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Reading List 278

Friday 18 June 2021

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)

Reading List 277

Friday 21 May 2021

Building a resilient frontend using progressive enhancement (gov.uk) Government web sites need to be resilient and be available to all. That’s why they use HTML and JS properly. You should too.
Which Three Birdies?™©® – Birds! Maps! APIs! Open Source! Put ’em together and what do you get? Finally, a solution for encoding a location into 3 birds, and open sourced as a gift to the world from Stuart Langridge and me!
Chromium spelling and grammar features – “My first project has been implementing the new CSS spelling and grammar features in Chromium”. A deep dive that might help answer your question “How hard can it be to implement [my pet feature]?”
URL protocol handler registration for PWAs – Let installed PWAs handle links that use a specific protocol for a more integrated experience. Further steps to enhancing the capabilities and UX of web technology.
What’s New in Android Accessibility – TL;DR: Samsung and Google now collaborate on Talkback; You can now talk to Talkback. For deaf people: live transcription of conversations in 80 languages; an app to amplify certain frequencies of sound in real time (eg, a hearing aid); teachable app that can monitor environmental sound and alert you, eg of fire alarm/ dog barking/ your doorbell ringing. Lots of technology (crypto, surveillance, Facebook) makes the world worse, but the liberating tech on devices is a massive boon for people with disabilities.
An experiment in helping users and web publishers create deeper connections on Chrome – Google Chrome is trialling a new technology they’re calling “RSS”
Apple accused of breaking UK competition law by overcharging for apps – “The tech company has been accused of deliberately shutting out the competition in the store and forcing people to use its own payment processing system, generating “excessive” profits for itself in the process.”
The Enclosure of the Public Interest Internet – EFF

Reading List 276

Friday 7 May 2021

The F-word, Episode 11 – Vadim and I interrogate Miriam Suzanne about Susy and Sass, CSS Layers and CSS compatibility, Container Queries and CSSWG.
iOS 14.5 brings the new Safari 14.1 to PWAs and the Web Platform – PWA improvements, getUserMedia and “Privacy-Preserving Ad Click Attribution”, detective work by Maximiliano Firtman
Related: Why some developers are avoiding app store headaches by going web-only – “It’s hard to see Apple’s decisions here as anything but outright hostile to the web and designed to push developers into making native apps”
Progress Delayed Is Progress Denied – Do App Store policies harm developers? Is the web a credible alternative? A look at the data from the Dr Caligari of web standards, Big Al
:focus-visible in WebKit – April 2021 – thank Dawkins that someone is trying to enhance WebKit
Making Content Usable for People with Cognitive and Learning Disabilities – a note from Sir Uncle Timbo’s barmy army (W3C)
Terror of the adtech industry iOS 14.5 has landed, and Siri can answer your calls … though she/he can’t hang up -“Good news for users with disabilities, though there’s room for improvement”
Finger spelling uses your webcam and machine learning to analyze your hand shapes so you can learn to sign the American Sign Language alphabet. Made by American Society for Disabled Children; “We believe that deafness is not a disability, but language deprivation is.”
Seeing the wood for the trees: demystifying markup in 2021 – Ian Lloyid’s HTML De-crapulator will at least allow you to scrutinise the ringpiece of the HTML produced by your framework, without the oozing haemorrhoids of its endless data-, class and onclick attributes.
Wix Launches First of Its Kind Accessibility Tool to Help Make The Web Accessible for Everyone – My old chums at Wix launched an Accessibility Wizard, providing Wix users with a step-by-step interactive solution that detects accessibility content issues on their sites and guides the user to resolve them.
Design Affordance Controls – Uncle Brian muses about HTML interactive controls and thingies
WebAIM Million – 2021 Update – TL;DR Everything’s shit, but not quite as shit as last year
The talent race is also an ethical race – “good candidates are increasingly dubious of Big Tech’s ethical credentials … technologists know the industry intimately and recognize that toxic companies can blight a résumé” by Cennydd Bowles

