Dan Q
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Don’t understand why Web accessibility is important? Need a quick and easily-digestible guide to the top things you should be looking into in order to make your web applications screenreader ready? Try this fun, video-game-themed 5 minute video from Microsoft.
There’s a lot more to accessibility than is covered here, and it’s perhaps a little over-focussed on screenreaders, but it’s still a pretty awesome introduction.
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Google’s built-in testing tool Lighthouse judges the accessibility of our websites with a score between 0 and 100. It’s laudable to try to get a high grading, but a score of 100 doesn’t mean that the site is perfectly accessible. To prove that I carried out a little experiment.
…
Manuel Matuzovic wrote a web page that’s pretty-much inaccessible to everybody: it doesn’t work with keyboard navigation, touchscreens, or mice. It doesn’t work with screen readers. Even if you fix the other problems, its contrast is bad enough that almost nobody could read it. It fails ungracefully if CSS or JavaScript is unavailable. Even the source code is illegible. This took a special kind of evil.
But it scores 100% for accessibility on Lighthouse! I earned my firework show for this site last year but I know better than to let that lull me into complacency: accessibility isn’t something a machine can test for you, only something that (at best) it can give you guidance on.
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There are plenty of opportunities for friction in the user experience when logging in, particularly while entering a two factor authentication code. As developers we should be building applications that support the need for account security but don’t detract from the user experience. Sometimes it can feel as though these requirements are in a battle against each other.
In this post we will look at the humble
<input>element and the HTML attributes that will help speed up our users’ two factor authentication experience.…
Summary: simple changes like making your TOTP-receiving <input> to have
inputmode="numeric" gives user-agents solid hints about what kind of data is expected, allowing mobile phones to show a numeric keypad rather than a full keyboard, while
setting autocomplete="one-time-code" hints to password managers and autocomplete tools that what’s being collected needn’t be stored for future use as it’ll expire (and can
also help indicate to authenticators where they should auto-type).
As my current research project will show, the user experience of multifactor authentication is a barrier to entry for many users who might otherwise benefit from it. Let’s lower that barrier.
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I think that CSS would be greatly helped if we solemnly state that “CSS4 is here!” In this post I’ll try to convince you of my viewpoint.
I am proposing that we web developers, supported by the W3C CSS WG, start saying “CSS4 is here!” and excitedly chatter about how it will hit the market any moment now and transform the practice of CSS.
Of course “CSS4” has no technical meaning whatsoever. All current CSS specifications have their own specific versions ranging from 1 to 4, but CSS as a whole does not have a version, and it doesn’t need one, either.
Regardless of what we say or do, CSS 4 will not hit the market and will not transform anything. It also does not describe any technical reality.
Then why do it? For the marketing effect.
…
Hurrah! CSS4 is here!
I’m sure that, like me, you’re excited to start using the latest CSS technologies, like paged media, hyphen control, the zero-specificity :where() selector, and new accessibility selectors like the ‘prefers-reduced-motion’ @media query. The browser support might not be “there” yet, but so long as you’ve got a suitable commitment to progressive enhancement then you can be using all of these and many more today (I am!). Fantastic!
But if you’ve got more than a little web savvy you might still be surprised to hear me say that CSS4 is here, or even that it’s a “thing” at all. Welll… that’s because it isn’t. Not officially. Just like JavaScript’s versioning has gone all evergreen these last few years, CSS has gone the same way, with different “modules” each making their way through the standards and implementation processes independently. Which is great, in general, by the way – we’re seeing faster development of long-overdue features now than we have through most of the Web’s history – but it does make it hard to keep track of what’s “current” unless you follow along watching very closely. Who’s got time for that?
