A CMS-look-alike with AJAX

Reading Time: 3 minutes Why? Static wireframes are not prototypes. I expect to use this technique when demonstrating inclusive and accessible UX or UI design strategies. These include relative units, fluid responsiveness, and server responses that static wireframes or [insert ‘prototyping’ software of choice] click-through output can only fail to convey. Starting Out It’s been a while since I […]

MSc UX Design Graduation 2020

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: one of only two names poor Andrew needed to name in […]

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

Screen grab of the environment using TextEdit alongside the browser

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…

analogue clock with black face

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 […]