Reading List 253
- Link o’the Week: Open Peeps is a library of illustrated people – mix and match expressions, clothes, etc. Free for personal/commercial use, by Pablo Stanley.
- Me! Me! Me! corner: Web Accessibility Checklist: 15 Things to Improve Your Website Accessibility – a monster 5000 words from yours truly, on avoiding the worst and most common errors.
- Stop using Material Design text fields! – “I recently started working on a project built with Google’s Material Design UI library, and noticed quite a few usability and accessibility issues.”
- Headers and Jump Links? The Solution is scroll-margin-top – “you have a position: fixed; header at the top of the page obscuring the header you’re trying to link to!” solved
- You talkin’ to me? – a really cool prezzo by Léonie Watson on the state of speech synthesis, and how to control the emotional cadences.
- Resize text to fit the parent with variable font width axis “Adjust the width of your text to fit its parent container using a variable font width axis” by Mandy Michael
- Proposal o’the week: Focus Traversal API – “a proposed feature that would allow an author to better understand and manipulate the Focus system within a web page. This includes support for computing the next and previous Focus targets for any given element, moving the focus forward or backward programatically from an element without knowing the next focus target, and other focus related features.”
- Using the HTML title attribute – Updated March 2020 Uncle Stevo says “If you want to hide content from mobile and tablet users as well as assistive tech users and keyboard only users, use the title attribute”. Basically, it’s only useful for labeling iframes.
- roughViz – JavaScript library for creating sketchy/hand-drawn styled charts in the browser.
- Not a ‘math person’? You may be better at learning to code than you think – “a natural aptitude for learning languages is a stronger predictor of learning to program than basic math knowledge, or numeracy”
- On ethical design, and the Ethical Design Handbook – flame-haired FOSS Adonis @sil reviews @trinefalbe’s groovy new book
- Why Are We Talking About CSS4? – there isn’t a “CSS4” and there are no plans for it. Should there be?
- Top web browsers 2020: Firefox sinks to share unseen since 2005 – “Safari slumped four-tenths of a percentage point to 3.9%, while Opera Software’s namesake dropped two-tenths of a point, falling to 1.2%.’
- Grindr sold by Chinese owner after US raised national security concerns .It’s currently owned by Kunlun, part of the consortium that own Opera’s browsers.
- Groovy thing o’ the week: radiooooo – This is lovely. Choose a country, and a decade (1900-now) and hear music from that time and place.
- This person does not exist shows you a computer generated image of a person every time you refresh.
- Do Not Touch Your Face – “Using your webcam, you train a machine learning algorithm (specifically Tensorflow.js) to recognize you touching your face and not touching your face. Once it’s trained, it watches and alerts you when you touch your face.”
- Anorak Corner: The History of the URL – “all that matters is adoption. If you can get people to use it, however slipshod it might be, they will help you craft it into what they need. The corollary is, of course, no one is using it, it doesn’t matter how technically sound it might be.”
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)