My debut album is out, featuring 10 songs written while I was living in Thailand, India and Turkey. It’s quite a jumble of genres, as I like lots of different types of music, and not everyone will like it – I write the songs I want to hear, not for other people’s appetites.
You can buy it on Bandcamp for £2 or more, or (if you’re a cheapskate) you can stream it on Spotify or Apple Music. I am available for autographing breasts or buttocks.
What is “accessibility”? For some, it’s about ensuring that your sites and apps don’t block people with disabilities from completing tasks. That’s part of it, in my opinion, but it’s not all of the story. Accessibility, to me, means taking care to develop digital services that are inclusive as possible. That means inclusive of people with disabilities, of people outside Euro-centric cultures, and people who don’t have expensive, top-the-range hardware and always-on cheap fast networks.
In his closely argued post The Performance Inequality Gap, 2023, Alex Russell notes that “When digital is society’s default, slow is exclusionary”, and continues
sites continue to send more script than is reasonable for 80+% of the world’s users, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots. This is an ethical crisis for the frontend.
Big Al goes on to suggest that in order to reach interactivity in less than 5 seconds on first load, we should send no more that ~150KiB of HTML, CSS, images, and render-blocking font resources, and no more than ~300-350KiB of JavaScript. (If you want to know the reasoning behind this, Alex meticulously cites his sources in the article; read it!)
Now, I’m not saying this is impossible using modern frameworks and tooling (React, Next.js etc) that optimise for good “developer experience”. But it is a damned sight harder, because such tooling prioritises developer experience over user experience.
In January, I’ll be back on the jobs market (here’s my LinkTin resumé!) so I’ve been looking at what’s available. Today I saw a job for a Front End lead who will “write the first lines of front end code and set the tone for how the team approaches user-facing software development”. The job spec requires a “bias towards solving problems in simple, elegant ways”, and the candidate should be “confident building with…reliability and accessibility in mind”. Yet, weirdly, even though the first lines of code are yet to be written, it seems the tech stack is already decided upon: React and Next.js.
As Alex’s post shows, such tooling conspires against simplicity and elegance, and certainly against reliability and accessibility. To repeat his message:
When digital is society’s default, slow is exclusionary
The Web’s Next Transition – Kent C. Dodds thinks it is “Progressively Enhanced Single Page Apps”. Progressive Enhancement? Yay. Single Page Apps? Meh. Talking of which…
You Don’t Need ARIA For That – “ARIA usage certainly has its place. But overall, reduced usage of ARIA will, ironically, greatly increase accessibility.”
Make your own simple, public, searchable Twitter archive – download your archive from twitter, this tool processes the zip file (on your local machine), upload the resulting html pages to your archive URL. Simpler than using Tweetback, but less customisable.
I wrote a couple of short blog posts for Open Web Advocacy (of which I’m a founder member) on our progress in getting regulators to overturn the iOS browser ban and end Apple’s stranglehold over the use of Progressive Web Apps on iThings.
Here’s a YouTube video of a talk I gave for the nerdearla conference, with Spanish subtitles. Basically, it’s about Safari being “the new IE”, and what we at Open Web Advocacy are doing to try to end Apple’s browser ban on iOS and iPads, so consumers can use a more capable browser, and developers can deliver non-hamstrung Progressive Web Apps to iThing users.
Since I gave this talk, the UK Competition and Markets Authority have opened a market investigation into Apple’s iThings browser restriction – read News from UK and EU for more.
A Twitter Off Ramp – “A tutorial for getting on Mastodon”. Setting myself up on Mastodon and migrating my “following” list was a doddle thanks to this post, and Vivaldi Social’s ‘Advanced web UI’ is very like Tweetdeck.
aria-label is a code smell – “When I encounter too much, or mis-applied aria-label it makes me take notice. This code smell puts me on alert to investigate things more thoroughly, as it most likely indicates accessibility issues.” says Eric Bailey
JPEG XL decoding support (image/jxl) in Blink – Lots of disappointment in Chrome’s decision not to ship JPEG XL image format, which many big players want due to its many advantages over other formats
Browsers, JSON, and FormData – “until we start building our APIs to speak in more than just JSON ”” or we get browsers to speak JSON without requiring JavaScript[2] ”” it’s going to be difficult for progressively-enhanced web pages to gain traction over JavaScript rendered apps.”
Apollo 11 Mission Report – “the national objective of landing men on the moon and returning them safely to earth before the end of the decade had been accomplished.” – NASA, November 1969
How We Uncovered Disparities in Internet Deals – “digital redlining” leads US ISPs to offer “the worst deals to people who are the most in need of affordable prices for high-quality, high-speed internet”: poorer communities of color.
Element Timing: One true metric to rule them all? – “Sensible defaults, such as Core Web Vitals, are a good start, but one pitfall of standard measures is that they can miss what’s actually most important” says Andy Davies, and he ain’t daft.
New patterns for amazing apps – Dive into a fantastic collection of new patterns for amazing apps, including clipboard patterns, file patterns, and advanced app patterns. By Thomas Steiner.
Why we need CSS Speech – “In these times when almost every device and platform is capable of talking to you, you may be surprised to learn that there is no way for authors to design the aural presentation of web content, in the way they can design the visual presentation” writes Leonie “Wedgie” Watters.
