OS X Yosemite introduced JavaScript for Automation. This makes it possible to access native OS X frameworks with JavaScript. I’ve been digging in to this new world and putting together examples along the way. In this post I’ll explain the basics and step through building a small example app.

The biggest challenge your organization will face is in overcoming the audit-fix-audit-fix cycle prevalent in most organizations. When most companies begin their accessibility journey, they do so because of a current or anticipated legal threat. This often puts the organization in the mindset that accessibility is a project and that once the project is complete they consider themselves “Done” with accessibility. But that’s never actually the case

Usability practitioners are called on, not only to conduct many research studies during their careers, but also to read, review, and advise on usability studies and market research studies that have been conducted and reported by others. The ability to critically review the research of others, and to help stakeholders weigh up the merits or shortcomings of research data and conclusions, is an extremely valuable skill.

TabFS is a browser extension that mounts your browser tabs as a filesystem on your computer.

In the previous post, we observed some rules on how to get the most out of our functions. In this post, we will do exactly that, get the most out of them. But rather than diving straight into these techniques, we are going to come up with them ourselves. There is no better way to learn a concept than to arrive at it through simple steps. To see how we ourselves could have come up with these techniques.

Peter Naur’s essay “Programming as Theory Building” is an exploration into the essence of programming. What is the activity of programming? How does this notion affect our practice? As Naur sees it, understanding the nature of this activity is paramount, for, “If our understanding is inappropriate we will misunderstand the difficulties that arise in the activity and our attempts to overcome them will give rise to conflicts and frustrations.” Unfortunately, despite Naur’s consciousness-raising essay, we find ourselves in exactly this predicament.

As the title suggestions, Naur claims that programming is first and foremost a process of theory building. What Naur means by this is that what is most fundamental to the process of programming is not the source code, the documentation, or even the running program, it is instead the knowledge the programmer has.

Thanks to virtual columns, we almost have a NoSQL database

thisiswcag.com helps you build and test against the web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) consistently. Use this resource as a starting point to understand what you need to consider to pass success criteria.

After the Russian Revolution, Jews left behind the shtetl and had to navigate a modern identity: New Soviet Man.

There is a prevailing notion in web development that the frontend—the discipline of creating what someone can see and do on a website or web app—is the only place you need to consider accessibility. This simply isn’t true. Accessibility is a holistic practice that touches every aspect of creating a digital experience. This means it is also a backend web development consideration.