Bruce Lawson's personal site

Debut album: “Calling For The Moon”

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.

album cover

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.

Bad performance is bad accessibility

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

Bad performance is bad accessibility.

Reading List 298

Progress reversing iOS browser ban in UK, EU and Australia

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.

TL:DR; we’re winning.

IE – RIP or BRB?

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.

Reading List 297

Reading List 296

Inclusive name inputs – because not everyone is called Chad Pancreas

Recently, “Stinky” Taylar and I were evaluating some third party software for accessibility. One of the problems was their sign-up form.

two inputs fields, labelled 'First name, minimum 2 characters' and 'Last name, required'

This simple two-field form has at least three problems:

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”:

Bono, Madonna and Cher, looking very angrily at you, drawn by AI

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”.)

This is why there is a strong and statistically significant correlation between the diversity of management teams and overall innovation and why companies with more diverse workforces perform better financially.

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”.

Reading List 295

Reading List 294