#a11y (1/3)
The numeronym “a11y” stands for digital accessibility. My interest is not primarily technical accessibility, but the overall mindset, processes and practices of designing an inclusive and universally useful digital future.
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Design that excludes some cannot be "usable". Here, I collect my preferred resources on specific (web) design tasks, with a strong focus on accessibility.
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With great interest, I discovered the comprehensive guide "Centering Accessibility in Data Visualization" by Urban Institute: it approaches the topic from general considerations on the role of #a11y in process and artifact, diving all the way into specific examples showcasing how things should be done in an inclusive way.
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This is inclusive design in action: while some users may have set a permanent preference to disable motion, enabling a simple switch for a motion-heavy website is a great feature. -
Charts.css
chartscss.org 
Charts.css is a modern CSS framework. It uses CSS utility classes to style HTML elements as charts.
A brilliant idea: Charts.css turns semantically marked-up data tables into visualizations using various types of graphs, and all with pure CSS. This makes for lighter code […] -
Mandated by law under certain circumstances, but always good practice and a sign of inclusive thinking, accessibility statements (and placing them in a navigation scheme) may sometimes be considered merely a compliance chore rather than a subject of good design themselves. In an article on the Deque blog, Patrick Sturdivant highlights a personal perspective on how important a part of UX such statement can be.
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My Grandma is Not a Cyborg
futuress.org 
The story of early fighter planes designed for an idealized body type leading to about 90% of accidents due to operational issues is well known to anybody who ever attended a university class in usability, ergonomics, or “human factors”. Sinem Görücü tells a similar tale through her […]
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Joschi Kuphal: #Unicode #LinkedIn #assistive
linkedin.com 
“Formatting” social media posts by using special unicode characters (that, for example, look like bold text but aren’t) is one of the most common ways to create completely inaccessible social media posts. Joschi Kuphal’s screencast demonstrates the problem:
Most […]
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The Optional Chaining Operator, 'Modern' Browsers, and My Mom
blog.jim-nielsen.com 
These are the kind of stories that would deserve so much more space in education and practice of technologists:
The real-life impact of our technical decisions really hit home to me once again: my Mom had trouble volunteering and participating in her local community because somebody […]
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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 accessibility. They’re going to have a hard […]
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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 key facts about ASD and then builds a […] -
This must be the most thorough walk-through on accessible navigation patterns on the interwebs?
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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". -
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 techniques.
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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. -
This is a brilliant reference project on the process and design behind creating accessible data visualizations.
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This article by Sophie Clifton-Tucker presents a whole range of considerations how to better consider varying cultural norms in design. It illustrates the difference between internationalization (i18n) as a "pre-launch" design phase task, and the "post-launch" localization (l10n), but most importantly provides an even broader perspective in calling for culturally aware design.
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Blind Accessible Comics
spinweaveandcut.com 
My interest in the accessibility of information visualisations occasionally leads me into the rather niche topic of accessible comics. **Comics and graphic novels share a lot of the accessibility challenges information visualisations have** (content that is by definition first and foremost visual), hence the approaches to solving the challenge could cross-pollinate. -
Hidde de Vries’ short and to-the-point article between analytics and accessibility contains three important highlights: It is impossible to reliably measure “disability” through web analytics Even if it were, those numbers would rather be a measure for the quality of a site (e.g […]
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Datenschutz-Transparenz für Sehbehinderte
datenschutz-notizen.de 
This blog post by the German privacy blog “Datenschutz-Notizen” poses more questions than it provides answers, but I find it noteworthy for bringing together three of my core interests: legal design, accessibility and privacy. The text refers to a court ruling from Italy, where the […]
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Chinese Number Websites: The Secret Meaning of URLs
newrepublic.com 
At first sight, this article may not have much to do with accessibility or inclusive design. Yet, after reading it, I suddenly realized how even my own thinking, deliberately tuned to think in an inclusive, prejudice-free way wherever possible, has been biased by a preconception of something I do not fully understand. […]
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Championing Inclusive Research Through User Stories
answerlab.com 
When people ask me what I do as a UX researcher my answer is usually along the lines of “I watch people struggle with technology without judging them.” And I’ve watched hundreds of people struggle with technology.
In an article that neatly brings together UX […] -
Progressive Enhancement, the New Hotness™
gomakethings.com 
It’s 2022, and 36.8% of respondents (not a representative survey, but assuming the demographic of Sara Soueidan’s Twitter followers to be dominantly web developers: even more shocking) don’t know what Progressive Enhancement is. This short intro by Chris Ferdinandi, cheekily […]
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How many people are missing out on JavaScript enhancement?
gds.blog.gov.uk This is a 9 years old article. Yet, while the quantitative numbers may have shifted in one direction or the other, the qualitative statements stand unchanged: it cannot – and must not – be assumed that all JavaScript code is executed for every visitor of a website. […]
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Everyone has JavaScript, right?
kryogenix.org 
Stuart Langridge presents this simple, yet convincing flow chart to illustrates all the various things that may go wrong as users request a web site requiring JavaScript code. […]
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Molly Holzschlag called for more attention to the UNESCO’s ROAM principles, a United Nations policy framework for an internet for all: Rights, Openness, Accessibility to all, Multistakeholder participation.
Never once can I recall a discussion with any Web colleagues about The ROAM Principles. They are a framework for Internet (and #Web) universality and we need them. We're too fragmented and without unity and discourse, we will lose what's left of the idealism and hope born of Web.
— This Miss Molly 2022-02-19 […]
urban.org 
uxmastery.com 
web.dev 
w3.org 
medium.com 
prototypr.io 
