LLM chatbots are out and dead chatbots are in.

How diamonds are made

This is just absolutely stunning work.

Taken

This does an excellent job of highlighting how easy it is for companies to be creepy and build a fingerprint on you, using information the browser happily hands over.

Making an original Jubilee line door button into a Hue light switch

A very cool idea and reading about the how was an absolute joy.

How we’re approaching theming with modern CSS

Here's one from the Piccalilli archives that you might have missed to wrap up this issue.

P.S. this is a good website from personalsit.es.

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Polypane snippets store

Polypane is already the best development browser in the business and these new snippets make it even better.

Artemis 2 photo timeline

A really impressive page which assigns photos from NASA's Flickr to points in the Artemis 2 mission's timeline.

Anil also answers why the photos are on Flickr here.

RYBitten

This is really stunning work across the board, and the RYB space (often used in painting) produces some great colours.

P4LETTE

A colour palette generator which is very similar to Coolors but with added contrast checking and other handy features.

Speed is Not Conducive to Wisdom

Wise people I’ve met seem unhurried. I don’t think it’s because they’re slow thinkers or actors. I think it’s because they’ve learned that important things take the time they take, no amount of urgency changes that.

Wait it out.

A simple masonry-like composable layout

Here's one from the Piccalilli archives that you might have missed to wrap up this issue.

P.S. this is a good website from personalsit.es.

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The toolkit

For a long time, open source projects and packages have given developers a wealth of resources to learn, improve, or simply make our lives easier. While there are some fantastic open source design tools out there, when it comes to the actual artefacts and outputs of our day-to-day design work, we’re far less spoiled for choice as designers.

The Mindful Design Toolkit aims to make a tiny little dent in this problem, with an already-large-but-definitely-growing collection of resources aimed squarely at designers. You’ll find common, industry-standard artefacts like user personas and information architecture boards, forgotten classics like style tiles, and transformative gems like OOUX workshops and How Might We sessions.

The toolkit is split into some of the most common phases of a design project, covering everything from kicking off with a simple brief, all the way through to final design prototypes and robust token systems. Most resources come with filled examples and blank templates so you can check out what the finished product might look like before grabbing a fresh, crisp copy to use in your own work.

Even more free lessons are now available

While the toolkit aims to open up and democratise the most impactful artefacts of a good design process, you’ll still need to learn how to make use of them. To coincide with this launch, we’ve made a few lessons from the Mindful Design Course viewable for free. If you like what you see in the following freebies, you can grab the full course at a discounted rate!

Here’s the (further) lessons we’ve opened up:

• Predictive Mental Models (10:14 mins)
• The Design Process (6:52 mins)
• Problem & Empowerment Statements (20:10 mins)
• Playing With Type Scales (1 hr 10 mins)
• Style Explorations (26:27 mins)

As you can see, there’s at least a couple hours’ worth of learning, and that’s just a fraction of the full course.

If you find the free lessons or the Mindful Design Toolkit useful, feel free to reach out to Scott on Bluesky.

Check it out!

Why slop it when you can Fraude it?

heerich.js

A really nice tool for generating 3D voxel scenes with fantastic documentation and examples.

Searching for birds

So much good stuff in this piece. It's so refreshing to see this sort of thing without scroll-jacking too.

The sites we lost

A huge archive of old websites from the older days that would have otherwise vanished or been taken over by ads.

Digital Independence Day

We've shared a few things to help you get away from big tech over time but this specific event (and the resources) looks great.

Date is out, Temporal is in

Here's one from the Piccalilli archives that you might have missed to wrap up this issue.

P.S. this is a handy way of scanning for Claude slop in dependencies.

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Among other things, they talk about three principles, and in this article, I’m going to discuss how they can help you in your everyday life doing web accessibility work.

Manage yourself, not the outside world

“Having the emotion, but not being ruled by it.”

You already seem to be living by this principle, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this. You can't influence how your colleagues deal with the issue of accessibility, but you have decided to be here.

There are many things we have no control over: laws, recommendations, opinions, hierarchies, technologies used, brand colours, et cetera. This can be very upsetting and you might feel your voice is not heard. Don’t be discouraged and take it personally though, because even in this confined space you still get to decide how to work with these restrictions.

You might not be able to break free from the oppressive nature of the corporate world, but you can still do your best by not taking it personally and keep moving towards the goal: improving the user experience, collaborating with your colleagues and protecting your employer from a lawsuit along the way.

