No one says “information superhighway” anymore, but whenever anyone explains net neutrality, they do so in terms of fast lanes and tolls. Twitter is a “town square,” a metaphor that was once used for the internet as a whole. These old metaphors had been joined by a few new ones: I have a feeling that “the cloud” will soon feel as dated as “cyberspace.”
Mandy takes a deep dive into the treatment of altruism in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
I didn’t know the Washington Post had a design system or that the system has this good section on accessibility.
There’s a time for linguistics, and there’s a time for grabbing the general public by the shoulders and shouting “It lies! The computer lies to you! Don’t trust anything it says!”
Imagine a collaboratively developed, universal content style guide, based on usability evidence.
Stuart has written this fantastic concise practical guide to privacy for developers and designers. A must-read!
A very handy guide to considering privacy at all stages of digital product design:
This guidance is written for technology professionals such as product and UX designers, software engineers, QA testers, and product managers.
This is a great step-by-step guide to HTML by Estelle.
- Make the right thing easy
- Always answer “so what”?
- Close the gap between “something is wrong” to “we fixed it”
The primary goals of this strategy are to inform decision-making and enhance the success of accessibility-related activities within the GOV.UK Design System team.
Interestingly, accessibility concerns are put into two categories: theoretical and evidenced (with the evidenced concerns being prioritised):
- Theoretical: A question or statement regarding the accessibility of an implementation within the Design System without evidence of real-world impact.
- Evidenced: Sharing new research, data or evidence showing that an implementation within the Design System could cause barriers for disabled people.
This is a superb explanation of flexbox—the interactive widgets sprinkled throughout are such a great aid to learning!
A terrific piece by Maggie Appleton that starts with a comparison of graphical user interfaces and command line tools—which reminds me of the trade-offs between seamless and seamful design—and then moves into a proposed paradigm for declarative design tools:
Small, scoped areas within a graphical interface that allow users to read and write simple programmes
This piece by Giles is a spot-on description of what I do in my role as content buddy at Clearleft. Especially this bit:
Your editor will explain why things need changing
As a writer, it’s really helpful to understand the why of each edit. It’s easier to re-write if you know precisely what the problem is. And often, it’s less bruising to the ego. It’s not that you’re a bad writer, but just that one particular thing could be expressed more simply, or more clearly, than your first effort.
My talk, Building, was about the metaphors we use to talk about the work we do on the web. So I’m interested in this analysis of the metaphors used to talk about markup:
- Data is documents, processing data is clerking
- Data is trees, processing data is forestry
- Data is buildings, processing data is construction
- Data is a place, processing data is a journey
- Data is a fluid, processing data is plumbing
- Data is a textile, processing data is weaving
- Data is music, processing data is performing
A century of sci-fi book covers.
How a writing system went from being a dream (literally) to a reality, codified in unicode.
Vitaly has rounded up a whole load of accessibility posts. I think I’ve linked to most of them at some point, but it’s great to have them all gathered together in one place.
This is easily my favourite use of a machine learning algorithm.
A fascinating crowdsourced project. You can read the backstory in this article in Wired magazine.
This explains rubber ducking.
Speaking out loud is not only a medium of communication, but a technology of thinking: it encourages the formation and processing of thoughts.