Articles by

Eric Bailey

Boston, like many large cities, has a subway system. Commuters on it are accustomed to hearing regular public address announcements.

Riders simply tune out some announcements, such as the pre-recorded station stop names repeated over and over. Or public service announcements from local politicians and celebrities—again, kind of repetitive and not worth paying attention to after the first time. Most important are service alerts, which typically deliver direct and immediate information riders need to take action on.

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The open web's success is built on interoperable technologies. The ability to control animation now exists alongside important features such as zooming content, installing extensions, enabling high contrast display, loading custom stylesheets, or disabling JavaScript.

Sites all too often inundate their audiences with automatically playing, battery-draining, resource-hogging animations. The need for people being able to take back control of animations might be more prevalent than you may initially think.

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Making your SVG accessible includes adding extra steps to your workflow, but is well-worth it. By embracing clean, semantic markup and taking advantage of some of the less well-known features of CSS, you can create easily maintainable solutions that include considerations for low vision, a condition that affects a not-insignificant amount of the population.

Rather than writing and maintaining complicated and brittle state-managing Javascript, work with existing browser capabilities such as media queries to easily make the experience accommodate the widest range of browsing contexts, including High Contrast Mode.

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