September 17, 2021

🧶 ICYMI #21: September 17, 2021

Howdy y’all,

Friday yet again! Here are a handful of things that came my way this week. I hope a couple catch your eye.

✏️ Writes

• When to manage focus in an accessible way (Dave Kennedy) - The answer to “when to manage focus” is not clear, but Dave’s article highlights common scenarios where it would be appropriate to consider focus management. He frames a metaphor I quite enjoyed: “Think of it like passing a baton in a relay race. The baton represents the focus you need to pass to the next phase of the race, or in your case, the next step in the experience you’ve shaped… if you don’t manage focus properly, you drop the baton and the race ends.”
• Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS - (Josh Comeau) - Not just beautiful – done well, using shadows can create depth in a web experience, making it feel more “tactile and genuine”, and the elevation effect can be a useful tool to direct user attention.
• How to Draw a Map to a More Fulfilling Career (Jason Lengstorf) - “If we want a happy, fulfilling career, what should we focus on?” Jason frames an exercise that’s helped him create clarify where to focus effort for success.

🎤 Talks + Events

• Upcoming event: Inclusive Design 24 - I’ve shared this before, but worth a reminder as it’s coming up next week! (September 23). A free 24-hour online event, celebrating inclusive design and sharing “knowledge and ideas from analogue to digital, from design to development, from planners to practitioners, and everything and everyone in between.” No registration or sign-up, all sessions are streamed live and publicly with live captions for each session.
• Recorded talk: Voice Content, Multimodal Accessibility, and Ask GeorgiaGov (Preston So) - In this talk, Preston So discusses “the assistive potential voice interfaces and voice content unlock, with insight from Ask GeorgiaGov, among the first content-driven voice interfaces in existence and the first conversational interface built for residents of the state of Georgia.”
• Recorded talk: Measuring Core Web Vitals (Barry Pollard) - In this talk, Barry Pollard does a deep dive on core web vitals, a set of metrics designed to measure vital facets of the user experience.

🔨 Projects

• Fingerspelling.xyz - Learn the ABCs of American Sign Language (ASL) with machine learning.
• Checkboxland - A JavaScript library for rendering anything as HTML checkboxes. Why? “Sometimes the world needs more weird and fun things.”

💬 Tweets

🌵 Personal

• I often miss living in DC, and one of the main reasons is the vibe of everyday life – the walkability and transit, the real neighborhood feel where you can walk to the grocery store and other necessities. The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is proposing an expansion of I-35, the main interstate that runs through the middle of Austin. Widening highways don’t work – the demand increases to fill the new capacity, creates more sprawl, and, in Austin, divides the city. The Rethink35 project proposes instead replacing it with a boulevard. This is the type of city I want to live in.
• Nationally, there’s an increasing focus on legislating pay transparency. Secrecy around compensation only benefits employers. Transparency has been shown to narrow pay inequality. I’m super interested to see how this develops – I’ve both benefitted from pay transparency (amongst co-workers, not via employer transparency) and seen it benefit others.
• The Battle for 3000 Funston Street is the story of The City of Austin’s attempt to build a singular affordable single-family home on a plot of land owned by the city in a wealthy Austin neighborhood. Construction has been stopped since the neighbors filed suit in January 2020.

By the way… if you use any Apple devices, and happen to have not heard about the zero-day flaw discovered that affects all Apple devices, please go update all of them.

Be well and have a good weekend,

Amberley