As would be expected from a former manager of the Web Standards Project, Aaron Gustafson is passionate about web standards and accessibility. He has been working on the Web for over two decades now and is a web standards advocate at Microsoft, working closely with their browser team. He is also Editor in Chief of A List Apart and writes about whatever’s on his mind at aaron-gustafson.com.
Deciding to build a PWA or a native app should be based on the needs of the specific project, not hype. With Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) encroaching on native development’s turf, Aaron Gustafson thought this might be a good time to step back and take stock of these two approaches to building products. In this article, Aaron walks you through the pros and cons of each approach to help you arrive at an informed decision.
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If our websites don’t enable users to accomplish the key tasks they come to do, we’ve failed them. We should do everything in our power to ensure our websites function under even the harshest of scenarios, but at the same, we can’t expect our users to have the exact same experience in every browser, on every device. Because none of the solutions Aaron Gustafson found actually complied with the law in either spirit or reality, he opted to roll his own robust solution.
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Wondering how to get started with the Web Speech API? If you’re unfamiliar, this API gives you (the developer) the ability to voice-enable your website in two directions: listening to your users via the SpeechRecognition interface and talking back to them via the SpeechSynthesis interface. In this article, Aaron Gustafson guides you through this experimental API and covers everything you need to know to help you get a better understanding of how it works.
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Dependencies are everywhere. They’re unavoidable. They aren’t inherently bad, but if you don’t consider the possibility a given dependency might not be met, you run the risk of frustrating your users. Reducing dependencies improves the likelihood that your site will be usable by the greatest number of people in the widest variety of scenarios. Even knowing this, however, it’s easy to overlook the most basic dependencies our projects have, undermining their resilience in the process. To illustrate this point, consider the humble submit button.
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