Link of the week: On popover accessibility: what the browser does and doesn’t do – even if you don’t care about popover, this is an excellent post on the kind of things that browsers give you for free when you use HTML rather than loads of JS. By Hidde de Vries and Scott O’Hara Why UI designers should understand Flexbox and CSS Grid – “Or bye bye, rigid column grid layout” What You Need to Know about Modern CSS (Spring 2024 Edition) by Chris Coyier These Side-by-Side Videos Will Make You Rethink Your Captioned Videos or ‘how to do captions properly’ by Meryl Evans Real CSS scoping and View Tr ..read more

Sometimes, if I’m fixing an unrelated bug I spot the opportunity to make a quick “drive-by” accessibility tweak that is quick and easy and will give a disproportionately big boost to the user experience for people with accessibility needs. Here are some of my top faves (number 3 will have you in tears!). Your mileage may vary, of course, depending on your codebase and conventions. Replace meaningless divs with landmark semantics In some codebases, I see lots of HTML festooned with classes, which are used to style the element rather than apply styles to the element directly, so <div > and ..read more

At the recent EU-organised workshop, Apple explained its proposals for its compliance with the Digital Markets Act, and took questions from developers. One developer, Riley Testut of AltStore (which has announced it will be a third-party app store in the EU) asked an interesting question about Apple’s new Core Technology Fee. He noted that the free open-source app he made and released while at High School would have put him in 5 million Euros of debt to Apple under their new fee structure, even though it was not distributed through its AppStore. Apple’s lawyer made soothing noises about Apple ..read more

Yesterday was a momentous day for tech in the European Union; the Digital Markets Act came into enforcement on 7 March. It’s been the law for 6 months already, but affected companies (Apple, Google, Microsoft, Meta, the usual colossi) were given a grace period to prepare themselves. Apple spent their time playing silly buggers. They hilariously tried to claim that Safari is a different product on each OS, successfully (but ridiculously) claimed that iOS on tablets is different from iOS on phones. Then they tried to sneak in a change in Safari that crippled Progressive Web Apps (aka Home Screen ..read more

Link o’ the Month:The Performance Inequality Gap, 2024 – “how much more HTML, CSS, and (particularly) JavaScript can a new project afford?”. This is long, dense, heavily-annotated and (in my rarely-humble opinion) a must-read. Justice Department Secures Agreement with Oklahoma State Agency to Ensure Oklahoma Mobile Apps Are Accessible to People with Disabilities -TL;DR: the State’s mobile app used a third-party service which was inaccessible. The third party was told this, but did nothing. The ruling found that “A public entity cannot contract away its ADA obligations”. Expect more pressure o ..read more

As the showdown between the European Union and Your Best Friend Apple looms (27 days, according to OWA’s Digital Markets Act Countdown), it appears that Apple is intending to break PWAs in iOS 17.4 beta 2: Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are still disabled for EU users in #iOS 17.4 beta 2. But now there’s a new pop-up. The pop-up somehow indicates that PWAs are disabled intentionally, rather than being a bug … It will be a major blow for EU users if iOS 17.4 is released without PWA support. Many major European companies have already converted their native iOS apps into PWAs, mainly to skip the u ..read more

If you’re the kind of gorgeous funbundle who reads my blog, you’ve doubtless heard that Apple will finally allow full versions of Chrome and Firefox to run on the iPhone, but only in the European Union. This geo-fencing is because Apple has been dragged kicking and screaming into ending its browser monopoly by the European Union’s Digital Markets Act. Of course, Apple isn’t giving in without some petulant whining in its announcement. Whatever. But more important than its sadness that “the new options for developers’ EU apps create new risks to Apple users and their devices” (conveniently forge ..read more

Apple loses on Appeal, CMA can restart investigation into browsers – Open Web Advocacy. An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid This article is excellent, in my opinion. It explained a lot of things that I half-knew and helped me get a mental model of what’s happening. (Your learning style might be different, of course, but I found I had to read it 2 or 3 times to get into it, and I’ve bookmarked it to be able to refer to) How To Avoid Breaking Web Pages For Keyboard Users (including with ‘Skip Links’) The CSS property you didn’t know you needed – isolation: isolate; – I’d never heard of it. How to ..read more

If you find filling in forms boring, you won’t believe how boring coding them can be. And then you have to do something with the submissions, decide on how to archive them, their GDPR liabilities etc. No wonder so many organisations go looking for third party solutions. For web users, browsers can do a lot of work to help filling in forms accurately and quickly. We’re all familiar with browsers remembering your username and password. Also, all browsers let you input credit card details and other personal data (address, name, date of birth etc) and that can be used by the browser to autocomplet ..read more

Link of the Week: Navigation API: Accessibility technology announcements – a great discussion of accessibility features in the new Navigation API (that replaces the History API). This should ameliorate many of the woes that Single Page Apps cause screen reader users. Also, a great place to start if you don’t know why SPAs can be very hard for disabled users of Assistive Tech, if coded thoughtlessly and untested. Contains a useful Guide for migrating from the existing history API. Who can you trust with your online business? asks Jason Grigsby. I’ve worked in many places with a hugely over-eng ..read more