Reading List 275

Friday 23 April 2021

Container Queries are actually coming – yes siree!
CSS Container Queries – @rachelandrew explains all
No, Google! Vivaldi users will not get FLoC’ed – whether or not you use Vivaldi, this is a good intro into Google’s plans for FLoC once third-party cookies are gone.
How to fight back against Google FLoC – “To opt your site out of FLoC, you need to send the Permissions Policy HTTP response header. Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=()“. Or there’s a WordPress plugin.
WordPress core: Proposal: Treat FLoC as a security concern – WordPress Core developers are discussing a security patch to block FLoC by default, and potentially roll it out as a security fix
Chrome Extension to block FLoC from your chums at DuckDuckGo
Publishing a Progressive Web App (PWA) on the PlayStore – What works and what doesn’t (in 2021)
“Person, Shoes, Tree. Is the Person Naked?” What People with Vision Impairments Want in Image Descriptions
How to publish packages to npm (the way the industry does things) by Zell Liew
How to locally test an npm package – a good guide to using yalc, by Mae Capozzi
The WebPageTest API Has Gone Public
Building Blocks – What you should look for from open source code – Flaxen-haired FOSS Adonis @sil writes “When Isaac Newton made his point about standing on the shoulders of giants, he was actually talking about Github (probably).”
A list of connectivity indexes, maps, and reports “to help you better under who has access to communication infrastructure and on what terms” by Steve Song.
Browser Standards Rampage: Can We Have Nice Things? – JS Jabber talk with Jake Archibald about Portals, iframes, App Cache, Service Workers, HTML, Browser History and more. Wouldn’t it be lovely if all podcasts have transcripts?
Space Jam – an analysis of the original 25 year-old site and its replacement: “Although connection speeds and devices keep getting better and better, the web is actually getting slower. We see the increasing bandwidth as an invitation to use more and more stuff in our websites. More images, more videos, more JavaScript.”
They Hacked McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines—and Started a Cold War – “Secret codes. Legal threats. Betrayal. How one couple built a device to fix McDonald’s notoriously broken soft-serve machines—and how the fast-food giant froze them out” – A surprisingly interesting article.

Reading List 274

Thursday 1 April 2021

Link o’ the Week: Accessible Text Labels For All – Sara Soueidan “On improving eCommerce experiences for screen reader users without breaking them for speech-input users”
The F-word, episode 10 in which Vadim and I ruthlessly interrogate Eric Meyer about joining Igalia, what’s coming, CSS Nesting and Cascading Layers
Form design “Best practice, research insights and examples”
The End of AMP – “Google announcing that sites with passing core web vitals will receive a ranking boost on mobile. However, there is another important item in the update – the end of special treatment for AMP pages.”
Web in Play with Bubblewrap – Learn how to transform your Progressive Web App into an Android package with Trusted Web Activity and Bubblewrap.
The end of Applets – This year we bade farewell to Flash, and Applet APIs are to be removed from Java. Interoperable open standards for the win!
There’s no such thing as a website or web app that doesn’t need to be accessible – 100%
An opinionated guide to accessibility testing
Overlay Fact Sheet – Factsheet about deceptive accessibility “repair” overlays (signed by me and 300+ other people in the industry)
AccessiByeBye! – Chrome extension to block overlays like AccessiBe, EqualWeb, MaxAccess, and UserWay.
Survey of Web Accessibility Practitioners #3 Results – “Web accessibility practitioners have notably higher average salaries on average than those reported on the 2020 Stack Overflow developer survey.” Personally, I do it for the drugs, groupies and glory rather than the riches.
Technology sector trust decline deepens – ” the main reason for the trust fall is the increasingly “complicated” relationship between the public and technology — including the spread of misinformation, rising privacy alarm and bias in artificial intelligence.”
Google, Apple Ties Are Target of Advertisers’ U.K. Complaint “Complaint asks antitrust authority to probe collaboration”
Is COBOL holding you hostage with Math? – “floating point math has blown lots of stuff up completely by accident.” why is it so hard to migrate legacy systems?
Chinese zoo embarrassed after attempting to pass off golden retriever dog as an African lion

