a11y

Here's a question I got the other day?

Would you suggest icon fonts or inline SVGs for a complex single page application? And are there specific accessibility concerns for either? Accessibility is especially important for us because schools use our products. I ask because we are currently in the process of unifying and setting up an icon system.

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Let's talk about state. Communicating state to the user that is, not application stores state in JavaScript objects, or localStorage. We're going to be talking about how to let our users know about state (think: whether a button is disabled or not, or if a panel is active or not), and how we can use CSS for that. We're not going to be using inline styles, or, as much as can be helped, class selectors, for reasons that will become clear as we go.

Still here? Cool. Let's do this.

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It started with seeing a recent Pen of Mandy Michael's text effects demos. I'm a very visual creature, so the first thing I noticed was the effect, not the title (which clearly states how the effect was achieved). Instantly, my mind went "blend modes!", which turned out to be wrong.

The demo actually uses clip-path. First of all, the text is duplicated. We have black text below as the actual text content of the element and the white text above as the value of the content property (taken from a data attribute which gets updated via JS). These two are stacked one on top of each other (they completely overlap). Then the pseudo-element with the white text above gets clipped to the shape of the black dress.

However, this means we need to change the clipping path if we change the image and, at this point, it's anything but easy to figure out polygonal clipping paths with a lot of points via dev tools (which is why having something like Benett Feely's Clippy with two-way editing directly in dev tools would be immensely useful). So I decided to give my initial idea - blend modes - a try.

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A month ago I explored the importance of relying on Interaction Media Features to identify the user's ability to hover over elements or to detect the accuracy of their pointing device, meaning a fine pointer like a mouse or a coarse one like a finger.

But it goes beyond the input devices or the ability to hover; the screen refresh rate, the color of the screen, or the orientation. Making assumptions about these factors based on the width of the viewport is not reliable and can lead to a broken interface.

I'll take you on a journey through the land of Media Query Level 4 and explore the opportunities that the W3C CSS WG has drafted to help us deal with all the device fruit salad madness.

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Last month, Heather Migliorisi looked at the accessibility of Smooth Scrolling. In order to do smooth scrolling, you:

1. Check if the clicked link is #jump link
2. Stop the browser default behavior of jumping immediately to that element on the page
3. Animate the scrolling to the element the #jump link pointed to

Stopping the browser default behavior is the part that is problematic for accessibility. No longer does the #jump link move focus to element the #jump link pointed to. So Heather added a #4: move focus to the element the #jump link pointed to.

But moving focus through JavaScript isn't possible on every element. Sometimes you need to force that element to be focusable, which she did through setting tabindex="-1".

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We posted not long ago about the difference between native CSS variables (custom properties) and preprocessor variables. There are a few esoteric things preprocessor variables can do that native variables cannot, but for the most part, native variables can do the same things. But, they are more powerful because of how they are live-interpolated. Should their values ever change (e.g. JavaScript, media query hits, etc) the change triggers immediate change on the site.

Cool, right? But still, how actually useful is that? What are the major use cases? I think we're still seeing those shake out.

One use case, it occurred to me, would be theming of a site (think: custom colors for elements around a site). (more…)