README.md

Notes

Open source version of my brain. Now with MIT license!

Files

• Stuff about gender
• Things for my house
• Reading list for 2019
• Reading list for 2020
• Bookmarks

Reading list

Not sure if this is the best way to go about a reading list, but I want to explore the option.

• The Stoic of Open Source by Amjad Masad

• Subgrids Considered Essential by Eric Meyer

• Being patient vs. being loud by Marcy Sutton

  • “No feedback might reinforce the assumption that ‘the disabled aren’t our audience.’”
  • “Accessibility is something you can build into your workflow.”
  • “In our pursuit to make the web more accessible we can be loud and we can be patient, but no matter what, we must be kind.”

• The web accessibility basics by Marco Zehe

  • “All img tags require an alt attribute. This goes without exception.”
  • More information about alt text can be found in this WAI alt text decision tree.
  • “In fact, when dealing with many web developers, I am surprised that many don’t even seem to be aware that there is a label element”
  • “Do not, under any circumstances, use the placeholder attribute as the label for an input element!”
  • “But I still find in modern web applications in 2015, cases where layout tables are being used to align form fields and their labels to one another. STOP DOING THAT! PLEASE!”
  • “JavaScript dynamics in itself are no problem to accessibility, only some specific behaviors can be, like losing keyboard focus.”
  • Colour contrast is important (and that's coming from a blind guy!)
  • “please keep the Pinch To Zoom gesture alive!”
  • “Adhering to semantic structures that HTML already offers today will get you a long long way towards accessible web content.”

• The accessibility of HTML 5 autofocus by Bruce Lawson

  • “I believe that autofocussing into a form is a usability win for most people if the purpose of the page is that form.”
  • “Screenreader users find themselves dumped in the middle of a form.”

• Building Offline Sites with ServiceWorkers and UpUp

• Doesn’t work in lynx by Steve Faulkner

• Being a deaf developer by Hollie Kay

  • “Specifications and bugs come to you (in an ideal world, at least) on paper and in ticketing systems instead of through other people’s noiseholes.”
  • “The stereotype of a programmer as a solitary eccentric who’s allergic to human company is unfair and inaccurate.”
  • On pair programming: “Plus, y’know, it’s fun. You get to know your colleagues. You get to remind yourself that everyone makes mistakes sometimes.”
  • “Using Screenhero to set up a remote pairing session meant that we could both look at the screen and use text to communicate, losing no information and generating no confusion.”
  • “They make no assumptions about ability and provide full access by default.”
  • “Accessibility is considered a niche discipline. It shouldn’t be.”

• Working with Colour in CSS by Ire Aderinokun

  • “HSL is seen as a more intuitive format for colour because we are able to reason what a colour might be just from looking at the numeric value.”

• Privilege and inequality in Silicon Valley by Ricky Yean

• Accessible interfaces (basic recap of WCAG 2.0

• Accessibility by Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

• Sources of Innovation by fantasai

  • “IMHO, to pretend that useful innovation can only come from one source is to be blind to the reality of crafting a Web standard.”

• The W3C is a restaurant by David Bruant

• Basic screen reader commands for accessibility testing by Léonie Watson

• Jet-lag study reveals why time changes are a struggle by University of Oxford

  • “The SCN receives information from a specialised system in the eyes which senses the time of day by detecting environmental light, and synchronises the clock to local time.”
  • “If you think about it, it makes sense to have a buffering mechanism in place to provide some stability to the clock. The clock needs to be sure that it is getting a reliable signal, and if the signal occurs at the same time over several days it probably has biological relevance.”
  • “More recently, researchers have found that circadian disturbances are a common feature of several mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.”

• Why I work remotely (hint: it has nothing to do with productivity). by Jason Zimdars

  • “My son usually goes right for my office when he gets home in the afternoon, standing with me at my desk rattling on about his day oblivious that he might be interrupting. I do my best (and sometimes it’s really hard) to stop what I’m doing, turn to him and be present. How many more of those conversations will there be? I’ll take every one I can get.”
  • “You won’t remember working a little later or catching up on Saturday because the people you love interrupted you but you’re certain to remember those little interactions. And even more, they will remember them, too.”
  • “The people you love aren’t interruptions, they’re the reason you work at all. Give ’em a hug.”

