Category: Web

The Paciello Group on accessibility for people with anxiety and panic disorders

Posted on by Daniel

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/

Express Review: Going Offline by Jeremy Keith

Posted on by Daniel

Jeremy nails it again with this beginner-friendly introduction to Service Workers and Progressive Web Apps. The foreword to the book says “you’ll gain a solid understanding of how to put this new technology to work for you right away” and I’d say that is very accurate.

One of the important things the book emphasizes is that any existing website can benefit from service workers, not only fancy single page apps.

If you’re like me and don’t know much about service workers, get this book now: abookapart.com/products/going-offline

Moving from CSS Frameworks to CSS Grid

Posted on by Daniel Leave a Comment on Moving from CSS Frameworks to CSS Grid
This is a long-overdue blog post version of a talk I did at WordCamp Stockholm in November 2017.

I’ve been playing around with various CSS frameworks for the past eight years. All these frameworks like Foundation, Bootstrap and Blueprint have really only served one purpose for me: to disguise the fact that until now, layout in CSS has been a hack.

Continue reading “Moving from CSS Frameworks to CSS Grid”

Thoughts on the Contrast Swap Technique for Improving Performance

Posted on by Daniel

In her post three days ago on CSS Tricks, Una Kravets described a clever technique she discovered for significantly reducing image sizes on the web with little loss of quality. Essentially the idea is this: 

  1. Reduce the contrast of the image in Photoshop
  2. Re-apply contrast using CSS filter()

With this process, Kravets managed to get between 23% to 28% reduction in image size, which can add up to a lot of KB if you have many images on the page. I think this technique is a great discovery and a boost for image-heavy sites that don’t need to worry much about good IE support… but. But, I can’t help but think it does smell a bit hacky.

This kind of contrast trickery shouldn’t be done in CSS, it should be in the image format. And to be clear, I don’t mean to criticize Una’s discovery. If it’s possible to reduce contrast and then re-apply it on the fly with little perceptible loss in quality, surely those instructions could be passed along in the image files themselves and not have to rely on a separate stylesheet which may or may not load? I guess we’d need a new image format for that…

Posted in Web