When CSS2 gained prominence at around the turn of the millennium it was revolutionary, and part of the reason for that – aside from the fact that it gave us all some features we’d wanted for a long time – was that it gave us a term to rally behind. This browser already supports it, that browser’s getting there, this other browser supports it but has a f**ked-up box model (you all know the one I’m talking about)… we at last had an overarching term to discuss what was supported, what was new, what was ready for people to write articles and books about. Nobody’s going to buy a book that promises to teach them “CSS3 Selectors Level 3, Fonts Level 3, Writing Modes Level 3, and Containment Level 1”: that title’s not even going to fit on the cover. But if we wrapped up a snapshot of what’s current and called it CSS4… now that’s going to sell.
Can we show the CSS WG that there’s mileage in this idea and make it happen? Oh, I hope so. Because while the modular approach to CSS is beautiful and elegant and progressive… I’m afraid that we can’t use it to inspire junior developers.
Also: I don’t want this joke to forever remain among the top results when searching for CSS4…
Chris Ferdinandi‘s daily tip for yesterday addressed a common familiar to Web developers using custom fonts (i.e. basically all of them):
In many browsers, if a custom typeface is declared but hasn’t finished downloading and parsing yet, browsers will leave space for the text but not render it until the file is ready.
This is often called a Flash Of Invisible Text (or FOIT).
In a now slightly outdated article, Ilya Grigorik, a web performance engineer at Google, reports:
29% of page loads on Chrome for Android displayed blank text: the user agent knew the text it needed to paint, but was blocked from doing so due to the unavailable font resource. In the median case the blank text time was ~350 ms, ~750 ms for the 75th percentile, and a scary ~2300 ms for the 95th.
To make matters worse, some mobile browsers never timeout a failed font file, and therefore never show text in a fallback typeface if the custom one fails to load. You get nothing at all.
Let’s talk about how to fix that.
…
He’s right that the FOIT is annoying, and he’s right that for most text (and especially body text) the best result would be if a fallback system font was used immediately and swapped-out for the designer’s preferred font as soon as it becomes available: this maximises usability, especially on slower devices and connections. His solution is this:
FontFaceSet.load() indicates that the font is available,
and (via a cookie) for as long as the font file is expected to appear in the browser cache.
This approach is not without its problems. It requires Javascript (users for whom Javascript fails for some reason won’t see the font at all, but may still have to download the font file!), conflates cookie lifetime with cache lifetime (the two can be cleared independently, cookies can sometimes be synchronised across devices that don’t necessarily share caches, etc.), and uses Javascript techniques that don’t work in some browsers (Edge and Internet Explorer are both capable of showing custom web fonts but both will use the fallback font unless either (a) further Javascript is added (which Chris doesn’t supply) or (b) browser detection and/or conditional comments are used to trigger different behaviour in these browsers (which is icky).
If only there was a better way to prevent the FOIT. One which degrades gracefully in older browsers, doesn’t require Javascript, doesn’t make assumptions about user cookie/cache configuration, and ideally involves a lot less code. It turns out, there is!
The font-display CSS directive exists to solve this exact issue [MDN]. Here’s what it looks like being used to solve the problem Chris presents (example taken from my
blog’s CSS!):
@font-face{
font-family:"Raleway";
font-style:normal;
font-weight:400;
src: local("Raleway"),
local("Raleway-Regular"),
url(/wp-content/themes/q18/fonts/raleway-v11-latin-regular.woff2) format("woff2"),
url(/wp-content/themes/q18/fonts/raleway-v11-latin-regular.woff) format("woff");
font-display:swap;
}
Setting font-display: swap in the @font-face block tells the browser to use fallback fonts in place of this font while it loads. That’s probably exactly what
you want for text fonts and especially body text; it means that the user sees the text as soon as possible and it’s swapped-out for the preferred font the moment it becomes available:
no Javascript necessary! Conversely, font-display: block is a better choice for icon fonts where you want to force the browser to wait as long as possible for the
font file to load (because any content rendered using it makes no sense otherwise).
font-display works out-of-the-box with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari and with the next version of Edge; older versions of Edge and Internet Explorer will simply fall-back to
their default behaviour (FOIT where-necessary) – this is a progressive enhancement technique. But instead of a couple of dozen
lines of Javascript, it’s a single line of CSS.
