Doing bad things to workers in the hope that they’ll quit is pretty evil 😭

The analogy I’ve been using is that this is like jumping from a tall 130 kilobyte-story building (ReactDOM) right into the zero kilobyte sewers of web components. If you take anything from this post, please understand this: web components (most likely) weren’t designed for you. Not to dissuade you from using them, but they were purposefully designed to be a low-level bare metal primitive for library authors to build on; they were designed to be used with a library, a thin layer of abstraction butter on top.

In the Importance Game, participants jockey for position. This usually works by way of casual references to wealth, talent, accomplishment or connections, but there are many variants. I can, for instance, play this game by pretending to eschew it: “Let’s get straight down to business” can telegraph my being much too important to waste time with such games; or your being so unimportant as to render the game otiose.The other game is the Leveling Game, and it uses empathy to equalize the players. So I might performatively share feelings of stress, inadequacy or weakness; or express discontent with the Powers that Be; or home in on a source of communal outrage, frustration or oppression.

As smartphone ownership and use grow, the front ends we deliver are ever-more mediated by the properties of those devices. The inequality between the high-end and low-end, even in wealthy countries, is only growing. What we choose to do in response defines what it means to practice UX engineering ethically.

convert from curl to a bunch of other formats

A pre-made spreadsheet for running accessibility audits

Claims that a website can be made fully compliant without manual intervention are not realistic, since no automated tool can cover all the WCAG 2.1 level A and AA criteria.

Supporting keyboard-only interaction is one of the most important principles of web accessibility. However, the scope of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) in relation to keyboard accessibility is often misunderstood.

When you’re designing and developing for accessibility, performing manual testing using a screen reader is important to catch and fix accessibility issues that cannot be caught by automated accessibility testing tools. In this article, which is a modified, text-only excerpt from the Practical Accessibility course, we’re going to walk through the process of setting up your screen reader testing environment, from downloading virtualization software if you need it, to installing screen readers, and setting up keyboard configuration. We’ll also learn what screen reader and browser combinations are most relevant for your testing work.

Accessibility annotations help capture design intent that cannot be conveyed through visual design alone. This can help prevent many accessibility issues earlier and create more usable digital experiences.After 2 years of testing with over 65 design teams at CVS Health®, we’re releasing our Web Accessibility Annotation Kit to the public. It’s made specifically for web-based experiences. Additional resources will be published soon, including an extensive iOS Accessibility Annotation Kit.

PDFKit is a PDF document generation library for Node and the browser that makes creating complex, multi-page, printable documents easy. The API embraces chainability, and includes both low level functions as well as abstractions for higher level functionality. The PDFKit API is designed to be simple, so generating complex documents is often as simple as a few function calls.

gov.uk’s guidance on testing with assistive tech, what to use

Modify your editor while it is running by executing ClojureScript code via the Joyride REPL and/or run scripts via keyboard shortcuts you choose. The Visual Studio Code API, as well as the APIs of its extensions, are at your command! Joyride makes VS Code scriptable in a very similar way to how how Emacs users can hack their editor. Complete with Interactive Programming.

In other words: if you introduce the solution (in this case, a new kind of math) before introducing the kind of problems that it’s meant to solve, the solution is likely to come across as pointless and arbitrary. But if you first let students try to tackle these problems with the math they already understand, they’re likely to come away with a kind of intellectual “headache” – and, therefore, to better understand the purpose of the “aspirin” you’re trying to sell.

Your job title says “software engineer”, but you seem to spend most of your time in meetings. You’d like to have time to code, but nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone’s going roughly in the same direction. If you stop doing those things, the team won’t be as successful. But now someone’s suggesting that you might be happier in a less technical role. If this describes you, congratulations: you’re the glue. If it’s not, have you thought about who is filling this role on your team?

This review of web Shadow DOM functionality also works as a nice, relatively high-level overview of how the Shadow DOM is used.

Building proper UI Web Components can be quite a task though, especially if you want them to be accessible. Here are some pointers on what to look out for.