• Looking at the accessibility of the IRCCloud service by Marco Zehe

  • “James was super responsive in adding the appropriate attributes and also adding his own ideas and asking good questions about details here and there.”
  • “Interest and willingness to fix these issues is definitely there, so don’t be shy if you want to use IRCCloud and run into problems!”

• Writing resilient unit test by Andrew Wilcox

• Interview with Jingmai O’Connor on scientific publishing and social media

  • “I think the idea that scientists need to operate more like a business is becoming a major problem in science recently.”
  • “Pure and unadulterated desire for greater knowledge”
  • “Branding science puts focus on making your research appealing, which is extremely limiting, and — dare I say? — corrupts the scientific process.”
  • “I love collaborating—there is no way individuals can be experts in every field”
  • I disagree with this, but enough has been said about it elsewhere: “Those who can, publish. Those who can’t, blog.”
    • Who is Jingmai O’Connor, and why is she saying nasty things about science blogggers?
    • Chill out about Jingmai O’Connor’s criticism of bloggers (UPDATED)

• Thoughts on screen reader detection by Léonie Watson

  • “My disability is personal to me, and I share that information at my discretion.”
  • “Social segregation is a bad idea.”
  • “We’ve spent time turning to web standards and feature detection, instead of browser sniffing”
  • “Most things that make a website usable with a screen reader are achieved by conforming to web standards.”
  • “What is really being discussed is disability detection, and that is a very different thing altogether.”

• Why screen reader detection on the web is a bad thing by Marco Zehe

• Flexbox & the keyboard navigation disconnect by Léonie Watson

  • “When content is presented in sequence, we expect to read it and navigate through it in a logical order.”
  • “The first reason aria-flowto does not solve the flexbox disconnect, is because it complicates rather than simplifies the problem.”
  • “The CSS “don’t use it” recommendation is unacceptable.”

• Why We're All Addicted to Texts, Twitter and Google by Susan Weinschenk

  • “…dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes you to want, desire, seek out, and search.”
  • “Evolution again — seeking is more likely to keep you alive than sitting around in a satisfied stupor.”
  • “It's easy to get in a dopamine induced loop.”
  • “It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, or stop checking your cell phone to see if you have a message or a new text.”
  • “One of the most important things you can do to prevent or stop a dopamine loop, and be more productive is to turn off the cues.”
  • “But they—notifications—are actually causing you to be like a rat in a cage.”

• Effectively including accessibility into web developer training by Karl Groves

• Don’t Be Afraid To Be Personal by Vitaly Friedman

• Give Grunt the Boot! A Guide to Using npm as a Build Tool by Peter Dierx

• Responsive Progressive Accessible Vanilla Search by Adrian Roselli

• Making Accessibility Simpler, With Ally.js by Rodney Rehm

• How to map your Mac’s CapsLock key to a NVDA or JAWS key in a Windows virtual machine by Marco Zehe