Does it upset you when a team lead tells you that only 1% of their users have a disability and frankly they don’t give a shit about accessibility? It did upset me, but it didn’t stop me from “killing them with kindness”. I asked them politely where this made up number came from and if they’re aware that there are roughly 7.9 million people in Germany with an official disability instead.

Everything is an opportunity, including suffering

“The obstacle is the way.”

Let's take the dreaded carousel pattern as an example: there is a insistence on using it on the home page, preferably an external ready-made solution, because it has to be done quickly. It has been decided, the customer insists it must be used and you have no influence on this decision.

You can influence by educating your colleagues about the implications. Welcome to the amusement park of pain, take a seat on the merry-go-round of the unreasonable!

The carousel pattern is not only a questionable one and will most likely not have the desired effect that you intend, it’s also very complex to implement, especially if it must be accessible. The ARIA Authoring Practices Guide explains the Carousel (Slide Show or Image Rotator) Pattern in detail, in case you want to give your developer colleagues a look behind the scenes and get their sweat glands working overtime.

If the offer must be accessible, time (and therefore money) must be invested in finding a suitable ready-made solution, adapting it or writing it yourself. Sonja Weckenmann from tollwerk has written a very detailed, excellent article on creating accessible carousels.

The article is in German but your browser of choice should be able to translate it into your preferred language.

You could also try to convince your colleagues to integrate an MVP (minimum viable product) solution that offers simple horizontal scrolling. If you break this pattern down to its essence, that's exactly what it is: a container that you navigate horizontally to access the content.

This solution can be implemented quickly and easily, and the horizontal scroll bar can even be implemented using CSS with the brand colours. Building on this progressive enhancement approach, further complexity can be added later.

What you can also do — which is my preferred solution — is re-evaluate the use of the carousel, even if it has already been decided to use the pattern. At this point, everyone involved should be aware of the many disadvantages and few advantages and be able to form their own opinion. Simplifying design with feedback is a big part of producing excellent user interfaces.

If the carousel still has to be implemented as desired, you (and your colleagues) will suffer a lot, but you will also learn an incredible amount about accessibility during the implementation of an accessible carousel.

Choose virtue over comfort

On those mornings you struggle with getting up, keep this thought in mind—I am awakening to the work of a human being. Why then am I annoyed that I am going to do what I’m made for, the very things for which I was put into this world? Or was I made for this, to snuggle under the covers and keep warm? It’s so pleasurable. Were you then made for pleasure? In short, to be coddled or to exert yourself?

— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.1

Simply put: Sometimes there are days when you wonder why you should get up and subject yourself to the stress of everyday life when you could just stay in bed. Take the previous example: Instead of fighting a losing battle and trying to talk your boss out of the carousel pattern with very good arguments, you could just do it and be done with it.

As bleak as this situation may seem, it’s okay! If you have a little breathing room, why not document the process internally, for example? If the topic comes up again, you can show in detail what had to be done and how much work was involved. You can use hard facts to demonstrate the disadvantages and how much time went into it.

Other ways to go the extra mile could include:

• You could publish a case study as part of your company blog (if there is one) and thus help others by showing that the company takes accessibility seriously.
• You can involve designers in creating images with accessibility annotations to make the process easier to understand for a non-technical audience.
• Writing good, easy-to-understand documentation is an important skill that not only increases your market value but can also greatly improve your communication skills.

I had a colleague who was very interested in the topic but didn't have the capacity to deal with it. When he asked me to give him a glimpse behind the scenes and I showed him everything that goes into the work of an accessibility practitioner, he was very surprised. Moments like these also help to raise awareness within the team and sensitise people to the topic.

Even if you only have the capacity to do one of these things, a little goes a long way. Attentive colleagues will take note and be grateful that you went the extra mile. And who knows, maybe it will even inspire them to follow your example because they realised how it makes their own work easier?

Wrapping up

If you search for them, you will find much more than just these three principles. Some may not be so easy to apply to work in the field of web accessibility, but others will.

These three principles have helped me to take several steps back and look at my work from a bird's eye view.

More often than I would like, I get too caught up in technical details and forget that I am working with many different people to ultimately enable as many people as possible to participate digitally.

If you would like to dive deeper into this non-technical topic, I highly recommend The Accessibility Operations Guidebook by Devon Persing. In it, she explains in detail how to make accessibility work more sustainable.