CategoryAccessibility

June 7, 2022 — Computer technologies have simplified the process of recording historical events, technological breakthroughs, contemporary art, and everyday life. However, the notion of digital archiving can be deceptive. Often our technical footprints are carved in sand rather than stone. Read more…

May 31, 2022 — In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we ask why accessibility really matters and why it is so important to get it right. Smashing’s Vitaly Friedman talks in-depth to Sara Soueidan to find out. Read more…

May 26, 2022 — Developing accessible products can be challenging, especially when some of the requirements are beyond the scope of development. It’s one thing to enforce alt text for images and labels for form fields, but another to define an accessible color palette. From working with design handoffs to supporting custom themes in a design system, the CSS color-contrast() function can become a cornerstone for developers in enforcing sufficiently contrasting and accessible UIs. Read more…

May 4, 2022 — How difficult can it be to design a bulletproof language selector? It’s not as straightforward as one might think. We need to avoid redirects, decouple our language and country presets, allow for overrides, and use non-modal windows. Can we fix it? Absolutely! We just need to decouple presets, allow for overrides and allow users to specify their intent. Read more…

April 13, 2022 — Carousels have plenty of accessibility issues, they often exhibit low click-through rates, can be very disruptive when auto-advancing and people frequently scroll past through them. In this series of articles, we highlight design patterns and techniques to design better interfaces. You can find more examples in “Smart Interface Design Patterns”, a 10h-video course with 100s of hand-picked examples, curated by Vitaly. Read more…

April 4, 2022 — Ever wondered how to build a paginated list that works with and without JavaScript? In this article, Manuel explains how you can leverage the power of Progressive Enhancement and do just that with Eleventy and Alpine.js. Read more…

March 21, 2022 — CSS Custom Properties can be used for far more than just color, and their values update in realtime, both via display mode updates and JavaScript logic. This is powerful stuff. Eric explains how modern CSS is a powerful piece of assistive technology that can thread into it to create flexible, maintainable and adaptive digital experiences. Read more…

January 12, 2022 — Accessibility must be a permanent program within organizations, much like security. There are many ways to increase your team’s capacity for accessibility and it’s less important where you start than it is that you do start. Accessibility must be a permanent program within organizations, much like security. You wouldn’t just do one round of security testing and consider it taken care of. In this article, Kate Kalcevich shares tips on which skills and questions to keep in mind when hiring for digital accessibility roles. Read more…

December 6, 2021 — There are so many websites out there that have not considered the overall usability of their visually impaired users. When it comes to designing better links and sending better emails, Slava Shestopalov has a few tips on how to improve your website’s experience while accessibility in mind. Read more…

November 23, 2021 — The separation of content and presentation that CSS gives us always comes in handy when we need to adapt designs to better serve different communities. With a little CSS, we can adapt our web designs to be more accommodating for people with dyslexia. In this article, John C Barstow will explore those techniques by adding a dyslexia-friendly mode to an existing design. Read more…