• HTML Developers: Please Consider by Steve Faulkner

• Flexbox Grid Finesse by Heydon Pickering

• Links are not buttons. Neither are DIVs and SPANs by Karl Groves

• A guide to publish articles in Open Access by Mathilde Pascal <3

• Testing Using a Screen Reader by Callum Macrae

• The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web by Richard Rutter

• How Open Sourcing My Personal Goals Made Me Really Productive by Una Kravets

• Let Links Be Links by Ross Penman

• WCAG 2.0 Parsing Criterion is a PITA by Steve Faulkner

• Peering Into The Minds Of The 4.3 Billion Unconnected by Hassan Baig

• Losing sight by Léonie Watson

  • “We’d fall out of clubs at 6am and drive to Glastonbury Tor to watch the sunrise just for the hell of it.”
  • “If enough insulin isn’t available then the cells in your body are starved of energy and begin to die and the excess glucose remains trapped in your blood-stream.”
  • “Until that moment I had never believed people when they said an emotional reaction could be like a physical blow.”
  • “Whilst I was asleep my mind appeared to have wrapped itself around the enormity of what was happening. This wasn’t any kind of revelation, but it was a recognition of what I was up against, and that was enough for the time-being.”
  • “I’m one of the few who can see nothing at all, and nothing is the best way to describe it. People assume it must be like closing your eyes or being in a dark room, but it’s not like that at all. It’s a complete absence of light, so it isn’t black or any other colour I can describe.”
  • “Since my mind is constrained only by my imagination, it rather charmingly overlays everything with millions of tiny sparkles of light, that vary in brightness and intensity depending on my emotional state.”
  • “Oddly this is the one thing that still makes me feel a little uncertain about being blind, but given that I no longer really remember what I look like, perhaps there will come a time when that uncertainty will fade.”
  • “I did learn something far more important though. I discovered something called a screen reader.”
  • “I still find technology challenging sometimes, because we have yet to reach a time when things are engineered to be accessible as standard.”
  • “So life moved on, as life has a habit of doing.”

• Use On-Page Image Descriptions by Adrian Roselli

• CSS-Driven Internationalization In JavaScript by Maksim Chemerisuk

• What is Audio Description? by Léonie Watson

• Introducing Slot-Based Shadow DOM API by Ryosuke Niwa

• What is WAI-ARIA, what does it do for me, and what not? by Marco Zehe

• Panels and panel sets by Léonie Watson, Brian Kardell, and Chaals Nevile

• My captioning workflow by Michael Lockrey

• The Ten Rules of a Zen Programmer by Christian Grobmeier

• Three common accessibility pitfalls for developers: text alternatives by Julie Grundy

  • “But, wherever there’s a lot of elements, there’s a lot of errors, too. Nobody’s perfect!”

• A Brief(ish) History of the Web Universe: Part III The Early Web by Brian Kardell

• CSS Variables Are a Bad Idea

  • I disagree.
  • Could be said for any new value or unit that is added to CSS.
  • “Now I’m sure browser makers can find ways to optimize this process, but it’s bound to affect the rendering time. And not in a positive way.” Well, sure, but neither does adding 3MB of JavaScript, and we do that all the time.
  • “Honestly, I love using variables…” Me too!

• Short note on improving usability of scrollable regions by Steve Faulkner

  • “Making a scrollable region operable for keyboard users is pretty simple. Add tabindex="0"”
  • “Provide a clear indication of focus on the scrollable region so keyboard users know where they are.”

• Machine code for beginners

• Why “variables” in CSS are harmful by Bert Bos

  • Current implementations aren't so much variables as they are constants.

• Creating Accessible Tables by WebAIM

• LIGO sees gravitational waves by Lauren Biron

  • “LIGO is so sensitive, it can detect if the distance between its mirrors changes by 1/10,000 the width of a proton – a positively minuscule measurement.”

• Interstellar‘s true black hole too confusing by Jacob Aron

  • “The result looked good, but the central black hole seemed to be squashed up against one side. That’s because the black hole had to spin very fast to cause the movie’s time dilation effects, dragging the light to one side.”
  • “The black hole’s rotation turned the glowing red matter a cool blue, thanks to the Doppler effect shortening the wavelength of the light it gave off.”

• The Art of Consensus

• Why I got into this and why I’m still here by Elle Waters

• Why Keyboard Usability Is More Important Than You Think by David Sloan and Sarah Horton

  • Two fundamental actions that form the basis of keyboard interaction:
    1. Moving focus to the next active element on a page
    2. Activating the element that currently has focus
  • “Keyboard usability benefits everyone”
  • “Some people simply prefer the keyboard as a more efficient input method.”

• Progressive Enhancement Makes Me Sad by Heydon Works

• How I audit a website for accessibility by Marcy Sutton

• Accessibility and the Shadow DOM by Marcy Sutton

• Set Your Measure: Optimizing Line Length for Reading

• Danger! ARIA tabs by Jeff Smith

  • “But ARIA is tricky, even if you’re using it in a technically correct way.” This is true; it's not easy to work out how all the pieces fit together.
  • This article preaches wrong practices

• Placeholders are problematic by Adam Silver

  • This article has a shitty title
  • “But it’s okay if they are used in addition to labels right?” “Not particularly. Its certainly better but it’s still problematic.”
  • “If you’re trying to help the user, the best place to start is to always include a clear, always-visible label.”
  • Most desturbing of all was in the commnets: “Apple just released this in the Beta of their new Human Interface Guidelines: ‘Don’t use a separate label to describe a text field when placeholder text is sufficient.’”
    • Which is in tvOS' HIG.