The only downside is that Google Web Fonts won’t add this directive, so you’ll need to
self-host your font files (which is really easy, by the way: there’s a tool that’ll show you how). You should consider
doing this anyway, of course: CDNs introduce a
number of problems and no longer provide the relative performance benefits they used to. So self-host
your fonts, add font-display: swap, and enjoy the most-lightweight and well-standardised approach possible to combatting the FOIT.
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I was just talking with Dave about the accessibility of moving images on the web, and he said:
hm… I wonder if you could use
picture+prefers-reduced-motion?He then sends the following code:
<picture> <source srcset="no-motion.jpg" media="(prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)"></source> <img srcset="animated.gif alt="brick wall"/> </picture>I copied the code, dropped it into a post of mine, created a static image of an animated GIF, and turned on the “reduce motion” preference (System Preferences > Accessibility > Display). And then BOOM. Just worked. In real time!
…
I added reduced-motion support to DanQ.me earlier this year, but I only bothered to pay attention to the animated parts of the layout and design itself (the “bounce” on the menus and the cutesy motion of the logo, for example) and considered the (few) GIF animations and the like that I’ve added to be out-of-scope. But this approach is really quite simple and elegant, and I’ll bear it in mind if I ever have need of such a thing!
When I write a blog post, it generally becomes a static thing: its content always
usually stays the same for the rest of its life (which is, in my case, pretty much forever). But sometimes, I go back and make an
amendment. When I make minor changes that don’t affect the overall meaning of the work, like fixing spelling mistakes and repointing broken links, I just edit the page, but for
more-significant changes I try to make it clear what’s changed and how.
Historically, I’d usually marked up deletions with the HTML <strike>/<s> elements (or
other visually-similar approaches) and insertions by clearly stating that a change had been made (usually accompanied by the date and/or time of the change), but this isn’t a good
example of semantic code. It also introduces an ambiguity when it clashes with the times I use <s> for comedic effect in the Web equivalent of the old caret-notation joke:
Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's visiting from corporate HQ.
Better, then, to use the <ins> and <del> elements, which were designed for exactly this purpose and even accept attributes to specify the date/time
of the modification and to cite a resource that explains the change, e.g. <ins datetime="2019-05-03T09:00:00+00:00"
cite="https://alices-blog.example.com/2019/05/03/speaking.html">The last speaker slot has now been filled; thanks Alice</ins>. I’ve worked to retroactively add such
semantic markup to my historical posts where possible, but it’ll be an easier task going forwards.
Of course, no browser I’m aware of supports these attributes, which is a pity because the metadata they hold may well have value to a reader. In order to expose them I’ve added a little bit of CSS that looks a little like this, which makes their details (where available) visible as a sort-of tooltip when hovering over or tapping on an affected area. Give it a go with the edits at the top of this post!
ins[datetime], del[datetime] { position: relative; } ins[datetime]::before, del[datetime]::before { position: absolute; top: -24px; font-size: 12px; color: #fff; border-radius: 4px; padding: 2px 6px; opacity: 0; transition: opacity 0.25s; hyphens: none; /* suppresses sitewide line break hyphenation rules */ white-space: nowrap; /* suppresses extraneous line breaks in Chrome */ } ins[datetime]:hover::before, del[datetime]:hover::before { opacity: 0.75; } ins[datetime]::before { content: 'inserted ' attr(datetime) ' ' attr(cite); background: #050; /* insertions are white-on-green */ } del[datetime]::before { content: 'deleted ' attr(datetime) ' ' attr(cite); background: #500; /* deletions are white-on-red */ }
<ins>/<del> datetimes and citations on hover or touch.
