Reading Time: < 1 minute Darn Covid 19 in 2020. Our graduation is in absentee—or some such concept spoken in Latin to dress the situation up a bit. Here’s our segment on YouTube at 27 min and 27 seconds introduced by my supervisor, Dr Andrew Errity. You’ll spot me: the only name poor Andrew needed to name in full! 😀 […]
Inclusive Dialog Design?
Reading Time: 11 minutes ☰ Navigate this post: Introduction My Initial Thinking Adrian Replies The Missing Je Ne Sais Pas More Thinking Required Use Cases Solutions That Fail Summary Reference this Post Introduction I happened upon and was impressed by Adrian Roselli’s post, “Dialog Focus in Screen Readers”. His testing set me a line of thought current to my […]
‘Special Characters’ Accessibility and Usability
Reading Time: 12 minutes ☰ Navigate this post: Introduction The Problem Missed Opportunity Experiments Testing Solutions Solution when all else is impossible Summary Reference this post Introduction I’m concerned when we expect screen reader users to overcome our design and technology shortcomings. Why should they ‘work around’ barriers we create? When they learn a ‘workaround’ that becomes a global […]
Expanding Summary Details Accessibly
Reading Time: 7 minutes Note. This post is a work in progress. A decade ago we got excited by two new HTML tags; the details and its nested summary. We all watched the demonstrations and immediately thought, “accordions” are finally available out the box! Why not: the accordion was already a pervasive UI pattern? The Vanilla “Details” and “Summary” […]
Blueberry Muffins and Terrible People
Reading Time: < 1 minute Hoorah for Monica Dinculescu (‘Meownica‘) of Google calling out developers who don’t “bake-in” accessibility to their apps like blueberries in a muffin recipe: “If you don’t want to make accessible apps, then you are a terrible person and you shouldn’t be making apps for anybody. You should be doing something else.” Dinculescu (2016) The following […]
Shaking the Alt Decision Tree
Reading Time: 9 minutes ☰ Navigate this post: Why must images be inclusive And not only accessible? The problem Why image a11y fails The rotten Alt Decision Tree Analysis Pruning the Alt Decision Tree Cutting out the technical Shaking the ‘Tree Asking what stays? My Alt Decision Shrub Tra-daa, the problem solved!? Reference this post References Why is alternative […]
Web Components can be Accessible!
Reading Time: 3 minutes When inspecting products for inclusive code strategies, I regularly run across custom HTML tags, or ‘extended’ HTML belonging to web components. They are usually comprised of DIV and SPAN soup and a style block. ARIA labelling is more often than not omitted and fixed pixel units are common, so their responsiveness is limited. The explanation […]
‘Liquid’ DELETE animation demo
Reading Time: 5 minutes Sometimes I get so hooked up on inclusive design—and rightly—that I can overlook the strategies that take an OK user interaction (UI) to delight. Following on from my starter-project on UI SVG animations, I found the following demonstration that exports Sketch PNG files into After Effects. Forgiving that the YouTube comments capture my own ill-ease […]
Utility-first CSS
Reading Time: < 1 minute During dotCSS 2019, Sarah Dayan made a compelling—if, in summary a flawed argument “In Defense of Utility-First CSS”. There’s certainly room for us to reflect and also to counter with some concerns. Sarah argues that utility-first has advantages over our grooming toward semantic CSS and its enhancement with BEM CSS writing styles. These add weight […]
Animation and Keyframes
Reading Time: 4 minutes This was a fun hour’s project this morning. On a past web page project, I used the viewport width to move multiple backgrounds on expanding and contracting the browser window. A yacht floated serenely across the Adriatic past islands floating on the azure waters in a changing perspective – in my mind. Anyway, the client […]
To title abbr or not?
Reading Time: 4 minutes The following code snippet caught my attention when following posts by Chris Coyier and Eric Bailey diminishing objections to the abbreviation of accessibility to “a11y”. Abbreviation <abbr>a11y</abbr> There is no title=”” attribute within the abbr element. I was groomed to always include it. The Correct HTML? A little research including the WHATWG Living Standard (September, […]
Accessible Clock? Almost…
Reading Time: 3 minutes I adapted a coded clock from W3C Schools (home of the accessible clock canvas) on the Learning Too website’s Articles page. It’s a fun piece of bling drawn into an HTML5 canvas using JavaScript. Online Tutorials YouTube channel demonstrates a lighter-weight HTML, CSS, and JavaScript clock. Both clocks lack inclusive design. Any assumption that our screen […]
Exasperations of accessible experiences
Reading Time: 4 minutes Accessibility is treated by my industry as you would treat a stone chip stuck in your vehicle’s brakes. You can hear it squealing as it grinds into your imagination of a deeply scarred disk. You cannot identify which wheel is affected from inside the comfort of the vehicle. You select reverse gear and go back […]
Major Research Project Update
Reading Time: < 1 minute Find out why I updated my MRP to research our users’ comparable and equitable experience of accessibility. Go to the MRP section to learn all.
A Delightful Slider?
Reading Time: < 1 minute Josh Collinsworth’s Likert-based slider input styles a range of emoji in place of the usual grades. It may bring a piece of visual delight to our feedback survey forms? A measure of satisfaction and delight? The 12 emoji that display on the slider button range from, “swear I’m angry” (🤬) to “love it” (😍). The […]
An Accessible App Assignment
Reading Time: 12 minutes This is a ramble from which to launch ideas for an assignment. You can pass on it if you like. I’m scoping an app for an assignment. Assignment From the off, this project must meet set assignment criterion and inventing a new app isn’t one of them. A new app simply provides the vehicle on […]
Research content and information
Reading Time: 5 minutes Our latest submission covered information architecture and content as a part of Module 3, the psychology of UX. My preliminary research was included as an Appendix and is included here for (my) future reference. Research: content and information ”…You need to have a good understanding of the content before you even think of tackling the […]
Do storyboards tell the whole story?
Reading Time: 6 minutes There’s an example storyboard in Preece, Rogers, Sharp’s (2015) Interaction textbook that held my attention. In less than a moment I recognised it is a very poor example. Sure, it is intentionally simple and it is also unintentionally of poor quality. It exemplifies why UX design can fail to reach the levels of delight we […]
An interception survey reflection
Reading Time: 2 minutes Recruiting participants for field research by “door stopping”, or interception as they perform and behave in a native environment is an opportunity to observe, enquire, and record real-world and spontaneous experiences, behaviours, and attitudes. Supporting enquiry strategies may include overt observation, surveys, and semi-structured interviews. Resulting data may be quantitative or qualitative as designed. Chisnell […]
What is the Delightful User Experience?
Reading Time: 2 minutes Delight is a subjective and emotional reaction to stimuli. “Delightion” of customers is important to our enterprise where Willis (2015) states that it costs six to seven times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones and 55% of customers will pay more for better services. Fessenden (2017) ties delight to Walter’s (2011) […]