• Make the Web Work For Everyone by Justin Crawford, Chris Mills, and Ali Spivak

• Looking Back at iOS Accessibility’s Biggest Milestones by Steven Aquino

  • “Considering the usability gains I get from Dynamic Type, I strongly believe every developer should adopt it right away if they aren’t already supporting it. Text is a basic part of any piece of software, and I’m surely not the only person with low vision (or tired/aging eyes, for that matter) who benefits immensely from larger text.”
  • “This sense of empowerment and independence is exactly what Switch Control (and the purpose of any accessibility feature, really) is designed to do.”

• Better keyboard navigation with progressive enhancement by Christian Heilmann

• Writing damn less code by Heydon Pickering

  • “No, the universal selector will not kill your performance. That’s bunkum.”

• Using the fieldset and legend elements by Léonie Watson

  • You should use the and elements when:
    • You have a single multiple choice question (using radio buttons or checkboxes).
    • You have several questions relating to the same topic (like text boxes, or any other type of field).

• Passion For Independence by Maureen T. Corrigan

  • “Miwa’s passion for equal accessibility on public transport is a fight for a human right from which I, and many others, will benefit.”

• Designing for people you didn't know existed by Kayla Heffernan

• This blind Apple engineer is transforming the tech world at only 22 by Katie Dupere

• The Language of Addresses by Jen Lambourne

• Making Tau Station an accessible game by Job van Achterberg

• When to Use a Switch or Checkbox by Anthony

• Headings and the Seinfeld Pitch

  • Brian is evil I tell ya!
  • “Imagine instead that we wrote that such that only a "good" tag would take on any meaning at all - even visually. The rest would be explictly Nothing. Then, our insides would match our outsides again. It would be a really good incentive to learn "the right way to convey meaning" and to apply it.”

• The Unicorn Workflow: Design to Code with Atomic Design Principles and Sketch by Joe Toscano

• I don't do Angular, is that OK? by David Bushell

• Non-blocking UI's with interface previews by Callum Hart

• Why motion matters by Justin Cone

• Don’t punish the humans Ryan Nance

• Regressive disclosure: designing complex interfaces by reducing choice by Rian van der Merwe

• UI Animation reviews by Val Head

• Transitional Interfaces by Pasquale D’Silva

• God is in the details by Buzz Usborne

• Accessible HTML video as a background by Emma Sax

• Styling using language attributes by Andrew Cunningham and Richard Ishida

• Color vs. Contrast — Which makes you click? by Piotr Koczorowski

• Stop forcing your arbitrary password rules on me. by Ryan Winchester

• Invisible animation by Steven Fabre

• Stop solving problems you don't yet have by Rachel Andrew

• Graphic Design for the visually impaired; A neglected dissertation by Kate Greenstock

• Text descriptions and emotion rich images by Léonie Watson

• The Invisible (HTTP) by Basil Safwat

• Breaking Things (HTTP) by Aral Balkan

• Copy and Paste Layer Effects and Vector Attributes by Seth Shaw

• They are your users by Rik Schennink

• Accessibility Tools Presentation by Luis Garcia

• SRs: Punctuation and Typographic Symbols by Paul Bohman

• Accessibility: Inclusion is not an illusion by David Bolton

• How Our CSS Framework Helps Enforce Accessibility by Ian McBurnie

• An Alphabet of Accessibility Issues by Anne Gibson

• Letters, symbols, misrecognition by Thomas Bohm

• Menace by Allie

• Getting started with web accessibility by Monika Piotrowicz

• Commercial Benefits of Accessibility by CKEditor Blog

• Hello, my name is Stéphanie by Stéphanie Walter

  • “The really strict one “special characters are forbidden” Ok, forbidden by WHOM? WHY?”
  • “When it comes to e-commerce, we should remember that the user experience does not stop after we sold the product. Shipment is also part of the global experience.”
  • “A person named Léa answered me that her name often became “Løa” on her payslip. This could become a problem with administrations who tend to refuse your proof of identity if they don’t see the exact same name.”
  • “Something as trivial as a decision to not support special characters on a form can lead to really complicated issues for people on the other end of this form, so, let’s take those decisions, wisely shall we?”
  • “Some people might have an apostrophe in their last name (hello Scott O’Hara, Irish and Dutch people among many others), some people might have names with kanjis, Arabic, Cyrillic characters, etc. and they will mostly have the same issues as I have, or even worse.”
  • “Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept”

