Recent links

A bunch of things I've read, am reading, or intend to read. They're currently cluttering up my open tabs, mastodon bookmarks, note app etc, so I'm offloading them here.

Alt alternatives

https://design.scotentblog.co.uk/providing-text-alternatives-for-non-text-content/

Sometimes images are deemed "decorative" on the basis that they don't add information to the page as a whole. My position is that images need to maintain a specific relationship with the text that describes them, whether that's alt text, or a caption, or being obviously colocated with the text in such a way that the visual content can be inferred.

This post helped clarify my thinking around that. Explicit references ("as shown in figure 1...") are probably only appropriate in certain circumstances, but worth considering. The use of <details><summary> for hiding long descriptions is an excellemt idea that I'll explore in due course. But overall, I'm increasingly convinced that the best all-round solution is a figcaption that adds (rather than repeats) information, with the image itself regarded as a visual affordance.

Operational-level agreement

https://webglossary.info/terms/operational-level-agreement/

I'm not familiar with this site but it feels like the kind of resource that might be useful. I suspect that a lot of problems we have at work are down to a lack of operational rigor; it feels like parts of the machine are missing. Too often, it seems to me, the product teams are building the end results instead of building the structures that build the end results. Maybe if we get our heads around concepts like this we start to change that.

Sharing options

https://piccalil.li/blog/simplify-sharing-with-built-in-apis-and-progressive-enhancement/

Not read this, but looks like it fits my MO.

HTML component library

https://gomakethings.com/an-html-web-component-library/

Very much in line with what my designer colleague and I have been chatting about recently. Parked here for reference.

Icon labels

https://www.chrbutler.com/in-defense-of-text-labels

Again, not read this, but I'll come back to it. I assume that this is coherent with my stance that we should reverse our thinking about affordances. Rather than trying to insert alt text and aria labels and whatnot as affordances for AT users, we should regard a well-structured document as the primary output onto which images, icons and design elements are layered as visual affordances. Icons can help you if you:

• can interpret it at a glance
• aren't a native speaker of the site's language
• have cognitive problems like dyslexia
• struggle to read small text on a mobile phone

etc

HTML conformance

https://meiert.com/en/blog/commit-to-conformance/

Having written all that stuff above, I checked out my homepage with https://validator.w3.org/ and found issues: <ul> cannot have the reversed attribute and <date> cannot be a descendent of <a>. But this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.