08 March 2022
Oh carousels. The last time I wrote about carousels, it was 2017 (seemingly a lifetime ago), when I shared a solution for fixing keyboard navigation in carousels.
I write about... Accessibility
A Very Informal Look at Gutenberg Accessibility
16 October 2018
We have been working all year to replatform our websites at work from Drupal to WordPress. We decided to go with WordPress for many reasons, one of the biggest being its admin UI. The WordPress edit screen, especially when compared to the Drupal edit screen, has historically been intuitive and preferred by content editors. In fact, many of my clients in the past have asked to switch their websites from Drupal (or similarly complex systems) to WordPress because of WordPress’s UI advantages.
The Accessibility of ::before and ::after
19 December 2017
I was recently reading a tutorial on how to use CSS counters. They look great! CSS counters are a new feature of CSS that allow us as developers to enumerate elements in the DOM and then do something with that information. There are plenty of practical uses for this - from numbering highlighted blocks in the text to creating complex nested ordered list bullets. (I mean, we’ve all read government documents that include bullet point 13.2.4.1. Right?)
02 October 2017
I launched a survey to help me answer some lingering questions I have had about what tools screen reader users user to navigate websites. Specifically, I wanted to learn about how users interact with links on a site.
Yes, Virginia. Unique link text really is important.
09 August 2017
One of my biggest pet peeves these days stems around blog or news sites. Your typical blog front page will include a bunch of articles. Each article has a title, a date, maybe an image, and a small bit of “teaser” text from the article itself. The goal is to get the reader to choose a specific article and click to read the entire article. To make that goal abundantly clear, each article on this front page includes a link or a button that usually says “Read More” (or something similar).
Manual accessibility testing is your new BFF
08 August 2017
Testing your websites to ensure they are fully accessible is a lot of work. There are a bunch of tools out there to help you thoroughly test your sites - Siteimprove or Tenon, for example.
I'm lost!: A brief introduction to web landmarks
20 July 2017
Let’s pretend for a minute that you are a new visitor to Washington DC. You look around and see a lot of streets, buildings, and other structures. You need to get from one point in the city to another. You ask me, a local, for directions. I could give you directions like this:
Stop 👏 putting 👏 text 👏 in 👏 images
18 July 2017
I can’t believe it is 2017 and I have to say this, but stop putting text in your #$@&*% images!!!
Bold and strong are not the same thing
10 July 2017
Believe it or not, the <b>, <i>, <strong>, and <em> tags have all been a part of the HTML spec since nearly the beginning. All four of these tags were introduced in HTML 2. However, for a very long time, the community was focused on the <b> and <i> tags only. It is only recently that the <strong> and <em> tags have become “popular”.
Keyboard navigation when carousels block your way
20 April 2017
Oh… carousels.
Accessibility and phone number formatting
02 November 2016
Accessible phone numbers on the web is a more complicated topic than you would think. Screen readers are remarkably inconsistent in the way they handle phone numbers. This is a huge issue from an accessibility point of view.
Accessibility testing: Screen reader edition
16 September 2016
Accessibility testing on our websites is a large, large topic. I am writing about testing with screen readers here, but please keep in mind that accessibility testing != screen reader testing alone. There is a already great article from Viget about web accessibility testing in general – “How to do Web Accessibility QA“. (Be sure to read both parts.)
All Topics
- accessibility
- development
- life
- pregnancy
- user experience
- wordpress
- writing