Bruce Lawson's personal site

• How We Uncovered Disparities in Internet Deals – “digital redlining” leads US ISPs to offer “the worst deals to people who are the most in need of affordable prices for high-quality, high-speed internet”: poorer communities of color.
• Element Timing: One true metric to rule them all? – “Sensible defaults, such as Core Web Vitals, are a good start, but one pitfall of standard measures is that they can miss what’s actually most important” says Andy Davies, and he ain’t daft.
• New patterns for amazing apps – Dive into a fantastic collection of new patterns for amazing apps, including clipboard patterns, file patterns, and advanced app patterns. By Thomas Steiner.
• Pop-ups: They’re making a resurgence! – a nice (Chrome-only) experimental declarative way of doing pop-ups. Love this.
• Why we need CSS Speech – “In these times when almost every device and platform is capable of talking to you, you may be surprised to learn that there is no way for authors to design the aural presentation of web content, in the way they can design the visual presentation” writes Leonie “Wedgie” Watters.
• Why We’re Breaking Up with CSS-in-JS by the 2nd most active maintainer of Emotion, a widely-popular CSS-in-JS library for React.
• Library Upgrade Guide: <style> (most CSS-in-JS libs) – React cabal discovers that stylesheets made of CSS are fast and cacheable. “Our preferred solution is to use <link rel=”stylesheet”>”. Who knew?
• Browser Vendors Aim to Heal Developer Pain with Interop 2022
• Handy Tools For Mocking API Requests
• let’s talk about web components says Brad Frost
• When life gives you lemons, write better error messages Wix on the user experience of error messages
• How Chinese citizens use puns to get past internet censors – homophone substitution to evade censorship
• Radix-UI: A gorgeous, accessible color system – “An open-source color system for designing beautiful, accessible websites and apps.” – even if you don’t want to use the React components, there’s some nice colour combos here to “inspire you”.
• An endless collection of accessible color combinations
• Competition regulator needs teeth to curb big tech, MPs say – I can’t help but wonder how the Coalition for a Digital Economy (who are warning MPs against it) reconcile their their work “Regulating with the little guy in mind so startups can innovate safely and compete against the giants” with being supported by Google
• Apple’s App Review Fix Fails to Placate Developers – After bad press about its App Store rules, Apple added a way to challenge app rejections. Creators say projects still get blocked for no good reason.
• Don’t read off the screen – flame-haired Linux lovegod Stuart Langridge has advice for new public speakers

(Last Updated on 8 December 2022)

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

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

• The “first name” must be two characters or more.
• “First name” and “last Name” aren’t defined; are they “given name” and “family name”?
• “Last name” is mandatory

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”:

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”.

(Last Updated on 21 October 2022)