Thinking with a progressive enhancement mindset, that is starting with the most basic HTML features and enhancing with more advanced stuff, is in my opinion the best way to go about building inclusive, accessible websites. Jeremy Keith wrote about some accessibility feedback he got and how his originally robust code made the solution an easy fix:
Category: General
Christmas Pudding, Revisited
Nine years ago I wrote a post on my first experience making my own Christmas Pudding at home, just like my mum used to make them. I haven’t been bothered to make my own for a few years now, especially since they are easier to find these days in Finland. Like I wrote in my 2009 post, they should be steamed for up to 6 hours, which is A Bother. This year my wife and I made them ourselves again, but it turned out we had made twice the amount of pudding mixture required to fill the two Pyrex bowls we had bought specially for them. My wife then had an excellent idea: let’s make pudding cupcakes!
Continue reading “Christmas Pudding, Revisited”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.
Lifehack Tip: Make Better Use of Your Time by Rearranging Icons
I recently discovered it’s pretty easy to trick myself into reading more books and wasting less time looking at my Twitter feed. A lot of my phone usage is just a habit and habits can be changed.
So here’s the magic 3-step program:
- Move social media apps into a folder or off the home screen of your phone. Or even better, remove them completely (which I have done to Facebook and Instagram a while ago)
- Replace with stuff you actually want to be doing. For me that means iBooks for various ebooks and Pocket for saved articles.
- Profit!
John Gruber on Annoying Sharing Bars
Over on Daring Fireball, John Gruber has some true words to say about those pesky floating sharing bars (or “dickbars” like he calls them) used by Medium and others.
A website should not fight the browser. Let the browser provide the chrome, and simply provide the content. Web developers know this is right — these dickbars are being rammed down their throats by SEO experts. The SEO folks are the same dopes who came up with the genius strategy of requiring 5-10 megabytes of privacy-intrusive CPU-intensive JavaScript on every page load that slows down websites. Now they come to their teams and say, “Our pages are too slow — we gotta move to AMP so our pages load fast.”