Bruce Lawson's personal site

• The hidden world of aria-hidden – Steveo Faulko reports “The effects of aria-hidden are not consistent across browsers and screen readers”. Seems like a Chrome bug to me.
• Bad Apple Safari update breaks IndexedDB JavaScript API, upsets web apps – Given Apple is currently pretending that it likes PWAs because of legal stuff, this would seem to be an accident rather than deliberate. And testing is hard, and Apple long gave up being a software company.
• Meet :has, A Native CSS Parent Selector (And More) (and Can I :has() – Uncle Brian explains this new exciting CSS thingy)
• Optical size, the hidden superpower of variable fonts – with mushroom examples.
• CMA to have key oversight role over Google’s planned removal of third-party cookies, also Privacy Sandbox – CMA oversight role and how to engage – video.
• Free, open source health icons
• Creating Accessible React Native Apps – some useful actionable advice here
• What my decade at Google taught me about Africa’s tech future
• My Life in the Apple Ecosystem – “But change is coming, whether or not Apple wants it. And boy, Apple deserves having those changes forced onto it, given how badly they’ve treated their developer community for so many years.”
• Huawei officially launches Android alternative HarmonyOS for smartphones – Yay, another not-Android (and not-Windows and not-Tizen and not-Ubuntu)

I’m doing some accessibility testing on a React Native codebase that uses Expo during development. If you’ve done something seriously wrong in a previous life and karma has condemned you to using React Native rather than making a Progressive Web App, Expo is jolly useful. It gives you a QR code that you can scan with Android or iOS to ‘install’ the app on your device and you get live reload of any changes. It’s like sinking in a quagmire of shit but someone nice is bringing you beer and playing Abba while it happens. (Beats me why that isn’t their corporate strapline.)

Anyway, I struggled a bit to set it up so here are some random tips that I learned the hard way:

• If your terminal yells “Error: EMFILE: too many open files, watch at FSEvent.FSWatcher._handle.onchange (internal/fs/watchers.js:178:28) error Command failed with exit code 1” when you start Expo, stop it, do brew install watchman and re-start Expo. Why? No idea. Someone from StackOverflow told me. Most npm stuff is voodoo magic–just install all the things, hope none of them were made by in Moscow by Vladimir Evilovich of KGB Enterprises, ignore all the deprecation warnings and cross your fingers.
• If you want to open your app in an iOS simulator, you need xcode and you need to install xcode command line tools or it’ll just hang.
• Scrolling in iOS simulator is weird. Press the trackpad with one hand and scroll with other hand. Or enable three finger drag and have one hand free for coffee, smoking or whatever other filthy habits you’ve developed while working from home.
• If you don’t want it, you can turn off the debugging menu overlay.
• If you like CSS, under no circumstances view source of the app running in the browser. It is, however, full of lots of ARIA nourishment thanks to React Native for Web.

Who knows? One day, Apple may decide not to hamstring PWAs on iOS and we can all use the web to run on any device and any browser, just as Sir Uncle Timbo intended.