It’s that time of year when most people publish their „books I have read“ articles. Tim for example, and also Jeremy. I for myself am what you could call a book taster. There are a lot of books on my shelves that I started reading but somehow never finished. But this year th...
In May 2016, I flipped the switch for the redesign of this site. My last site was never updated once it was online, so I wanted to do things differently this time. Inspired by numerous people who use their web presence to share and promote their thoughts and ideas, I decided...
2016 has not been an exemplary year in some ways. What with the anti-intellectualism and fascism and kleptocracy and all. And you know what? I'm not completely convinced everything's going to be okay again when the clock strikes twelve on New Year's Eve.
I'm not convinced th...
Once again, beyond tellerrand, a great conference about design, development, and all things web, took place in the cold November air of Berlin. After walking over from Bahnhof Friedrichstraße to the Admiralspalast, an historical theater opened in 1910, where the spirit of th...
You spend more time contemplating and discussing code than you do writing it.
You spend more time thinking about how the end product affects users than you do about how pleasurable it is for you to write its code.
You think in terms of relationships and systems, not just th...
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...
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...
