This is a transcript of a talk I did at WordCamp Turku on the 28th of September, 2018. The slides to my talk are on Slideshare. I will update this post with a video when that is available.
Continue reading “Talk: What You Need to Know about the EU Accessibility Directive”Author: Daniel
End of An Era
Today I gave a talk on the EU Web Accessibility Directive at WordCamp Turku. The slides to my talk are on SlideShare, but a blog post summarising the talk will be up here next week. Today was also my last day at Zeeland Family.
I joined H1 in 2012 as the third employee. It was my first “real” web development job working for a company, after almost 4 years of working as a freelancer. In 2016 our small team was acquired by Zeeland Family, and overnight we gained over 130 new colleagues. During these years I’ve had the priviledge of working with extremely talented, smart people and all-round fun and lovable human beings. Thank you, you know who you are.
Now though it’s time to move on, meet new people, face new challenges and learn new things.
Gutenberg editor styling: more work for CSS developers?
Many agencies trying out Gutenberg early seem to have run into issues styling the editor. Keeping the front end and editor styles similar and in sync will be even more important with the new editor because of its visual nature, but it doesn’t seem like it’s going to be easy for developers.
In June, Marie Manandise wrote about her Gutenberg research at Studio 24. The post is quite long and worth reading even though Gutenberg development has progressed a lot since then. One of her main conclusions was quite scary though:
Were we to implement one of our current websites with Gutenberg now, we estimate that the extra CSS work required to style blocks in the editor and the complexity of updating block markup would more than double our development and QA time.
And that’s not counting the time to invest in coming up with internal best practices, build tools and a potential bank of re-usable components.
“We tried converting a bespoke website design in WordPress with Gutenberg” on Medium
Luehrsen Heinrich‘s more recent experiences building a site for a game studio were overall positive, but they too mentioned this in WP Tavern’s article:
From a development perspective, Luehrsen said his team still struggles with the backend styles for the editor and that frontend and backend styles differ wildly because of that. They also haven’t yet found a maintainable, stable way of applying global styles to the Gutenberg editor.
“How a Munich-based Game Studio is Using WordPress and Gutenberg to Power Its Website” on WP Tavern
Exciting times. Hopefully there’s still time to do something about that now that 5.0 development has been pushed back to November.
Trying out webmention support on my blog
This post is a test. I like the idea of owning my content, instead of leaving it inside corporate silos like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Webmentions are a cool W3C recommendation for mentioning/replying to another page on the Internet from your own site. I see it as a standardised way to do what bloggers used to do in the old days anyway, before all these fancy comment forms and social networks.
This post should also be automatically posted to, and collect comments and retweets from Twitter using Bridgy, if the works as advertised. Let’s see.
If you want to try out these things, start by installing the IndieWeb plugin for WordPress, or read more on IndieWeb.org if you’re using some other system.
The Paciello Group on accessibility for people with anxiety and panic disorders
I’ve always thought the prompts on booking sites that tell you there are only 2 rooms left were annoying, but hadn’t considered them an accessibility issue until now. Good read, and there’s a second part coming too.
The web is awash with all manner of so-called dark patterns, designed to convert visitors and part them from their money. While such intrusions can be a source of irritation or even stress for many people, they may be complete showstoppers for people with anxiety or panic disorders.
— Read on developer.paciellogroup.com/blog/2018/08/a-web-of-anxiety-accessibility-for-people-with-anxiety-and-panic-disorders-part-1/