Reading List 273

Friday 12 March 2021

Link o’ the Week: The Performance Inequality Gap, 2021 – Big Al’s update on devices, networks, browsers, and the new baseline scenario for web performance. A must-read.
Improving React Native Accessibility – “Since May, Facebook has spent that time thoughtfully reviewing and documenting accessibility gaps within React Native. So far the gap analysis has surfaced 90 issues, all of which have been translated to Github issues. Overall, we found that React Native APIs provide strong support for accessibility. However, we also found many core components do not yet fully utilize platform accessibility APIs and support is missing for some platform specific features.”
The State Of Mobile And Why Mobile Web Testing Matters
Accessible forms – ‘A range of HTML form components and how they are interpreted by screen readers”. Also, don’t rely on <legend> with Voiceover.
RadioShack Sued for Alleged ADA Website Accessibility Violation – “Specifically, website issues included input fields with inaccessible labels and unlabeled buttons”. The actual suit (PDF) also mentions “no skip to content link. Keyboard focus order is not working sequentially.”
Clipchamp’s video editor PWA installs see a 97% monthly growth – How PWAs, WebAssembly, and Chrome OS are helping a web-based video editor deliver better performance and a more engaging experience to 12M users.
Website accessibility complaints process: your questions answered – “We answer some frequently asked questions about the web accessibility complaints process for public sector bodies.”
Good news about display: contents and Chrome – Rachel Andrew reports that the nasty accessibility bug is fixed. (Still there in Safari, though.)
Launching the Facebook Map “Neighborhoods, parks, and social places are emphasized over “traditional” features like road networks … Our base map design with pale colors and no icons allows overlaid social layers that use more saturated colors to come to the foreground.”
Bundling for the Web
New Mobile Native Foundation to Foster Development Collaboration – “Linux Foundation hosts effort to improve processes and technologies for large-scale mobile Android and iOS applications; Lyft makes initial contributions”
Introducing the Framework Laptop – “the Framework Laptop, a thin, lightweight, high-performance 13.5” notebook that can be upgraded, customized, and repaired in ways that no other notebook can. We’re here to prove that designing products to last doesn’t require sacrificing performance, quality, or style.”
The Kilobyte’s Gambit “Can you beat 1024 bytes of JavaScript?” Combines an incredibly tiny (1.2K) chess engine with pixel art imagining The Queen’s Gambit as an MS-DOS game
The UX on this small child is terrible – “Not only am I VP of Reproduction for this household, but I’ve also been the end-user of this Small Child for over three years now. I’m going to give it to you straight. The user experience is terrible.”

Reading List 272

Friday 26 February 2021

Trusted Web Activity – “a new way to open your web-app content such as your Progressive Web App (PWA) from your Android app”. Basically, get your PWA in the App Store, create a feedback channel via ratings and reviews, use Play Billing.
The F-Word episode 9 – Vadders and I discuss Safari extensions, cascading layers of CSS, what’s new in WCAG 3
<details> and <summary> with animated arrow (no JS) by Moritz Gießmann, faking the arrow with borders so no extra content is inserted that may confuse an assitive technology user. Brilliant!
Make Your PWAs Look Handsome on iOS (I haven’t verified this)
Apple Executives’ Bonuses to Be Tied to Their Performance With Respect to Accessibility and the Company’s Other Core Values
Material Design Text Fields Are Badly Designed by Adam Silver
Did you know: iOS apps are insanely larger than Android apps – “compared to Android apps, iOS apps are huge. Much bigger. The big question is, Why are iOS apps bigger than Android apps? We answer the question.”
How to start testing screen reader support using VoiceOver
Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files. “Now you can work with your data as text file or a spreadsheet rather than a PDF!”
Citibank just got a $500 million lesson in the importance of UI design – “Citibank was trying to make $7.8M in interest payments. It sent $900M instead.”
The Bizarre Reaction To Facebook’s Decision To Get Out Of The News Business In Australia – “First is the link tax. This is fundamentally against the principles of an open internet… a bunch of lazy newspaper execs who failed to adapt and to figure out better internet business models not only want the traffic, they also want to get paid for it.”
Spy pixels in emails have become endemic – “Hey’s review indicated that two-thirds of emails sent to its users’ personal accounts contained a “spy pixel”, even after excluding for spam.”
“Allow this app to personalize advertising for you?” – “Apple defines privacy in a way that benefits its own commercial interests and harms the commercial interests of its competitors. Apple has wrapped its arms around the open internet with a privacy bear hug that is designed to entrench and enrich its own closed ecosystem.”
Cambodia to force all internet traffic through national ‘Internet Gateway’ – “De facto one-party state decrees censorship scheme that sounds a lot like China’s Great Firewall”
The web didn’t change; you did by Remy Sharp