Radix-UI: A gorgeous, accessible color system – “An open-source color system for designing beautiful, accessible websites and apps.” – even if you don’t want to use the React components, there’s some nice colour combos here to “inspire you”.
Competition regulator needs teeth to curb big tech, MPs say – I can’t help but wonder how the Coalition for a Digital Economy (who are warning MPs against it) reconcile their their work “Regulating with the little guy in mind so startups can innovate safely and compete against the giants” with being supported by Google
Apple’s App Review Fix Fails to Placate Developers – After bad press about its App Store rules, Apple added a way to challenge app rejections. Creators say projects still get blocked for no good reason.
Don’t read off the screen – flame-haired Linux lovegod Stuart Langridge has advice for new public speakers
This simple two-field form has at least three problems:
The “first name” must be two characters or more.
“First name” and “last Name” aren’t defined; are they “given name” and “family name”?
“Last name” is mandatory
U Nagaharu was a Korean-Japanese botanist. Why shouldn’t he sign up to your site? In Burmese “U” is a also a given name: painter Paw U Thet, actor Win U, historian Thant Myint U, and politicians Ba U and Tin Aung Myint U have this name. Note that for these Burmese people, their given names are not the “first name”; many Asian languages put the family name first, so their “first name” is actually their surname, not their given name.
Many Afghans have no surname. It is also common to have no surname in Bhutan, Indonesia, Myanmar, Tibet, Mongolia and South India. Javanese names traditionally are mononymic, especially among people of older generations, for example, ex-presidents Suharno and Sukarno, which are their full legal names.
Many other people go by one name. Can you imagine how grumpy Madonna, Bono and Cher would be if they tried to sign up to buy your widgets but they couldn’t? Actually, you don’t need to imagine, because I asked Stable Diffusion to draw “Bono, Madonna and Cher, looking very angrily at you”:
Imagine how angry your boss would be if these multi-millionaires couldn’t buy your thingie because you coded your web forms without questioning falsehoods programmers believe about names.
How did this happen? It’s pretty certain that these development teams don’t have an irrational hatred of Indonesians, South Indians, Koreans and Burmese people. It is, however, much more likely they despise Cher, Madonna, and Bono (whose name is “O’Nob” backwards).
What is far more likely is that no-one on these teams is from South East Asia, so they simply didn’t know that not all the world has American-style names. (Many mononymic immigrants to the USA might actually have been “given” or inherited the names “LNU” or “FNU”, which are acronyms of “Last name unknown” or “First name unknown”.)
The W3C has a comprehensive look at Personal names around the world, written by their internationalisation expert, Richard Ishida. I prefer to ask for “Given name”, with no minimum or maximum length, and optional “family name or other names”.
So take another look at your name input fields. Remember, not everyone has a name like “Chad Pancreas” or “Bobbii-Jo Musteemuff”.
Link of the Week: Learn HTML – “This HTML course for web developers provides a solid overview for developers, from novice to expert level HTML”. Wen if you think you know it all cuz you’re a Full-Stack Ninja, read this. It will make your React/ Angular/ Vue/ Svelte apps better. By Estelle Weyl.
Accessibility Features – “Almost half of all people with a mobile phone use accessibility features. Much more than you would expect, right? In our survey of millions of iOS and Android users, we looked at which accessibility features are enabled.”
Better accessible names – “OK, you’ve added an accessible name to your control. Maybe you’ve used aria-label, <label> or some other way to name a control. Now you wonder: what makes a name good, effective or useful?” Another one from Hidde.
How Fast Is Your Web App? How to Test Page Transition Performance – Scott Jehl on how to test a website’s post-load navigation speed in WebPageTest. This process is something you can use on any kind of website, but may be particularly handy for testing single-page web apps that tend to handle page navigations on the client-side.
Outdated vs. Complete – “In defense of apps that don’t need updates”. Apple now requires devs to update perfectly functional apps for no reason, so you have to keep paying for developer membership and waste time recompiling against a massive Xcode update.
TikTok’s In-App Browser Reportedly Capable of Monitoring Anything You Type – “TikTok’s custom in-app browser on iOS reportedly injects JavaScript code into external websites that allows TikTok to monitor “all keyboard inputs and taps” while a user is interacting with a given website” – IABs are a boil on the bum of the Web.
Let websites framebust out of native apps – “When a native app embeds a website via a webview, the native app has control over that page. Yes, even if it’s on a domain that the native app doesn’t control (!). This means the native app can inject whatever JavaScript it likes into any website that’s viewed in the webview”
The point of a dashboard isn’t to use a dashboard – “A dashboard isn’t there to be used. It is there to prove that the data are easily accessible, comparable, and trackable. Only once that is done can they be actionable. Trapped data is useless data.” opines Uncle Tezza.
New macOS 12.5.1 and iOS 15.6.1 updates patch “actively exploited” vulnerabilities “CVE-2022-32893, is a WebKit bug that allows for arbitrary code execution via “maliciously crafted web content” – update your iOS. Because of the #appleBrowserBan, every browser on iThings is compromised, because Apple requires them all to use its WebKit.
Browsers Are Back in the Antitrust Hot Seat – “Google and Apple control more than 80% of market through Chrome and Safari, raising questions among regulators and competitors” (WSJ)
