Do you remember when you wrote your first line of HTML? Watching my students sweat blood while I introduce them to the basics of HTML and CSS always reminds me of my teenage self, learning the ropes of HTML back in the 1990s. Although I loved to fiddle around with my compute...
Design is a wonderful thing. It's an integral part of how we work to shape the world around us.
But it is not a discrete profession or occupation.
We are not divided into designers and people who are not designers.
If someone says you don't have the right background, you hav...
We need to talk about aria-controls. It's poorly supported, does very little, and does what it does when it does badly. It is poop and we rely on it way too much. We are short-changing assistive technology users when we do.
What it is
The aria-controls attribute is a 'relati...
I'm not the most talented coder in the world. No, it's true. So I try to write as little code as possible. The less I write, the less there is to break, justify, or maintain.
I'm also lazy, so it's all gravy. (ed: maybe run with a food analogy?)
But it turns out the only sur...
Star Trek: The Next Generation was on TV in the UK when I was a little younger than Wesley Crusher, but I never watched it properly. I've started watching it on Netflix and I'm about twenty episodes into the first season. These are some notes I've made.
The set is very ster...
In September of last year, I decided I wanted to hear stories about how screen reader users access The Web. I suspected, as a sighted web user, I made a lot of incorrect assumptions. Accordingly, I composed seven questions to find out about strategies for reading and operat...
Lately, I travelled to Düsseldorf and attended the IndieWebCamp and also beyond tellerrand, a conference about design, development, and all things web. I’ll say it plain: If you never have been at a conference, you should go. If you never have been at beyond tellerrand, you ...
Far too long, we have thought of web projects like rocket launches: You plan, design, and build the thing, maybe you train people how to steer it, and most of all you sweat blood only to be prepared on that magical date: launch day. That one decisive moment when yo...
There's been a lot of talk lately in favour of progressive enhancement and 'universal' (isomorphic) applications. Apparently, server rendering increases performance, robustness, and the parsability and interoperability of content.
I welcome these arguments because I'm magna...
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From time to time, web and software developers will use bad arguments to justify their choice of technologies, workflows or org structures, or to disparage others' differing choices. I see this a lot, and I may have even dropped the occassional F-bomb myself. We're particula...
(This post was originally published on Medium, put has a permanent home here.)
Flexbox—not to be confused with Sex Box, the British TV show wherein Mariella Frostrup interviews people who’ve just had sex in a box—is the CSS layout toolkit de rigueur. Of all the celebrated fe...
They say accessibility is about people. Inaccessibility is about people too, of course. In either case, it's people — flesh-and-blood, living, breathing people — that interfaces are built to cater for, successfully or otherwise.
What we learn in user research is that people ...
This post is the first in a two part series examining the senescence and ultimate mortality of this blog's proprietor, Heydon Pickering. This week, guest author Malcolm Leader-Thought will make the case that, yes, Heydon Pickering is, in fact, dead; kaput; pushing up the dai...
TL;DR I'm putting together an album to raise money for an organization that supports web accessibility.
I had this brainwave while nursing a hangover in Brighton after Responsive Day Out: There are a load of folks working in the overlapping fields of web standards and acces...
I have a long-held suspicion of anything directed at me — especially anything commercial — that sells itself on its "experiential" qualities. I hate the word "immersive" in particular. "Here, let me waterboard you with my new web app! You're going to love it!" Basically, I'm...
Frame Based Animation with Sass
I wanted an easy way to create traditional animations, wherein each frame is a different drawing. I created this Sass @mixin which generates keyframe animation blocks for nth children, placing each of these "frames" in an animated sequence. Note the use of the steps(1) timing function…
I had this one friend at school. Let's call him Darren.
Darren was a liar — a compulsive one — and boy did he tell some whoppers. Not "the world was created in one week" whoppers, but big ones nonetheless.
One lie Darren would tell, at the age of 12, was that he had lost his...
Editor's note: This article has been submitted anonymously to me as the editor of geekmentalhelp.com — the website of the #geekmentalhelp campaign. Not everyone is in a position to "come out" as a sufferer of mental health problems, but they are still out there; members of o...
Note: This article is a deconstruction of a post by Paul Boag called I don’t care if homosexuality is a sin. I recommend you read it unannotated first. Paul "agonized over writing this post", so you owe him that.
I feel I have a duty to address Paul's post as an atheist, not...
