I linked to the first of Ethan’s short videos on accessibility last week, but it’s well worth checking out all five:
- Morality is not always relative.
- You’re a web professional.
- The web is accessible out-of-the-box. We break it.
- It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up.
- It should be easier. This is our job.
I just attended this talk from Heydon at axe-con and it was great! Of course it was highly amusing, but he also makes a profound and fundamental point about how we should be going about working on the web.
Vasilis gives the gist of his excellent talk at the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg. The rant at the end chimed very much with my feelings on this topic:
I showed a little interaction experiment that one of my students made, with incredible attention to detail. Absolutely brilliant in so many ways. You would expect that all design agencies would be fighting to get someone like that into their design team. But to my amazement she now works as a react native developer.
I have more of these very talented, very creative designers who know how to code, who really understand how the web works, who can actually design things for the web, with the web as a medium, who understand the invisible details, who know about the UX of HTML, who know what’s possible with modern HTML and CSS. Yet when they start working they have to choose: you either join our design team and are forced to use a tool that doesn’t get it, or you join the development team and are forced to use a ridiculous framework and make crap.
It looks like it will be a great tool for prototyping. A tool to help developers that don’t have experience with CSS and layout to have a starting point. As someone who spent some time building smoke and mirrors prototypes for UX research, I welcome tools like this.
What concerns me is the assertion that this is production-grade code when it simply is not.
I didn’t know the Washington Post had a design system or that the system has this good section on accessibility.
When it comes to sustainable web design, the hard work is invisible.
Separate your concerns.
Stop me before I use ARIA incorrectly again.
Embedding YouTube videos without sacrificing performance.
Relive Responsive Day Out 3 in the form of moving images