Accessibility

What is a good contrast text color on a black background? White. What about on a white background? Black. What about on #f06d06? Less clear. Devon Govett posted a good trick to having CSS pick for you, which works across browsers today. Lea Verou has a much deeper dive. There is supposed to be a […]

Ahmad Shadeed on CSS display: contents; — a feature that makes the DOM pretend that element just isn’t there (but it’s children are). Anything you use it for requires specific accessibility testing, but it can be quite useful. There are lots of use-cases here many of which boil down to “sometimes I want all these […]

It’s not that modals are all automatically bad, it’s that, as Adrian Egger says, “modals are the crutch of the inarticulate design and developer” and they “are easily replaced with other patterns that are less jarring.” on the dedicated site for this crusade: modalzmodalzmodalz.com. Adrian’s personal site is sweet, too.

Zooming in browsers is an accessibility feature. I’d say that any attempt to fight against it is bad form. Don’t do it. Leave it be. I have seen compelling examples of ways to code that work with browser zoom that help make a site look nicer when high levels of zoom are applied. But they […]

Good advice: “Write alternative text as if you’re describing the image to a friend.” Or, if it’s helpful, don’t forget to include the emotion in an image.

If you find yourself removing a border from an element that has a border and are tempted to use border: 0 , border: none, or outline: none, I’d urge you to stop for a moment and reconsider. It’s like the old G.K. Chesterton saying about fences: Do not remove a fence until you know why […]

A good point by Mayank: The multiple attribute on <select> should pretty much never be used. It’s like the polar opposite of single <select>, where instead of universal familiarity, it has universal unfamiliarity. Perhaps its only saving grace is that I have yet to encounter this attribute in any codebase. HTML: The Bad Parts