Dispatches From The Internets

Accessibility according to actual people with disabilities

Lots of real-world feedback about accessibility issues here. The laundry list of pain points is not insurmountable though:

  • Missing captions
  • Motion & animations
  • Visual clutter
  • Walls of text
  • Small text
  • Sites that don’t play well with magnifiers
  • Low contrast
  • Text in images
  • Bright colors
  • Reliance on color to convey information
  • Mouse-centric interactions
  • Tiny touch targets
  • CAPTCHAs

You can address most of these easily.

Alpha Testers Wanted for Progressive Web App Tools for VS Code

The goals of this extension are pretty straightforward:

  1. Create the code we know we need and only that code;
  2. Omit any code that we “might” need in the future;
  3. Work for Angular, React, Vue, plain old JavaScript; and
  4. Provide simple and functional steps to create a PWA on the major platforms listed above.

Nice.

Adding Paragraphs in Zillow Should Not be This Hard

Kelly and I are in the process of selling our (beautiful) home and I have been amazed at how difficult it’s been for our agents to break up the listing description into paragraphs, especially on Zillow. After a ton of trial and error—after all, I wasn’t gonna let poor software design trump readability—I found a solution. > TLDR; Insert a blank line between the paragraphs and put "  " (that’s a space followed by a tab) on that line.

My 2017 Mentees

Early this year, I put out the call to anyone who might be interested in a mentorship with me. The response was overwhelming and the decision of who to work with this year was really tough. After a great deal of consideration, however, I chose not one, but two folks I really wanted to work with this year: Amberley Romo and Manuel Matuzović. I’ve been working with the two of them for a few months now and wanted to highlight a bit about who they are and what we are working on.

And now, a brief definition of the web

This is an excellent and well-argued piece from Dieter Bohn. In it, he argues that “the web” is characterized by two things:

  1. URLs and
  2. Client agnosticism.

Reading this, I’m reminded of a lot of Jeremy’s writings about products being “on the web” rather than “of the web”. It’s an incredibly important distinction in my mind because, as Dieter so eloquently puts it

The openness of the web allowed small companies to become big ones without seeking permission from the biggest ones. Preserving the web, or more specifically the open principles behind it, means protecting one of the few paths for innovation left in the modern tech world that doesn’t have a giant company acting as a gatekeeper. And there’s reason not to trust those giant companies: there’s much less incentive to encourage openness when you have a massive empire to defend.

These are important things to consider when deciding where to invest your time and energy.