Our products become slower, clunkier and more painful to use — often simply unbearable for keyboard- and screen reader users, and as such fragile and vulnerable for legal disputes. Let’s fix it. IToday, we bring you Heydon Pickering’s new book Inclusive Components, which explores more accessible and robust solutions for the UI patterns we author, plug in, and use every day. Jump to table of contents or pre-order the book right away.Read more…
Today, Heydon will talk about the relationship between accessibility and design systems, and introduce his brand new book: Inclusive Components. During the session, he will explore how to create an accessible accordion using progressive enhancement, and answer your questions about inclusive interaction design.
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Gutenberg is reinventing the experience of creating content in WordPress, granting it new powers to create, edit and manage our content. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz will shine some light on these upgraded capabilities, exploring the new tools at our disposition and presenting several new ones to be released sometime in the future.
Let’s see what these new powers are!
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This is the final part of a series on how to create your own multiplayer text adventure engine. Today, Fernando Dolgio will focus on adding chat support to the text client from part 3. He’ll go through the basic design of a chat server using Node.js and socket.io, the basic interaction with the UI, and how we’ve integrated the chat code into the existing UI.
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What does it mean to be a freelance designer or developer? In this second episode of the Smashing Podcast we take a look a freelancing. Today, Drew McLellan talks to experienced freelance brand designer Liz Elcoate to find out more.
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In this inaugural episode of the Smashing Podcast, Drew McLellan talks to Andy Clarke about Art Direction. What is it, and how can it be used in our web projects? Find out about the book Art Direction For The Web, and catch up on the latest from Smashing Magazine. In this inaugural episode, Drew McLellan talks to designer, author, and speaker Andy Clarke about Art Direction. What is it, and how can it be applied to our web design projects? We dig into the topic and see if we can get to the bottom of things.
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Data import has historically been a time-consuming and frustrating task, especially for products that depend on ingesting a lot of data from users. That’s why many developers include CSV importers in their apps — to spare users from having to manually copy data from a spreadsheet into their database. But let’s face it: traditional data import solutions haven’t always been great. That’s why, today, Suzanne Scacca is going to look at how Flatfile helps you create a better import experience for your users, team, and product.
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A significant part of the Internet-using population is aged 50 or older — including the people who invented it. Even though we’re as tech-savvy as anyone else, older users have some specific needs that web designers and programmers should consider. None of them are particularly difficult to accommodate, but they can be critical for our use and enjoyment of the Internet. In this article, Barry Rueger will show you why designers need to understand what older users need and why it’s not enough to just say, “I can read it, so what’s the problem?”
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In a lot of cases we can do these things with CSS —just not on the web. For example, CSS is also used for print formatting via user agents designed for outputting to PDF. In this article, Rachel Andrew looks at some common layout patterns that we can’t yet do on the web and the CSS Specifications that might let us achieve them in the future. While most of her articles are about things we can do, this one is about things we can’t but that perhaps we might be able to do in the future. Take a look.
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What is it that makes a haunted house feel so disturbing? Is it the fact that it’s been long abandoned? That it’s riddled with dark and twisty hallways? That it simulates danger? Or maybe it’s the low-quality construction that makes people nervous? In this article, Suzanne Scacca is going to take these frightening characteristics and spin them around for the web. After all, what is a website, but a digital house? (Let’s just make sure yours doesn’t feel haunted!)
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