I’m aware that the intended use-case of <ins>/<del> is change management, and that the expectation is that the “final” version of a
document wouldn’t be expected to show all of the changes that had been made to it. Such a thing could be simulated, I suppose, by appropriately hiding and styling the
<ins>/<del> blocks on the client-side, and that’s something I might look into in future, but in practice my edits are typically small and rare
enough that nobody would feel inconvenienced by their inclusion/highlighting: after all, nobody’s complained so far and I’ve been doing exactly that, albeit in a non-semantic way, for
many years!
I’m also slightly conscious that my approach to the “tooltip” might cause it to obstruct interactivity with something directly above an insertion or deletion: e.g. making a hyperlink inaccessible. I’ve tested with a variety of browsers and devices and it doesn’t seem to happen (my line height works in my favour) but it’s something I’ll need to be mindful of if I change my typographic design significantly in the future.
A final observation: I love the CSS attr() function, and I’ve been using it (and counter()) for all
kinds of interesting things lately, but it annoys me that I can only use it in a content: statement. It’d be amazingly valuable to be able to treat integer-like attribute
values as integers and combine it with a calc() in order to facilitate more-dynamic styling of arbitrary sets of HTML elements. Maybe one day…
For the time being, I’m happy enough with my new insertion/deletion markers. If you’d like to see them in use in their natural environment, see the final paragraph of my 2012 review of The Signal and The Noise.
The current iteration of my blog diverges from an architectural principle common to most of previous versions of the last 20 years. While each previous change in design and layout was intended to provide a single monolithic upgrade, this version tries to provide me with a platform for continuous ongoing experimentation and change.
I’ve been trying to make better use of my blog as a vehicle for experimenting with web technologies, as I used to with personal sites back in the 1990s and early 2000s; to see a vanity site like this one as a living playground rather than something that – like most of the sites I’m paid to work on – something whose design is, for the most part, static for long periods of time.
Among the things I’ve added prior to the initial launch of this version of the design are gracefully-degrading grids, reduced-motion support, and dark-mode support – three CSS features of increasing levels of “cutting edge”-ness but each of which is capable of being implemented in a way that does not break the site’s compatibility. This site’s pages are readable using (simulations of) ancient rendering engines or even in completely text-based browsers, and that’s just great.
Here’s how I’ve implemented those three features:
The grid of recent notes, shares, checkins and videos on my
homepage is powered by the display: grid; CSS directive. The number of columns varies by screen width from six
on the widest screens down to three or just one on increasingly small screens. Crucially, grid-auto-flow: dense; is used to ensure an even left-to-right filling of the
available space even if one of the “larger” blocks (with grid-column: span 2; grid-row: span 2;) is forced for space reasons to run onto the next line. This means that
content might occasionally be displayed in a different order from that in which it is written in the HTML (which is reverse
order of publication), but in exchange the items are flush with both sides.
grid-auto-flow:
dense; means that the “3 Feb” item is allowed to bubble-up and fill the gap, appearing out-of-order but flush with the edge.
Not all web browsers support display: grid; and while that’s often only one of design and not of readability because these browsers will fall back to usually-very-safe
default display modes like block and inline, as appropriate, sometimes there are bigger problems. In Internet Explorer 11, for example, I found (with thanks to
@_ignatg) a problem with my directives specifying the size of these cells (which are actually <li> elements because, well,
semantics matter). Because it understood the directives that ought to impact the sizing of the list items but not
the one that redeclared its display type, IE made… a bit of a mess of things…
Do websites need to look the same in every browser? No. But the content should be readable regardless, and here my CSS was rendering my content unreadable. Given that Internet Explorer users represent a little under 0.1% of visitors to my site I don’t feel the need to hack it to have the same look-and-feel: I just need it to have the same content readability. CSS Feature Queries to the rescue!