• Is the Confidence Gap Between Men and Women a Myth? by Laura Guillen | 2018-03-26

  • “Regardless of how confident a woman feels, we focused on what we termed self-confidence appearance — that is, the extent to which others perceive a woman as self-confident.”
  • “We found that even among similarly high-performing workers, appearing self-confident did not translate into influence equally for men and women. For women, but not for men, influence was closely tied to perceptions of warmth — how caring and prosocial they seemed. Moreover, women’s self-reported confidence did not correlate with how confident these women appeared to others.”

• Swimming in Privilege by Andy Dunn

• Why authors should avoid aria-relevant by Aaron Leventhal and Rob Dodson

• Why girls can be boyish but boys can't be girlish by Elissa Strauss

  • “A bedazzled ninja turtle or a feature film about a peasant boy who falls hopelessly in love with princess would help all children feel more emboldened by their girlier proclivities.”
    • Isn’t that Aladdin?
  • “Remember, you still have 20th-century leadership marketing to 21st-century young adults. As these young adults move their way up through the ladder, you are going to see more and more gender neutrality.”
  • “My son freely and easily identifies as a boy. He doesn't need our help in his rejection of the label of "boy"; he needs the meaning of that label to expand.”
  • “If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women?”

• Help! someone has pointed out my conference has diversity issues! by Ada Rose Cannon

  • “Don’t ask people from underrepresented background to help you with your diversity work for free, their work has value.”

• Ik koester wrok tegen onbeschofte tweewielers by Darice de Cuba

• The Complementary Image by Scott Vinkle

• Is there any value in people who cannot write JavaScript? by Mandy Michael

• Stanford researcher examines how people perceive interruptions in conversation by Alex Shashkevich

• Why Janelle Monáe’s vagina pants make me cheer by Chitra Ramaswamy

• Tiny Life Tip: Do One Small Task Every Single Day As A Gift To Future You by Rachel Wilkerson Miller

• When "Zoë" !== "Zoë". Or why you need to normalize Unicode strings by Alessandro Segala

Watch list

• Can you read me lips? starring Rachel Kolb
• Tenon.io Training Demo by Karl Groves
• Improving Single Page App Accessibility with a11y_kit by Patrick Fox
• Accessibility and how to get the most from your screenreader by Edd Sowden
• Breaking the Broken Web by Kyle Simpson
• Pageload Perf Audits with DevTools Filmstrip in Chrome by Paul Irish
• Everything you need to know about Javascript Accessibility by Karl Groves
• Radical keyboard surfing by Isabel Brison
  • Point to APG: 2.19 Menu or Menu bar
• The Fallen of World War II
  • Puts things in perspective
  • Also see version with interactive chart
• PWAs in any context by Rob Dodson
  • Interesting video with some good points and examples.
• Don't Be a Sucker
  • Still relevant today.
• Wanderers by Erik Wernquist
• What even is a table? by Edd Sowden
• Impossible is Nothing by Robert Pearson
• The Extensible Web, Houdini, and CSS.next by Bruce Lawson
• Design like we give a damn! by Léonie Watson

ARIA code example

• Accessible forms with ARIA live regions by Léonie Watson

ARIA research things

• What gets focus when form control element is disabled? by Rodney Rehm
• Notes on making the W3C process diagrams accessible by Chaals

Interesting documents

• User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG)
• Notes on Using ARIA in HTML (Editors Draft)
• Accessibility API (Unofficial Draft)
• Accessibility Requirements for People with Low Vision
• Mixed Content
• Personal names around the world
  • “Are you collecting the person’s name just to have an identifier in your system? If so, it may not matter whether the name is stored in ASCII-only or native script.”
  • “Or do you plan to call them by name on a welcome page or in correspondence? If you will correspond using their name on pages written in their language, it would seem sensible to have the name in the native script.”
  • “Is it important for people in your organization who handle queries to be able to recognise and use the person’s name? If so, you may want to ask for a Latin transcription.”
  • “Will their name be displayed or searchable (for example Flickr optionally shows people’s names as well as their user name on their profile page)? Or will you want to send them correspondence in their own language, but track them in your back-office in a language such as English? If so, you may want to store the name in both Latin and native scripts, in which case you probably need to ask the user to submit their name in both native script and Latin-only form, using separate fields.”

