- Morality is not always relative.
- You’re a web professional.
- The web is accessible out-of-the-box. We break it.
- It’s not on people with disabilities to tell you how you screwed up.
- It should be easier. This is our job.
Coffee talk with Ethan Marcotte. Today’s special: inclusivity.
I want to get there: to have nuanced discussions about text descriptions; I want to read poetry in alt text; to have our work’s success measured by how broadly it can be accessed; to create moving, beautiful experiences for people who may not use the web like I do.
Vasilis gives the gist of his excellent talk at the border:none event that just wrapped up in Nuremberg. The rant at the end chimed very much with my feelings on this topic:
I showed a little interaction experiment that one of my students made, with incredible attention to detail. Absolutely brilliant in so many ways. You would expect that all design agencies would be fighting to get someone like that into their design team. But to my amazement she now works as a react native developer.
I have more of these very talented, very creative designers who know how to code, who really understand how the web works, who can actually design things for the web, with the web as a medium, who understand the invisible details, who know about the UX of HTML, who know what’s possible with modern HTML and CSS. Yet when they start working they have to choose: you either join our design team and are forced to use a tool that doesn’t get it, or you join the development team and are forced to use a ridiculous framework and make crap.
I guess the biggest criticism here is that it feels like people who believe in the superiority of single page applications and the entire ecosystem focus more on developer experience (DX) than user experience. That sounds like a dangerous blanket statement, but after all these years, I never had the feeling that the argument “better DX leads to better UX” was ever true. It’s nothing more than a justification for the immense complexity and potentially significantly worse UX. And even if the core argument isn’t DX, other arguments like scalability, maintainability, competitive ability, easier recruiting (“everyone uses React”), and cost effectiveness, in my experience, only sound good, but rarely hold up to their promises.
A very thoughtful post by Hidde that draws a useful distinction between the “internals” of a component (the inner workings of a React component, Vue component, or web component) and the code that wires those components together (the business logic):
I really like working on the detailed stuff that affects users: useful keyboard navigation, sensible focus management, good semantics. But I appreciate not every developer does. I have started to think this may be a helpful separation: some people work on good internals and user experience, others on code that just uses those components and deals with data and caching and solid architecture. Both are valid things, both need love. Maybe we can use the divide for good?
A very welcome project from Marcus Herrmann, documenting how to make common interaction patterns accessible in popular frameworks: Vue, React, and Angular.
It’s not just about finding the issues—it’s about finding the issues at the right time.
Materials and tools; client and server; declarative and imperative; inclusion and privilege.