CSS Feature Queries – the @supports selector – make it possible to apply parts of your stylesheet if and only if
the browser supports specific CSS features, for example grids. Better yet, using it in a positive manner (i.e. “apply these
rules only if the browser supports this feature”) is progressive enhancement, because browsers that don’t understand the @supports selector act in
the same way as those that understand it but don’t support the specified feature. Fencing off the relevant parts of my stylesheet in a @supports (display: grid) { ... }
block instructed IE to fall back to displaying that content as a boring old list: exactly what I needed.
I like to put a few “fun” features into each design for my blog, and while it’s nowhere near as quirky as having my head play peek-a-boo when you hover your cursor over it, the current header’s animations are in the same ballpark: hover over or click on some of the items in the header menu to see for yourself..
These kinds of animations are fun, but they can also be problematic. People with inner ear disorders (as well as people who’re just trying to maximise the battery life on their portable devices!) might prefer not to see them, and web designers ought to respect that choice where possible. Luckily, there’s an emerging standard to acknowledge that: prefers-reduced-motion. Alongside its cousins inverted-colors, prefers-reduced-transparency, prefers-contrast and prefers-color-scheme (see below for that last one!), these new CSS tools allow developers to optimise based on the accessibility features activated by the user within their operating system.
If you’ve tweaked your accessibility settings to reduce the amount of animation your operating system shows you, this website will respect that choice as well by not animating the
contents of the title, menu, or the homepage “tiles” any more than is absolutely necessary… so long as you’re using a supported browser, which right now means Safari or Firefox (or the
“next” version of Chrome). Making the change itself is pretty simple: I just added a @media screen and (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) { ... } block to disable or
otherwise cut-down on the relevant animations.
Similarly, operating systems are beginning to support “dark mode”, designed for people trying to avoid eyestrain when using their computer at night. It’s possible for your browser to respect this and try to “fix” web pages for you, of course, but it’s better still if the developer of those pages has anticipated your need and designed them to acknowledge your choice for you. It’s only supported in Firefox and Safari so far and only on recent versions of Windows and MacOS, but it’s a start and a helpful touch for those nocturnal websurfers out there.
It’s pretty simple to implement. In my case, I just stacked some overrides into a @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { ... } block, inverting the background and primary
foreground colours, softening the contrast, removing a few “bright” borders, and darkening rather than lightening background images used on homepage tiles. And again, it’s an example of
progressive enhancement: the (majority!) of users whose operating systems and/or browsers don’t yet support this feature won’t be impacted by its inclusion in my stylesheet, but those
who can make use of it can appreciate its benefits.
This isn’t the end of the story of CSS experimentation on my blog, but it’s a part of the it that I hope you’ve enjoyed.
Saw this and thought of you, @themissprince: cantunsee.space
Still have “the eye” for pixel-perfect design? #UX
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Last week, I attended W3C TPAC as well as the CSS Working Group meeting there. Various changes were made to specifications, and discussions had which I feel are of interest to web designers and developers. In this article, I’ll explain a little bit about what happens at TPAC, and show some examples and demos of the things we discussed at TPAC for CSS in particular.
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This article describes proposals for the future of CSS, some of which are really interesting. It includes mention of:
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TL/DR: When you use eight values specifying border-radius in CSS, you can create organic looking shapes. WOW. No time to read it all ?— we made a visual tool for you. Find it here.
Introduction
During this year’s Frontend Conference Zurich Rachel Andrew talked about Unlocking the Power of CSS Grid Layout. At the end of her talk, she mentioned something about an old CSS property that got stuck in my head:
“The Image is set round just by using the well-supported border-radius. Don’t forget that old CSS still exists and is useful. You don’t need to use something fancy for every effect.” — Rachel Andrew
Shortly after I heard this talk, I thought that you certainly could create more than just circles and started to dig deeper into what can be done using border-radius.
…
That’s really cool. I had a quick play and made this gold ‘shield’ award:
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false
Although there’s a lot of heated discussion around diversity, I feel many of us ignore the elephant in the web development diversity room. We tend to forget about users of older or non-standard devices and browsers, instead focusing on people with modern browsers, which nowadays means the latest versions of Chrome and Safari.
