A great piece covering the various ways we, as web designers and developers, must practice empathy:
Upping the empathy quotient among decision-makers, designers, and developers is integral to ensuring the creation of a digital world for everyone.
Dispatches From The Internets
Start with empathy
Your Site—Any Site—Should be a PWA
The other day, Frances Berriman—who coined the term “Progressive Web App”—wrote a bit about how she came up with that name. In it she clearly points out that the name has become a little problematic in dev circles
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:
- Create the code we know we need and only that code;
- Omit any code that we “might” need in the future;
- Work for Angular, React, Vue, plain old JavaScript; and
- 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.
CSS Shapes, clipping and masking – and how to use them
Let the hum-drum web design shake-up begin!
Just remember that not all browsers support these features, so have a fall-back for those that don’t.
Reducing Image File Size at Etsy
Etsy’s approach for automatic JPEG quality reductions is fascinating!
How to Make Your Website Accessible to People Who Use a Screen Magnifier
If you’ve never worked with a screen magnifier before, this is a super-handy piece to quickly boost your awareness.
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:
- URLs and
- 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.