Dispatches From The Internets

Software development 450 words per minute

No monitors, no problem. Tuukka Ojala on his experience of being a blind developer.

Speech or braille alone can’t paint an accurate representation of how a window is laid out visually. All the information is presented to me in a linear fashion. If you copy a web page and paste it into notepad you get a rough idea of how web pages look to me. It’s just a bunch of lines stacked on top of another with most of the formatting stripped out. However, a screen reader can pick up on the semantics used in the HTML of the web page, so that links, headings, form fields etc. are announced to me correctly. That’s right: I don’t know that a check box is a check box if it’s only styled to look like one. However, more on that later; I’ll be devoting an entire post to this subject. Just remember that the example I just gave is a crime against humanity.


Remember Palm’s WebOS? Maybe not, but Apple and Google definitely do

WebOS… so far ahead of its time:

  • Web code for apps (see PWAs),
  • Multiple synchronized calendars,
  • Unified social media & contact management,
  • Curved displays
  • Wireless charging
  • Integrated text and Web messaging
  • Unintrusive notifications
  • “Cards” for running apps
  • No home button (it used swipe instead)

And all of these features were available eight years ago!


Categories land in the Web App Manifest

Starting in early May, Rob Dolin began advocating for adding a categories member to the Web App Manifest spec. It was something we’d been discussing for a while now. It’s a feature that will be incredibly useful to users, especially as it relates to PWAs in the Windows Store, other app stores, and in catalogs. This weekend, our hard work paid off and it was added to the spec!