May 2019

There were 12 posts published in May 2019 (this is page 1 of 2).

Dear fellow developers: If you’re one of those developers who makes it impossible to press the tab key to move through a screen, hand in your dev creds now and put down your IDE until you learn to do better. I should not have to get help from a sighted person to add FTP users to a server. This is becoming a serious problem. Learn HTML damn it! Learn HTML as if I am going to find out where you live.
Read The Mac Open Web

These days, as the giant social networks behave more and more reprehensibly, many people are looking back to the “good old days” of the web, when self-published blogs were the primary means of sharing one’s thoughts.
Brian Warren has taken this enthusiasm, and combined it with his nostalgia for another classic resource: the links page.

This one is devoted to all things Mack and iOS that allow you to consume and create content for the open web. I don’t have a Mack, and have not gone through all the iOS apps yet, so you’ll have to test the accessibility of some or all of these apps for yourself. Indieweb developers are very open to accessibility feedback though, and this includes implementing things for the sake of accessibility, so this is sort of the one place where productive conversations about accessibility which don’t involve accessibility folks talking to each other are still possible.
Read Defining PDF Accessibility by WebAIM: Web Accessibility In Mind

When people talk about “accessible” PDF files, they are usually referring to “tagged” PDF files. PDF tags provide a hidden, structured representation of the PDF content that is presented to screen readers. They exist for accessibility purposes only and have no visible effect on the PDF file. There is more to an accessible PDF file than tags, but an untagged PDF would not be considered “accessible”.

Dear accessibility practitioners, please don’t use @medium as your primary publishing platform. Syndicate there if you must, but Medium doesn’t support alt text for images, and has given no indication that it plans to. Its last comment on the subject of alt text was made several years ago and amounts to “Sorry not sorry”. So, avoid Medium as your primary publishing platform, and go with a website of your own that you can control instead. Then, syndicate to Medium.
Read The boring front-end developer by Adam Silver

Cool front-end developers are always pushing the envelope, jumping out of their seat to use the latest and greatest and shiniest of UI frameworks and libraries. However, there is another kind of front-end developer, the boring front-end developer. Here is an ode to the boring front-end developer, BFED if you will.

I’m not saying that a framework or design style is automatically rendered inaccessible simply by virtue of its becoming trendy. It’s worth pointing out though that, if there were less emphasis on using the hottest thing and more on all the very unsexy parts of front-end development, (semantic HTML, properly written CSS, designing with things like color contrast in mind), the web would be a lot less problematic from an inclusive design standpoint.