Bruce Lawson's personal site

• Link o’ the week! Help the CMA help the web – Stuart Langridge on how you can help with the final push for a better web on mobile. Whether you agree with us or not, please tell the CMA what you think.
• Keyboard-Only Scrolling Areas from the Jello Biafra of #a11y, Adrian Roselli
• Firefox rolls out Total Cookie Protection by default to all users worldwide “making Firefox the most private and secure major browser available across Windows, Mac and Linux.”
• Meet Web Push in Safari! I like that Safari won’t hassle me to subscribe to push notifications without a user gesture, and settings are integrated. Presumably same for iOS and iPad next year. Good to see this work happening.
• The CMA Final Report on the Mobile Ecosystems market study: a repudiation of Apple’s narrative over privacy and safety as justifications for the status quo – “Apple submitted that the WebKit restriction is primarily motivated by security considerations�� CMA concluded that the WebKit restriction is unlikely to be justified by security concerns.”
• Chrome user device characteristics report – Data on device memory, network speeds, number of cores, smallest Android display sizes in BR, DE, EG, GB, ID, IN, JP, NG, US, ZA from Chrome usage stats
• The Email Markup Consortium is “a community-led group of industry professionals working to improve the user experience, accessibility, performance, consistency, and reliability of email markup”
• Japanese regulator’s interim report on Competition Assessment of the Mobile Ecosystem has lots of talk about the #appleBrowserBan, @webkit and PWAs (English, PDF)
• Apple now supports SSML – Speech Synthesis Markup Language. With SSML, you can include multiple ways to say text in a single request, instead of splitting it up into multiple AVSpeechUtterances.
• Using SQL to find my best photo of a pelican according to Apple Photos by Simon “l33t h4xx0r” Willison
• Silicon Valley’s Horrible Bosses – Dispatches From the Elon Musk School of Management
• Talking of hideously toxic workplaces, Kraken Announces Global Hiring Push and Commitment to Crypto-First Culture

My professional other half at Babylon Health, Taylar Bouwmeester, and I invite you to join us on a rollercoaster ride through the merry world of keyboard accessibility. It stars Brad Pitt as me and Celine Dion (she’s Canadian, you know) as Taylar.

• Link o’the week: A Management Maturity Model for Performance – “Despite advances in browser tooling, automated evaluation, lab tools, guidance, and runtimes, however, teams struggle to deliver even decent performance with today’s popular frameworks. This is not a technical problem per se �� it’s a management issue, and one that teams can conquer with the right frame of mind and support” by Big Al Russell
• The tech tool carousel by Andy Bell
• Internet Explorer retires on June 15, 2022 – For a long time, it was my browser of choice for downloading Firefox.
• React Native Accessibility – GAAD 2022 Update – React Native accessibility is dragging itself into the 21st century
• HTML Sanitizer API – Chromium & Firefox intend to ship a new HTML Sanitizer API, which developers can use to remove content that may execute script from arbitrary, user-supplied HTML content. The goal is to make it easier to build XSS-free web applications.
• W3C Ethical Web Principles – “The web should be a platform that helps people and provides a positive social benefit. As we continue to evolve the web platform, we must therefore consider the consequences of our work. The following document sets out ethical principles that will drive the W3C’s continuing work in this direction”
• What’s new for the web platform – Jake and Una at Google i/o yesterday showing new web platform features. Highlights: native <dialog> element for popup dialogs that has a11y baked in, the ability to give accent colours in CSS to form controls, declarative lazy loading of off-screen/ less important images. This should allow us to remove hacky components from our web pages, so they’ll be faster (as they’re in the browser) and more likely to be secure and accessible. Can we kill crappy framework dialogs and other form components and replace them with native browser-based equivalents?
• The page transition API uses CSS animations for highly customisable wiggly things to make your sites and PWAs feel more natively app-like. It’s really nice (don’t be put off by Jank Architect’s infomercial demeanour)
• Debugging accessibility with Chrome DevTools – another Google i/o vid
• WordPress’ market share is shrinking – “If WordPress wants to maintain its market share or better yet, grow it, it’ll have to get its act together. That means it should focus on the performance of these sites across the spectrums of site speed and SEO. The Full Site Editing project is simply taking far too long. That’s causing the rest of the platform to lag behind current web trends.”
• Responsive layouts for large screen development – “More than 250 million large screen Android devices are currently in use, including tablets, foldables, and Chrome OS.”
• The UK’s Digital Markets Unit: we’re not making any progress, but we promise we will “in due course�� – “at least this document confirms that it is still Government policy to do it “in due course�� and “when Parliamentary time allows��”
• Porting Zelda Classic to the Web – deep dive into the technical challenge to port an ancient game written in C++ to Web Assembly