6 min
Heading levels are an outline
On a page I audited last month the only `h1` was the logo, the section headings were all `h4` because `h4` was the right size, and the actual page title was a `div` with a class on it.
Accessibility
All writing →12 posts filed under Accessibility, newest first.
6 min
details and summary
An FAQ page arrived on my desk with about 200 lines of JavaScript running an accordion, and the two elements that do it natively have been in every browser since 2020 and got the missing feature last winter.
6 min
dialog
I have built the same modal four times across four projects, each one slightly different, each one getting a different two of the six behaviors wrong, and there has been an element for it since before the second one.
6 min
The popover attribute
I replaced a dropdown component last month and it went from about 180 lines of JavaScript to an attribute, and the six behaviors I'd hand-written were all better in the version I deleted them for.
6 min
tabindex
I pressed Tab once on a client's homepage and focus went straight to a chat widget in the footer, past the entire page, because somewhere in that widget's markup was a positive number.
7 min
Contrast ratios lie
A page I'd checked properly, that passed every automated tool I own, was unreadable on my own phone in a beer garden in June, and the number had nothing to say about why.
7 min
Focus management
A full page load does a small piece of housekeeping nobody has ever had to think about. Swap content with JavaScript and you have quietly taken it on, almost certainly without noticing.
7 min
Error messages are copy
Somebody typed a phone number with spaces in it, was told "Invalid input" three times, and gave up. The cause was a string written by a developer at the moment they were least interested in writing.
7 min
The 15-minute audit
Two clients have asked me this year whether their site is accessible, both of them because somebody frightened them about a deadline, and both times the useful answer came out of a quarter of an hour and a browser.
7 min
Dark mode is a data problem
A client asked how long a dark mode would take and I said half a day, because I was thinking about colors, and the colors were about an hour of it.
6 min
Motion is not decoration
I built a parallax hero because a client asked for one, showed it to a colleague, and they asked me to close the tab, and then had a headache for the rest of the afternoon.
8 min
Alt text is writing
Every image on the site had an alt attribute, the checker reported zero errors, and not one of those attributes told anybody anything because filling in a field and writing a sentence turn out to be different jobs.