2022 (p. 2/4)

LinkedIn Ran Social Experiments on 20 Million Users Over Five Years

nytimes.com

This is not the first report of how social networking sites run opaque “research” experiments on their users, and it is not going to be the last. But turning the users of your service into lab rats without them being aware of it, with potentially […]
2022

Accessibility is systemic

adactio.com

Jeremy Keith making the case for promoting accessibility on a system level:
Imagine someone who’s an expert at accessibility: they know all the details of WCAG and ARIA. Now put that person into an organisation that doesn’t prioritise […]
#design-for-all
2022

Hands-On Sustainable Web Design

branch.climateaction.tech

As an assumed 3.8% of global greenhouse emissions stem from “the digital world” (hard to define that more precisely, I assume), Laurent Devernay’s primer on how to make web design more sustainable is probably not the cure, but an important […]
2022

The Autistic UXer: Understanding, Researching and Designing for Autistic People

uxmastery.com

Different brains are beautiful because they think differently on a whole other level.
What an intro for an article about UX for neurodiverse users! Different brains are beautiful indeed. This article by Ashlea McKay starts from some […]
#design-for-all
2022

Building the main navigation for a website

web.dev

This must be the most thorough walk-through on accessible navigation patterns on the interwebs?
#design-for-all
2022

Minimum Viable Data Collection

hidde.blog

The question all website owners should be asking, is: do we really, really need these trackers to exist on our pages? Can’t we do the things we want to do without trackers?
Hidde de Vries presents simple thought exercises to […]
2022

Why your website should work without Javascript

endtimes.dev

For some reason, the myth that users without JavaScript don't exist, refuses to die. So thank you to the author of this comprehensive collection of both statistics (1% of millions is still a lot of people!) and – more importantly – all the other reasons that may, even temporarily, turn web users into "users with no JavaScript".
#design-for-all
2022

Stumblizer

indieseek.xyz

In the good old days, there was no full-text search for the web. It was all about directories; phonebook-like services (Yahoo being the most prolific, I assume) that categorized the web. Indieseek.xyz continues this tradition, with a strong Indieweb flavour […]
2022

Don’t Hide the Tech. Too much artifice is a symptom of something wrong

rushkoff.medium.com

Douglas Rushkoff’s argument against hiding technology by making it appear more human-friendly strikes a chord:
I’m happy for technology to be more “humane,” but not if that means disguising entirely inhumane algorithmic manipulation […]
#design
2022

Folk Interfaces

maggieappleton.com

“Folk Interfaces” by Maggie Appleton is a fascinating summary of an aspect of design that is actually somewhat related to my interest in as a gradient: the “other-use”, so to say…
Folk interfaces are when users […]
#design
2022

ADL Social Pattern Library | Anti hate by design

socialpatterns.adl.org

Conscious designers are well aware of the risks of online hate and harassment in social platforms. The Social Pattern Library wants to provide patterns to mitigate such risks through proven and tested strategies.
The Escalating Spiral of Online […]
#design
2022

Kun suomalainen perheenäiti palasi kotimaahan, hän törmäsi digimuuriin

yle.fi

Another Finnish language bookmark, but it’s so important a topic that it deserves to be shared beyond the language border: Public broadcaster YLE shares the story of a Finnish citizen moving back to Finland from abroad. Not having access to an online […]
2022

Nutshell: make expandable explanations

ncase.me

Oh, now this is a fun hypertext project! Nicky Case brings us Nutshell, “a tool to make ‘expandable, embeddable explanations’” – it’s essentially Ted Nelson’s StretchText brought to life. I love the quirkyness, the […]
2022

Let websites framebust out of native apps

holovaty.com

Adrian Holovaty highlights a massive security and privacy issue, as native apps on mobile OSs ignore the HTTP headers instructing a user agent to never display a website in a framed context. Instead, mobile apps may even display such pages with extraneous […]
2022

Equality vs. Equity

aaron-gustafson.com

Looking at two terms that are easily mixed up, Aaron Gustafson differentiates “Equality” (same access and opportunity for all) from “Equity” (various levels of support based on the understanding that everybody is different) […]
2022

The Feminist Tech Principles

superrr.net

Superrr Lab’s “Feminist Tech Framework” challenges the narratives dominating technology, digitalisation and innovation; proposing a holistic perspective that cares about societies and minorities, puts maintenance, accessibility and openness […]
2022

Value Beyond Instrumentalization

letterstoayoungtechnologist.com

"Letters to a Young Technologist" is an ambitious collection of essays, written by young technologists with the intention to make other young technologists aware of the power and responsibility that comes with shaping the world we live in.
2022

How to Meet WCAG (Quickref Reference)

w3.org

This quick reference to the WCAG 2.1 standard is a handy tool for quickly looking up requirements for specific web design tasks:
A customizable quick reference to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2 requirements (success criteria) and […]
#design-for-all
2022

Kyläradio pelaa, kun kännykät pimenevät

yle.fi

In Finland, it turns out, there is a movement of volunteers ("Kyläradio", i.e. "village radio") who establish a radio network to be used in disaster or blackout situations.
2022

Bye, bye algorithm

axbom.com

Here's a comprehensive take on not using algorithmic social media that illustrates how technology non-use is far from Luddism or the lack of technical skills it is often trivialized to.
2022

How to write user stories for accessibility

tetralogical.com

Transforming accessibility requirements (as e.g. derived from WCAG or other norms) into bite-size user stories makes them more tangible, and enable easier implementation.
#design-for-all
2022

A Visual History of Delicious Bookmarks

outer-outer.space

I greatly enjoy reading deep dives into a niche topic – here, Sarah Hibner retraces the history of Delicious, the web's famous bookmarking service that I, too, was a heavy user of back in its golden days of the mid-noughties.
2022

Dieter Rams on who rules the digital world

hustwit.com

I very much enjoyed the documentary “Rams” by Gary Hustwit, drawing a deep portrait of this extraordinary designer. Having shaped the place for technology in people’s lives over decades, his careful warning about who needs to stay in charge […]
2022

A template for accessible data visualizations

medium.com

This is a brilliant reference project on the process and design behind creating accessible data visualizations.
#design-for-all
2022

Leaky Forms: A Study of Email and Password Exfiltration Before Form Submission

homes.esat.kuleuven.be

This is another one of those papers that make your blood boil: through an experimental setup, the researchers found an astonishing amount of websites leaking email addresses entered by users to third party trackers …often even in cases where the user decides to not submit the form after all.
2022