on typography and colour, then white space, and finally the grid system.
The lessons learned make for good design principles:
- Talk to the people
- Look for duplication of efforts
- Know your values
- Empower your team
- Start small and iterate
- Don’t work in a vacuum
- Reuse and specialize
- Promote your system
- Be flexible
Following on from Amber’s introduction, here’s a really in-depth look at image formats, compression and optimisation techniques from Addy.
This is a really nicely put together little web book released under a Creative Commons licence.
This is a really intriguing book that combines design theory and programming—learn about contrast, colour, and shapes, with each lesson supported by code examples.
It’s still a work in progress but the whole thing is online for free. Yay for web books!
A plug-in for Sketch that allows you to simulate colour blindnesses and check colour contrasts.
I only just wrapped my head around the idea of variable fonts and now here’s colour fonts to really mess with my mind.
Smörgåsbord Studio created a design system for the Welsh government, including the typeface Cymru Wales Sans from Colophon.
The accompanying video lists the design principles:
- Elevate our status
- Surprise & inspire
- Change perceptions
- Do good things
- Be unmistakably Wales
Kevin writes a plea on Ev’s blog for better contrast in web typography:
When you build a site and ignore what happens afterwards — when the values entered in code are translated into brightness and contrast depending on the settings of a physical screen — you’re avoiding the experience that you create. And when you design in perfect settings, with big, contrast-rich monitors, you blind yourself to users. To arbitrarily throw away contrast based on a fashion that “looks good on my perfect screen in my perfectly lit office” is abdicating designers’ responsibilities to the very people for whom they are designing.
A handy Chrome extension to simulate different kinds of visual impairment.