Bruce Lawson's personal site

It’s been a while; since the last Reading List! Since then, Vadim Makeev and I recorded episode 6 of The F-Word, our podcast, on Mozilla layoffs, modals and focus, AVIF, AdBlock Plus lawsuit. We also chatted with co-inventor of CSS, Håkon Wium Lie, and Brian Kardell of Igalia about the health of the web ecosystem. Anyway, enough about me. Here’s what I’ve been reading about the web since the last mail.

• An Important Month for Public Sector Web Accessibility – “As of the 23rd of this month, all [UK] public bodies will be expected to conform to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1”
• RNIB: Challenge inaccessible websites with our new toolkit – “We want to make challenging all inaccessible websites a straightforward process so we’ve created a toolkit to support the public in using the Equality Act & the Regulations to call out websites.��
• Heading off confusion: When do headings fail WCAG?
• How screen readers navigate data tables by permaglam Leonie Watson
• On not choosing WordPress for the W3C redesign project – the agency redesigning the W3C site has chosen Craft CMS rather than WordPress due to accessibility concerns of Gutenberg
• New Apple accessibility features in iOS 14, iPadOS 14, and watchOS 7 – “Apple makes accessibility top-tier importance, which makes the entire experience better for everyone.”
• Adobe unveils ambitious multi-year vision for PDF: Introduces Liquid Mode “Liquid Mode uses AI .. to understand and identify parts of a PDF, like headings, paragraphs, images, lists, tables, and more. It also attempts to understand the hierarchy and ordering of those parts to reformat a static PDF into a more dynamic and customizable experience.”
• On the Web Share API by Chris Coyier
• Reduce the barrier between your Web App and Native Apps with one quick step – “Make your app a Web Share Target to enable cross app interactions” by Ada Rose Cannon
• Interaction Media Features and Their Potential (for Incorrect Assumptions) – cracking article by Chucklin’ Pat Lauke
• Eruda – Console for Mobile Browsers
• Elements of AI – free course in Artificial Intelligence, from University of Helsinki, translated into all EU languages. “Our goal is to educate 1% of European citizens in the basics of AI”
• Giving users and developers more control over focus – Chromium’s focus-visible and Quick Focus Highlight: a user preference that causes the currently focused element to display an indicator for two seconds, regardless of developer’s CSS devilry
• Full bleed layout using simple CSS – “I try to use the least powerful feature of the language to get the job done”, ah music to my ears
• The failed promise of Web Components by Lea Verou
• Bringing the browser developer tools to Visual Studio Code
• Wikipedia Matters (PDF, 48pp) – “a randomized field experiment to
  test whether additional content on Wikipedia pages about cities affects tourists’ choices of overnight visits. Our treatment of adding information to Wikipedia increases overnight stays in treated cities compared to non-treated cities”
• Family wrongly accused of uploading pedo material to Facebook � due to US-EU date confusion in IP address log – “Site accessed on 10/11/2016… is that November 10 or October 11?”
• Mozilla is hiring again after laying off 25% of their staff. It’s interesting to speculate on the new strategy; vacancies include a Strategic Finance Manager running mergers and acquisition, and a Head of Mobile who *must* be in USA, not Asia/ Africa where the action is.
• Top 4 Dying Programming Languages of 2020 – “Don’t learn these 4 languages”. Eh? Learn them! You’ll be in demand when those systems need tweaking. I was offered loads of money because I know COBOL & Fortran. So the cool kids don’t talk about them, but they run Business.
• Zhenhua Data leak: personal details of millions around world gathered by China tech company -“with reported links to the country’s military and intelligence networks”
• we are beautiful – “Our photographer takes photos of volunteers and processes these photos to produce 3D models of their genitals and other body parts. These 3D models are freely available for viewing .. so that you may print them on your own 3D printer”
• The Government Digital Service truly was once world-beating. What happened? – “The UK briefly led the globe in government online services. How has it squandered that lead, asks a former insider”
• Our Voice Assistant Spoke to Google Duplex. Here’s What Happened�� – “the first naturally-occurring conversation between AI voice assistants in the wild”