If you write CSS for a living, it is important to understand how to write valid CSS property values correctly. Once you understand how different values can be combined or multiplied, the CSS property value syntax becomes much easier to comprehend. The following syntax can be hard to understand if you don’t know the various symbols and how they work. However, it is worth taking the time to learn. If you understand how the W3C defines property values, you will be able to understand any of the W3C’s CSS specifications.
Read more…
An ever-growing number of web users around the world are living with dementia. They have very varied levels of computer literacy and may be experiencing some of the following issues: memory loss, confusion, issues with vision and perception. In this article, Laurence Ivil and Paul Myles will share some lessons they learned along the way about making a dementia-friendly front end on a tight budget. By making websites more accessible to a growing group of users who are so often excluded from the benefits that the internet has to offer, designers are not only supporting people living with dementia, but also those with similar accessibility challenges.
Read more…
Rodney Rehm understood that ARIA could help him write web applications without having to bike-shed class names for various states. You can care about accessibility issues without being affected by a disability yourself. In many ways, making your apps and sites accessible benefits everyone. ally.js helps you accomplish that. ally.js is positioning itself as a center for collaborating on accessibility-related features, by providing low-level tools to other libraries and frameworks as well as high-level functions to developers. If you start working together you might just get somewhere!
Read more…
We proudly craft affordable, practical books for pros like yourself who want to improve skills and make a difference. Our printed Smashing Books deliver in-depth knowledge and expertise shared by experts and practitioners from the industry. We strongly believe in print and in the benefits of tangible books — they are our editorial flagships. No fluff, no theory — just actionable insights applicable to your work right away. In this article, you will find all of our Smashing Books, which look damn good on a coffee table!
Read more…
Despite our pursuit to do a better job every day, sometimes we forget about accessibility, the practice of designing and developing in a way that’s inclusive of people with disabilities.These days, we build a lot of client-rendered web applications, also known as single-page apps, JavaScript MVCs and MV-whatever. AngularJS, React, Ember, Backbone.js, Spine: You may have used or seen one of these JavaScript frameworks in a recent project. Common user experience-related characteristics include asynchronous postbacks, animated page transitions, and dynamic UI filtering. In this article, Marcy Sutton will explore techniques for building accessible client-rendered web applications, making our jobs as web creators even more worthwhile.
Read more…
Perhaps the only thing worse than a fire that could happen to the office of a web development company would be losing connectivity to the web. This is why Google Mail inserts a warning whenever you go offline. As noted in Marco Zehe’s 2008 blog post, Google was an early adopter of ARIA live regions. In this article, Heydon Pickering is going to create a script which tests whether the user is online or off and uses ARIA to warn screen reader users of the change in this status so they know whether it’s worth staying at their desk or giving up and going for a beer.
Read more…
Successful web accessibility is about anticipating the different needs of all sorts of people, understanding your fellow web users and the different ways they consume information. Armed with this understanding, accessibility becomes a cold, hard technical challenge. How do assistive technologies present a web application to make it accessible for their users? Where do they get the information they need? One of the keys is a technology known as the accessibility API.
Read more…
It’s very easy to get bogged down by accessible output and to forget that, ultimately, accessibility is about people. Whether you are working in product, UX, development or quality assurance, remember to always give users control, over the page integrate accessibility into annotated UX and style guides and design with choice in mind. In this article, Henny Swan will explain these, and more key principles which will ensure that products are inclusive and usable for disabled people. Listening to users and actively including their feedback, along with adhering to organizational standards and guidelines, are essential.
Read more…
Ruth John has met some resistance when talking about this API. People either can’t see a need for it with the web, or they would feel uncomfortable talking to their device — both valid views. However, he hopes he will inspire you to at least give it a go and think about it the next time you are building something. Start welcoming speech: It might be just what you’re listening for.
Read more…
If you browse your favorite website and close your eyes slightly so that your vision is a bit clouded by your eyelashes. Can you still see and use the website? Are you able to read the labels, fields, buttons, navigation and small footer text? Can you imagine how someone who sees differently would read and use it?
In this article, Cathy O’ Connor shares one aspect of design accessibility: making sure that the look and feel (the visual design of the content) are sufficiently inclusive of differently sighted users.
Read more…