Projects

• HIKE
• ally.js
• Nu HTML Checker
• Pa11y
• Frend
• eBay MIND
• Parable of the Polygons

Slides

• CSS Best Practices by Fantasai
• Accessibility Nerdvana by Steve Faulkner
• Accessibility at the BBC by Ian Pouncy
• TEXT: A prosaic talk about accessibility by Heydon Pickering
• HTML 101 by Luis Garcia
• Extended rock nroll guide to HTML5 & ARIA by Léonie Watson

Random thoughts

• London was very sunny last time, not so much right now.
• If you can sleep during take off; you can pretty much sleep anywhere I guess.
• Rawr!
• Purple, just that, purple.

Interesting companies

• The Paciello Group
• MartianCraft

Software

A list of software I use, want to use, or have used, and thoughts on those.

• OS X
  • Has been getting worse (and way to heavy for HDD based Macs) but still offers the best experience for me.
• iTunes
  • Since the iOS 9 update I have replaced iTunes with Spotify on both OS X and iOS.
  • Has screwed me over with weird design choices since 2001…
• Spotify
  • love it, fast, easy, has everything I want (well, most of the time).
• Sublime Text
  • Lack of a “use packages” menu really bugs me. (Maybe there is a package for that).
  • Performance with larger files is good.
• Atom
  • Used thise for about a year and really like it.
  • Performance with larger files is an issue.
• TextMate
  • Has good accessibility.
  • Doesn't mess with formatting by default
• Pixelmator
  • Great product for its price.
  • Lacks some usability / clearity in certain parts.
• Things
  • Maybe it's not the best experience on mobile, but it has served me on both iOS and OS X since 2009.
  • Lack of accessibility in OS X UI. Should report this to them some day (maybe do an audit).
• Clear
  • Lack of contrast on lower priority items really bugs me.
• Safari
  • My favourite browser since 2003.
• Chrome
  • Have been using this more in recent months.
  • Good accessibility tools are a reason to use.
• IRCCloud
  • Was recommended to me by Marco Zehe; so accessibility ought to be good.
  • Really like to use it, cleaner interface than something like Gitter or Slack.
  • Well worth the 4 euro/month fee.
  • Comes in very handy for W3C meetings (and on the go).

Music

• Field Division
• Zeke

Conferences

• EnhanceConf in London
• CSS Day in Amsterdam
• CSSconf in Oslo
• ScotlandCSS Call for Speakers
• CascadiaFEST Call for Speakers — Submitted!
• From the Front

Courses

• Gravity! From the Big Bang to Black Holes

Games

List of games I own on the PS4. Check when finished.

• GTA III
• GTA Vice City
• GTA San Andreas
• GTA V
• Firewatch
• Beyond: Two Souls
• The Last of Us
• Uncharted 1
• Uncharted 2
• Uncharted 3
• Uncharted 4
• Heavy Rain
• Alien (probably not going to finish this)
• Battlefield 4
• Life is Strange
• Tomb Raider
• Flower
• Gone Home
• NBA 2k16 (Story Mode)
• Need for Speed Rivals

Games you can't really finish

• Project CARS
• NBA 2k15
• FIFA 15
• Pure Pool
• No Man's Sky
• F1 2016

Domains

I always forget which ones are mine…

• agosto.nl
• aria.guide
• codingkittens.com
• gridlayout.eu
• michielbijl.nl
• rawr.eu
• roledrinks.nl
• roledrinks.eu
• roledrinks.uk
• roledrinks.com
• moiety.me
• downwithw3c.me

Client domains

• acquavista.nl
• etwak.nl

Resources

• [High Quality Photos you can use for free](Sites with High Quality Photos You Can Use for Free)
• Unsplash
• Accessible media player resources and demos by Henny Swan