With so many drafts, so few minutes, and such spirited internal debate about accessibility, agility, and the power of positivity, this is the blog I'll either start or finish tomorrow.
Everyone is angry, the right, the left, the middle, all of us. We are split based on politics, religion, and sexuality. Our views, beliefs, and how we choose to express them is our right provided by the first amendment of the United States constitution.
Living in confined areas with friends and families during a global pandemic feels surreal. The reality of this situation can make it difficult to find reasons to be thankful. Unlike any other time in my life, I feel an overwhelming amount of gratitude to so many people.
A recent tweet from Scott Tolinski was an incentive to start a practice that I have been contemplating for far too long. My typical routine was up at dawn with a cup of coffee and some light reading. After reading and responding his post, I decided to set a 15-minute timer and practice what I tweet.
We all have the choice to determine if the glass is half-full or half-empty. Based on how the brain is wired, half-empty is much easier to recognize and focus on. Our glass half-full/empty perspective has a direct impact on the attitude and mood of those we interact with. This implies that positive team culture can only be cultivated by emotionally intelligent people.
When I created this site, I threw it together with PHP. It worked and didn't take long to develop. However, the FTP deployment process was antiquated and setting up an SSL certificate with my host was time-consuming. I had been wanting to try Netlify for a while after hearing about all the great services they offer like the ease of deployment, free and automatic SSL certificate installation, form submission service, and various other JAM stack based services.
Why are we still building user interfaces that are inaccessible? Why do we accept creating significant technical debt to build experiences that simply don’t work for all users?
It’s a short and simple story, really. It starts on a search to find a solution for some cross browser problems with Data URIs. The first stop was the probably don't Base64 SVG article on CSS Tricks and ends on these quick examples.
What does this mean, nudging #a11y into the development process? Accessibility is a challenging task. Standards are murky, supporting technologies vary, and there are far too few experts. Sadly, a large percentage of developers I’ve talked to bypass accessibility for a few reasons, all of which have one thing in common, knowledge gaps coupled with time constraints.