I love everything about this piece showcasing how people with disabilities are using open source to empower themselves and others.
Dispatches From The Internets
From gaming with your eyes to coding with AI: New frontiers for accessibility
GPT-4
GPT-4 is released. Really impressive improvements over GPT-3 and GPT-3.5.
The image description example with the VGA charger is really impressive. It will be really interesting to see how this new LLM can improve accessibility.
How to Skip Automatic Netlify Build When Committing to GitHub
If you auto-build with every push, did you know you can tell Netlify to skip building a given commit? Just add “[skip netlify]” to your commit message.
That’s gonna be super useful for something I have planned!
When JavaScript Fails
This piece does a great job of relaying the reality of JavaScript failures on the web and makes a strong case for why progressive enhancement is such an important approach. Jason’ illustrations of who is affected by JavaScript failures and how are particularly compelling.
I also love how succinctly he nails this section:
So, if progressive enhancement is no more expensive to create, future-proof, provides us with technical credit, and ensures that our users always receive the best possible experience under any conditions, why has it fallen by the wayside?
Because before, when you clicked on a link, the browser would go white for a moment.
JavaScript frameworks broke the browser to avoid that momentary loss of control. They then had to recreate everything that the browser had provided for free: routing, history, the back button, accessibility features, the ability for search engines to read the page, et cetera iterum ad infinitum. Coming up with solutions to these problems has been the fixation of the JavaScript community for years now, and we do have serviceable solutions for all of these — but all together, they create the incredibly complex ecosystem of modern-day JavaScript that so many JavaScript developers bemoan and lament.
All to avoid having a browser refresh for a moment.
A Practical Guide to Progressive Enhancement in 2023
I love it when people share their approaches to progressive enhancement. I don’t know that I would take the same approach, but it was really interesting to read Jason’s rationale and to see the comparisons between his original React project and the progressively enhanced one.
Some simple ways to make content look good
This is an excellent round-up of simple CSS tweaks you can make to improve the legibility of your content. I learned a few things and you will too.
PWA for Beginners
Some of my colleagues at Microsoft have put together a 17-part video learning course on Progressive Web Apps. It’s got a ton of great material if you’re looking to get started.
Redefining Developer Experience
This is a rather lengthy piece on developer experience from Cole Peters (who works on the Enhance framework). He makes some excellent points, including this one:
I believe ‘good developer experience’ needs to be re-imagined as the enabling of developers to deliver reliable and first rate end user experiences — for as many users as possible, and for as long as possible. With this goal in mind, I think we’d be hard pressed to find a better starting point than the fundamentals of the web platform — that is, web browsers, HTTP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These technologies have existed for decades in a near total state of backwards compatibility, while also consistently evolving to offer web developers ever more powerful techniques to deliver exceptional user experiences.
Progressive enhancement options for traditional server-rendered sites
I enjoyed this overview of options for progressive enhancement and web components in server-rendered websites. Not sure if I’ll ultimately use any of them, but it was interesting to see the different approaches.
NHSD Apply for Care ID alpha assessment
I love that the UK government is making digital product assessments, like this one for the in-development Care ID Assessment tool, public. There’s a lot to be learned from critiques like this.
In particular, I was impressed with how they held the line on the importance of robustness in tools like this (from the “Choose the right tools and technology” section):
Before their reassessment, the team needs to … allow users who have issues using services with Javascript or have Javascript disabled. The team must build services for all users and cannot depend on client-side Javascript.
Which yielded results in their reassessment:
The panel was impressed that:
- the team has worked around the limitations for progressive enhancement of the service, resulting from the use of a serverless Single Page Application (SPA) architecture, which is a historical technology choice inherited from NHS login the team has ensured the service now works for all applicants without requiring JavaScript to be enabled
- the team has used the third party Paycasso identity verification mobile application to automate many parts of the process for validating an identity document, presenting a significant improvement versus the current remote identity check process via video link
- the team has used the no JavaScript route through the service which re-uses the business logic for the SPA route despite the UI forms being separately maintained for both routes
The assessment also provides guidance for further improvements to be made. Love this!