Reading List 271

Friday 12 February 2021

Link o’ the week: Do accessible websites still need to support Internet Explorer 11? – TL;DR: Yes, because Edge (Chromium) doesn’t deliver a comparable experience for assistive technologies – especially JAWS, Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Zoomtext.(Graham Arnfield)
Prince 14 is out with CSS calc() support, Color emoji fonts and SVG fonts, Multipass formatting with JavaScript and New column and page float features. (Disclosure: I’ve done consultancy on PDF accessibility for them.)
A new history API, “app history” – ” This proposal introduces a new window.appHistory API, which is more directly usable by web application developers to address the use cases they have for history introspection, mutation, and observation/interception.”
Wix has 200 million registered users – like it or not, that’s a huge number of websites. I’d like to see Wix join W3C. (Disclosure: I used to work with Wix and have chums there.)
SmolCSS – “Minimal snippets for modern CSS layouts and components”
aria-description: By Public Demand and to Thunderous Applause by Steve Faulkner
What’s Next For HTML Controls? -“In this episode, we’re talking about HTML controls. Why are they so hard to style, and how might that change in the future? Drew McLellan talks to Microsoft’s Stephanie Stimac and Melanie Richards to find out.
Google’s next big Chrome update will rewrite the rules of the web – “Google’s impending takedown of third-party cookies in Chrome is a big win for privacy. And Google”
#accessiBe Will Get You Sued – Adrian Roselli’s magisterial post about the latest accessibility snakeoil salesmen. We should all buy him a pint as a thank you for researching this stuff in his own time. He’s like the Yoda of accessibility.
40% of the web uses WordPress
Firefox just walked away from a key piece of the open web because, on Firefox Desktop, there is currently no plan for PWA support.

Reading List 270

Friday 29 January 2021

WCAG 3 Introduction (currently an incomplete draft) and request for comments
First Public Working Draft of CSS Cascading and Inheritance Level 5 – adds cascade layers: “Authors can create layers to represent element defaults, third-party libraries, themes, components, overrides, and other styling concerns—and are able to re-order the cascade of layers in an explicit way, without altering selectors or specificity within each layer, or relying on source-order to resolve conflicts across layers.”
:focus-visible in WebKit – January 2021 – A report about the work done by Igalia during January 2021 adding support for :focus-visible in WebKit.
A simple custom – “For whatever reason some people don’t like the standard HTML checkbox and radio button, they seek to jazz ’em up and in the process the often jizz up the usability/accessibility of these controls.” Steve Faulkner to the rescue!
Get safe – Jezza Keef on the difference between GET and POST
Improving the usability and accessibility of a healthcare website by being mindful of reading level (Eric Bailey)
HTML and CSS techniques to reduce your JavaScript (Anthony Ricaud)
Making Audio and Video Media Accessible (W3C)
Improving accessibility with accessibility acceptance criteria (gov.uk)
New JavaScript features in ES2021 – but don’t get hung up on version numbers, counsels Mathias Bynens: “numeric separators shipped in V8 v7.5/Chrome 75 in mid-2019. It’ll be part of ES2021 which only officially gets published in mid-2021”.
Why is a CD 74 minutes long? It’s because of Beethoven – sometimes a tech standard is as it is for entirely non-technical reasons.
South African government releases its own browser just to re-enable Flash support “For some people, it’s apparently easier to manage your own browser than port some web forms from Flash to HTML.”

Reading List 269

Friday 15 January 2021

An Analysis of Privacy on the App Store – “The top 12 [most data-hungry] apps are all from the same company, Facebook. All of Facebook’s apps collect an ungodly amount of data, the nearest other app is LinkedIn which collects 37 fewer data types.”
Content-visibility and Accessible Semantics “if you’re using content-visibility on sections of content including headings and semantic structure, screen reader users won’t be able to benefit from that structure on load. This unfortunately degrades accessibility in favor of loading performance” by Marcy Sutton. Later update: “Update: lots of great discussion from the Chrome team, who say it shouldn’t have that effect and they’re looking into it.”
Researcher Breaks reCAPTCHA With Google’s Speech-to-Text API with a 97 percent success rate.
Is Progressive Enhancement Dead Yet? – a fun video by Bury St Somerset O‘Groat’s most celebrated web standards video director, Heydon Pickering.
Base64 Encoding & Performance, Part 1: What’s Up with Base64? – a 2-part series by Harry Roberts
Rube Goldberg corner: Introducing Zero-Bundle-Size React Server Components – The React community is finally discovering the advantages of doing heavy lifting on the server instead of doing everything on the client.
Hotwire (“HTML Over The Wire”) is “an alternative approach to building modern web applications without using much JavaScript by sending HTML instead of JSON over the wire.”
Should The Web Expose Hardware Capabilities? asks Noam Rosenthal
CMA to investigate Google’s ‘Privacy Sandbox’ browser changes – UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has opened an investigation into Google’s proposals to remove third party cookies and other functionalities from its Chrome browser.
Flash Is Dead writes Tiffany B. Brown.
‘Your Cock Is Mine Now:’ Hacker Locks Internet-Connected Chastity Cage, Demands Ransom – Hackers used an exposed API of an internet-connected chastity belt to lock and extort device owners.