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Category: Development

Ridiculously easy trick for keyboard accessibility

One of the more frustrating things about accessibility is how ridiculously easy most things are to do. While most developers tend to see accessibility as nebulous and time consuming, the truth is some of the most impactful issues are actually easy to deal with. As a case-in-point: consider simple keyboard accessibility for custom controls otherwise …

The form field validation trick they don’t want you to know

Yes, that was a purposefully click-bait headline. One of the most frustrating things for users is unclear or unintuitive form constraints. My personal pet peeve are phone number, credit card, or SSN/ EIN fields which ask for numeric-only entry. While it may very well be necessary that your field use only numeric data, you don’t …

WTF-ARIA?!?

Recently, I saw someone Tweet that “…ARIA should be last” when working to make a website accessible. As you learn in Logic 101, generalized statements are particularly false. Such a broad statement, though mostly correct at least in spirit, is wholly incorrect in certain situations. ARIA is clearly the right choice in cases where native …

CSS generated content is not content

CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation. Prior to CSS, nearly all of the presentational attributes of HTML documents were contained within the HTML markup; all font colors, background styles, element alignments, borders and sizes had to be explicitly described, …

Name, State, Role, and Value: What’s it all about?

4.1.2 Name, Role, Value: For all user interface components (including but not limited to: form elements, links and components generated by scripts), the name and role can be programmatically determined; states, properties, and values that can be set by the user can be programmatically set; and notification of changes to these items is available to …