I really, really like the way that this straightforward accessibility guide is subdivided by discipline. As Maya wrote in the blog post announcing its launch:
Each person on a team, whether you’re a manager, designer, or developer, has a role to play. Your responsibilities are different depending on your role. So that’s how we structured the guide, with a separate section for each of five roles:
- Product management
- Content design
- UX design
- Visual design
- Front-end development
This is excellent advice and I’m glad to see this getting addressed nice and early in the era of customisable select elements:
always provide text content or accessible text attributes for your option elements.
This is such a brilliant idea! Why not allow an img element inside video element in order to provide a responsive, accessible poster image?
There’s a new meta tag on the block. This time it’s for allowing system-level text sizing to apply to your website.
I like the idea of adding this to personal websites:
Mastodon shows an “Alt” button in the bottom right of images that have associated alt text. This button, when clicked, shows the alt text the author has written for the image.
I don’t normally link to articles on Medium—I respect you too much—and I do wish this were written on Mike Hall’s own site, but this is just too good not to share.
And don’t dismiss this as a nostalgiac case study from the past:
At no point did the constraints make the product feel compromised. Users on modern devices got a smooth experience and instant feedback, while those on older devices got fast, reliable functionality. Users on feature phones got the same core experience without the bells and whistles.
The constraints forced us to solve problems in ways we wouldn’t have considered otherwise. Without those constraints, we could have just thrown bytes at the problem, but with them every feature had to justify itself. Core functionality had to work everywhere, and without JavaScript crutches proper markup became essential.
This experience changed how I approach design problems. Constraints aren’t a straitjacket, keeping us from doing our best work; they are the foundation that makes innovation possible. When you have to work within severe limitations, you find elegant solutions that scale beyond those limitations.
A bit of feature detection for a proposed new HTML attibute.
Business, sustainability, and inclusivity.
Separate your concerns.
Can you have too much semantics?
The difference between inclusive design and accessibility.