Reading Time: 5 minutes We must understand when to include an alt value and when so, what to include in and how to write that value. That’s not necessarily simple. It’s emotional.
Sigma Pods – Speculative Design Update
Reading Time: < 1 minute Comparing our MSc UX Design speculative design project’s Sigma in-ear translator concept against an emerging world first solution.
There’s a code for the multiplication symbol: xxx-ing use it!
Reading Time: 2 minutes Listen to or watch any smartphone review this year and there’s an energetic reference to the camera’s zoom. “7 to 12 x”. X?
Emmet Emissary
Reading Time: 4 minutes My favourite YouTube codey stars and Emmet emissaries use Emmet and without viewing their keyboard strokes, I was left eager and still confused.
Are Frameworks Evil?
Reading Time: 3 minutes Frameworks don’t need to be evil. Only their masters can make them that way?
Is HTML better than Markdown? Yes
Reading Time: 4 minutes When we write web content in valid vanilla HTML, the Internet is a far more inclusive product. I argue to drop Markdown and write to, or into HTML.
Dog Poo is Accessible Too
Reading Time: < 1 minute Just because it is accessible does not mean it is inclusive. Dog Poo is Accessible – you don’t want to wade thru it.
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 […]
Inclusive Dialog Design?
Reading Time: 11 minutes At most every turn with accessibility I find , “it depends” actually translates to, “so what?” Dialogs just stink.
‘Special Characters’ Accessibility and Usability
Reading Time: 12 minutes Adding usability and accessibility to special HTML characters and punctuation for screen reader and visual users
Expanding Summary Details Accessibly
Reading Time: 8 minutes A decade later, can we use the HTML Details and Summary tags inclusively to replace expand and collapse accordions accessibly with and without JS and CSS?
Blueberry Muffins and Terrible People
Reading Time: < 1 minute Baking apps and components like Blueberry Muffins and the Terrible People who do not want to make apps accessible
Shaking the Alt Decision Tree
Reading Time: 9 minutes Why is alternative image content so difficult? In this article I analyse and update W3C’s WAI Alt Decision Tree for everyday human consumption.
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 […]