October 31, 2021

🧶 ICYMI #27: 5 Digital Accessibility Myths Busted

Howdy folks,

Coming at you a lil later than usual on this one, but let’s pretend I did it on purpose so I could wish you a day-of “Happy Halloween!” 🎃👻. I hope you’ve had some fun spooky times this weekend. As for me, I did an extremely low-effort costume (Noel Fielding from Great British Bake Off), and competed participated in my gym’s Halloween in-house partnered throwdown.

✏️ Writes

• 5 Digital Accessibility Myths Busted (Carie Fisher) - If you’re already well acquainted with digital accessibility, none of this will probably be new to you, but I love really great write-ups (like this one), because it gives language and framing to make the case for accessibility in our work environments and projects.
• Building accessible digital products using focus and interaction states (Claudio Luis Vera) - Learn the what, why and how of building accessible digital products using focus and interaction states.
• HTML and CSS still isn’t about painting with code (Christian Heilmann) - I’m super nostalgic about learning to code in the Neopets / Myspace web era. But in this reflection, Christian talks about the weaknesses of learning to build for the web with a priority on the immediate visual gratification, in a way I hadn’t really thought about. “In the best of worlds, we could get people excited with a visual first approach and get them to learn more later on. The state of the web right now makes me question the understanding part though.” ​(Posted in April 2020, but new to me).

🔨 Projects

• Radix UI - A component library with unstyled, accessible components. I usually reach for Reach UI (I’m leaving the pun) but I’ll definitely be looking into this more. Started taking a look through seeing this talk by Pedro Duarte on the Radix dropdown component.
• Torchlight.dev - A VSCode-compatible syntax highlighting API. I haven’t tried to use it yet, but I am rebuilding some stuff, and I’ve seen great things about this project! Will be checking it out.
• What the Tag?! - A decision tree to quickly find out which HTML tag to use, when.

💬 Tweets

🌵 Personal

• Facebook rebranded its corporate name to Meta. It feels laughably Black Mirror to me (in :lol-sob: horror fashion), but the last few years have taught me I have very little grip on what people will embrace, apparently. Hanging out with friends for Halloween last night, I had a… discussion with someone who really believes this vision is what a lot of people want to see. In my tiny piece of this world, myself and the folks around me seem to be leaning harder and harder outside of the virtual to the real and the tangible. Time will tell, I suppose. Definitely not the (non-meta, non-corporate, non-virtual) reality I want to see.
• My attempted complete read of the Wheel of Time series is going well. Since last week, I’ve read The Eye of the World, and The Great Hunt, and am now 234 pages into The Dragon Reborn. This pace will absolutely not maintain, but hell or high water I’ll finish this series, and high school me will finally relax about it.

Are you reading (or have you recently read) anything that you’d emphatically recommend? (To put on my list after I’ve finished all all 4 million (plus) words of the WoT series, of course 😭).

Happy Halloween,

Amberley