This is nothing new — see “works only in IE” ten years ago, or “works only in Chrome” right now — but as long as we’re addressing other diversity issues in web development we should address this one as well.
Ignoring users of older browsers springs from the same causes as ignoring women, or non-whites, or any other disadvantaged group. Average web developer does not know any non-whites, so he ignores them. Average web developer doesn’t know any people with older devices, so he ignores them. Not ignoring them would be more work, and we’re on a tight deadline with a tight budget, the boss didn’t say we have to pay attention to them, etc. etc. The usual excuses.
…
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I am increasingly of the opinion that the general software engineering adage “Don’t Repeat Yourself” does not always apply to web development. Also, I found that web development classes in CS academia are not very realistic. These two problems turn out to have the same root cause: a lack of appreciation of what browsers do…
As I indicated in my last blog post, my new blog theme has a “pop up” Dan in the upper-left corner. Assuming that you’re not using Internet Explorer, then when you move your mouse cursor over it, my head will “duck” back behind the bar below it.
This is all done without any Javascript whatsoever: it’s pure CSS. Here’s how it’s done:
<div class="sixteen columns">
<div id="dans-creepy-head"></div>
<h1 id="site-title" class="graphic">
<a href="/" title="Scatmania">Scatmania</a>
</h1>
<span class="site-desc graphic">
The adventures and thoughts of "Scatman" Dan Q
</span>
</div>
The HTML for the header itself is pretty simple: there’s a container (the big blue bar) which contains, among other things, a <div> with the id "dans-creepy-head". That’s what we’ll be working with. Here’s the main CSS:
#dans-creepy-head {
position: absolute;
top: -24px;
left: 15px;
width: 123px;
height: 133px;
background: url(/dans-creepy-head.png) top left no-repeat;
transition: all 800ms;
-o-transition: all 800ms;
-webkit-transition: all 800ms;
-moz-transition: all 800ms;
}
#dans-creepy-head:hover {
top: 100px;
height: 60px;
}
The CSS sets a size, position, and background image to the <div>, in what is probably a familiar way. A :hover selector changes the style to increase the distance from the top of the container (from -24px to 100px) and to decrease the height, cropping the image (from 133px to 60px – this was necessary in this case to prevent the bottom of the image from escaping out from underneath the masking bar that it’s supposed to be “hiding behind”). With just that code, you’d have a perfectly workable “duck”, but with a jerky, one-step animation.
The transition directive (and browser-specific prefix versions -o-transition, -webkit-transition, and -moz-transition, for compatability) are what makes the magic happen. This element specifies that any ("all") style is changed on this element (whether via CSS directives, as in this case, or by a change of class or properties by a Javascript function), that a transition effect will be applied to those changes. My use of "all" is a lazy catch-all – I could have specified the individual properties ( top and height) that I was interested in changing, and even put different periods on each, but I’ll leave it to you to learn about CSS3 transition options for yourself. The 800ms is the duration of the transition: in my case, 0.8 seconds.
html.ie #dans-creepy-head:hover {
top: -24px;
height: 133px;
}
@media (max-width: 780px) {
#dans-creepy-head {
display: none;
}
}
I apply some CSS to prevent the :hover effect from taking place in Internet Explorer, which doesn’t support transitions. The "ie" class is applied to the <html> tag using Paul Irish’s technique, so it’s easy to detect and handle IE users without loading separate stylesheet files for them. And finally, in order to fit with my newly-responsive design, I make the pop-up head disappear when the window is under 780px wide (at which point there’d be a risk of it colliding with the title).
That’s all there is to it! A few lines of CSS, and you’ve got an animation that degrades gracefully. You could equally-well apply transformations to links (how about making them fade in or out, or change the position of their background image?) or, with a little Javascript, to your tabstrips and drop-down menus.