Snippets

Designing Accessible Content: Typography, Font Styling, and Structure

There are many design considerations for making your content more accessible to all. Some things to think about and build into your design workflow include:

  • Choose a common font that most users have encountered before.
  • The “serif vs. sans-serif debate” is not a huge deal if you choose a common font family or one that has unique characters.
  • Avoid specialty display fonts or font families that are not unique (ex. letters or numbers that could mirror each other).
  • Your fonts should have a minimum size of 14px (ideally more) and when coded should use relative values.
  • Pay attention to color and contrast! Use tools to check the ratio between the text and background and be wary of gray.
  • Don’t rely on color alone to signify information (ex. “click on the red button”).
  • Clearly define paragraph and letter spacing.
  • Do not let the overall width of the content exceed 80 characters (40 characters for logograms).
  • Avoid paragraph alignment (such as justified) which creates whitespace within the content.

The Fallacies of Distributed Computing (Applied to Front-End Performance)

In the mid-nineties, Laurence Peter Deutsch and colleagues at Sun Microsystems devised a list of what they called The Fallacies of Distributed Computing. These were a list of common assumptions that developers working on distributed systems were prone to making; mistakes that would impact the reliability, security, or resilience of their software. Those fallacies are as follows:

  1. The network is reliable.
  2. Latency is zero.
  3. Bandwidth is infinite.
  4. The network is secure.
  5. Topology doesn’t change.
  6. There is one administrator.
  7. Transport cost is zero.
  8. The network is homogeneous.

Reading over the eight fallacies listed out so plainly, they seem so obvious and clear that you’d struggle to believe that anyone would ever fall foul of them: of course we know bandwidth isn’t infinite! The thing is, these fallacies are obvious, but they don’t exist to teach us anything new; they exist to remind us of the fundamentals. Nor are they intended to explain or describe normal condition; they’re intended to remind us of worst case scenarios. They’re not saying that the network is always unreliable, or that latency is always high, or that bandwidth is always low: they’re saying that, sometimes, one or all of them will be sub-optimal. We should prepare for that.

Yet time and time again I see developers falling into the same old traps—making assumptions or overly-optimistic predictions about the conditions in which their apps will run. Developers frequently tell me things like most of our users are on wifi, or 4G is pretty much everywhere now, or people only ever visit the site from inside the office anyway. Even if this is statistically true—even if your analytics corroborate the claim—planning only for the best leaves you utterly unprepared for the worst. To paraphrase Jeremy, it’s not about how well it works, but how well it fails.

What if images don't arrive? A tale of a badly designed lazy loader

If you’re looking for an example of exactly what not to do in terms of front-end performance, I can’t think of a better one than this - they threw away a lot of the performance optimizations browsers give us for free in a bizarre attempt at improving page loading, which ended up doing the opposite:

I was recently conducting some exploratory work for a potential client when I hit upon a pretty severe flaw in a design decision they’d made: They’d built a responsive image lazyloader in JavaScript which, by design, worked by:

  1. immediately applying display: none; to the <body>;
  2. waiting until the very last of the page’s images had arrived;
  3. once they’d arrived, removing the display: none; and gradually fading the page into visibility.

Not only does this strike me as an unusual design decision—setting out to build a lazyloader and then having it intentionally block rendering—there had been no defensive strategy to answer the question: what if something goes wrong with image delivery?

‘Something wrong’ is exactly what happened. Due to an imperfect combination of:

  1. images being completely unoptimised, plus;
  2. a misconfiguration with their image transformation service leading to double downloads for all images;

…they’d managed to place 27.9MB of images onto the Critical Path. Almost 30MB of previously non-render blocking assets had just been turned into blocking ones on purpose with no escape hatch. Start render time was as high as 27.1s over a cable connection1.

If you’re going to build an image loader that hides the whole page until all images are ready, you must also ask yourself what if the images don’t arrive?

Not Your Father's Navigation Strategy: There's More Than Just the TAB Key

As a blind screen reader user, and in my career educating designers, developers, and testers on accessibility issues, I have had the opportunity to observe the techniques used by various users to understand the layout and operation of web pages and applications. I have also seen well-intentioned sighted testers believe that components or entire sites are not accessible because they were unfamiliar with the techniques of navigating the web without sight.

In this article, I will walk you through the ways a blind screen reader user can navigate a web page, gather information about its layout and organization, and use that knowledge to efficiently and rapidly navigate a site or application. I hope to convey the importance of using techniques other than the TAB key as a primary means of navigating a website and illustrate the power you provide to a screen reader user by following semantic HTML markup and the principles of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

Revisiting prefers-reduced-motion, the reduced motion media query

Two years ago, I wrote about prefers-reduced-motion, a media query introduced into Safari 10.1 to help people with vestibular and seizure disorders use the web. The article provided some background about the media query, why it was needed, and how to work with it to avoid creating disability-triggering visual effects.

The article was informed by other people’s excellent work, namely Orde Saunders’ post about user queries, and Val Head’s article on web animation motion sensitivity.

We’re now four months into 2019, and it makes me happy to report that we have support for the feature in all major desktop browsers! Safari was first, with Firefox being a close second. Chrome was a little late to the party, but introduced it as of version 74.

[…]

Reduce isn’t necessarily remove

We may not need to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to using animation. Remember, it’s prefers-reduced-motion, not prefers-no-motion.

[…]

If the meaning of a component is diminished by removing its animation altogether, we could slow down and simplify the component’s animation to the point where the concept can be communicated without potentially being an accessibility trigger.

Debugging Internet Explorer in 2019

Even though Microsoft has explicitly told the world to stop using Internet Explorer 11, many organizations still have a significant enough IE11 user base that they have no choice but to build their products to acquiesce to the aging browser’s idiosyncratic demands.

Whether you are new to the world of building the front-end for Internet Explorer 11 compatibility or you are an old hand who knows their way around all the IE11 pitfalls, read on to learn more about:

  • Choosing the right environment for debugging
  • Dealing with unsupported JavaScript
  • Tackling CSS layout issues
  • Understanding the IE11 debugger

Armed with these tips, one should be able to quickly solve problems in the instance when a web application works perfectly on everything but IE11.

Reader Mode: The Button to Beat

A reminder of why reader modes exist in browsers and to embrace them as a user’s right:

Good design isn’t about forcing someone to walk a tightrope across your carefully manicured lawn. Nor is it a puzzle box casually tossed to the user, hoping they’ll unlock it to reveal a hidden treasure. Good design is about doing the hard work to accommodate the different ways people access a solution to an identified problem.

For reading articles, the core problem is turning my ignorance about an issue into understanding (the funding model for this is a whole other complicated concern). The more obstructions you throw in my way to achieve this goal, the more I am inclined to leave and get my understanding elsewhere—all I’ll remember is how poor a time I had while trying to access your content. What is the value of an ad impression if it ultimately leads to that user never returning?

Font style matcher

This is pretty cool: you can use this to visually display the differences between two fonts - usually a fallback font and a web font - and adjust the various CSS font properties to match them as closely as possible to reduce the amount of page shifting that may occur when the web font loads. Also includes a longer paragraph at the bottom that can compare the two fonts either by overlaying them statically or by switching between them at a regular interval.