These are lies we tell: “This is just an example.” “This is a demo, not for use as production code.” No, it’s not. You’re wrong. It may not be code you, the author, would use in production. But as soon as you published it, the likelihood that it will become production code in somebody else’s project skyrockets. And this is inevitably damaging. These examples can be horrible in many ways – reliability, portability, security – and accessibility. In a surprising […]
Continue reading “The damage of examples” »Tag: a11y
Contemplating “read more” links
Web accessibility guidelines stipulate that links need to provide context for meaning; but they also stipulate that link text needs to be unique when it leads to a new resource. Under Success Criterion 2.4.4, a read more link after an excerpt of the post would be meaningful, because the context provides information about what the link does. But when generating a list of links, “read more” links produce a long series of links with the same text and different destinations, […]
Continue reading “Contemplating “read more” links” »The Visual-only icon problem
This is something I’ve been seeing a lot lately, and it’s got to stop. This illustrates the use of icon only controls. In this case, using an icon font. (Similar problems show up using any form of icon-only control, however!) Now, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with icon fonts; but there’s often a problem with how they’re used. In this particular case, these are two links, used to toggle a particular preference. You can tab to them and activate them from […]
Continue reading “The Visual-only icon problem” »Accessible Video in WordPress
Since version 3.6, WordPress has incorporated the MediaElementJS library in core to handle the output of video files. It’s a great library — it has support for captions and subtitles; support for chapters; support for fallback formats of video; support for YouTube; keyboard support — everything you’d want to have for displaying video accessibly. That’s totally exciting! But there’s a “but”. WordPress manages media through the media manager, which doesn’t offer any way to associate caption and subtitle files with […]
Continue reading “Accessible Video in WordPress” »Taking over GrayBit.com
Mike Cherim and Jonathan Fenocchi, creators of the GrayBit service for showing a site design converted into grayscale, needed to move on. The time and expense of maintaining GrayBit was too much – and since Mike Cherim has moved out of the web development and accessibility world, it was necessary to make some changes. They recently shut down GrayBit.com, not having received any word that anybody wanted to take the site over. I was too late to save the domain, […]
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