Linknote — — 84 words

Web

HTML: The Inaccessible Parts — Dave Rupert

Following on from Gov.UK’s revelation about <input type="number">, Dave Rupert has compiled a list of other bits of HTML that can cause inadvertent accessibility issues.

There are some cases where even using plain ol’ HTML causes accessibility problems. I get frustrated and want to quit web development whenever I read about these types of issues. Because if browsers can’t get this right, what hope is there for the rest of us.

Not that we should give up, of course.

Linknote — — 79 words

Business — Design

McKinsey: CEOs have no clue what chief design officers do — Mark Wilson — Fast Company

Picture of a hipster drinking coffee with headphones hanging of a massive Mac screen. I guess that's what a designer is.

Talk about designers “having a seat at the table” generally leaves me cold. But this useful article explains why it can matter — but why designers have a duty to do more than simply be at the table.

Evidence has long suggested that companies with a strong design focus are more successful. The example of Logitech outlined here bears that out.

But if some CEOs don’t understand the value of design, it’s up to designers to articulate it properly.

Linknote — — 83 words

Design — Web

Why the Gov.UK Design System team changed the input type for numbers — Hanna Laakso — Technology in government

Numeric keypad interface

The Gov.UK Design System team have discovered that using the HTML element <input type="number"> creates some surprising problems in certain environments.

Some of the limitations in assistive technologies such as Dragon Naturally Speaking are disappointing but unsurprising.

But Chrome deciding to convert large numbers to exponential notation is rather more eyebrow-raising. Then there is Safari adding commas to long numbers that are in fact credit card numbers. You have to wonder about some of the decision-making among browser vendors.

Linknote — — 139 words

Culture — Society — Technology — Web

Coding is for everyone — as long as you speak English — Gretchen McCulloch — Wired

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, so there’s been a lot of pixels spilled on “the initial promises of the web”—one of which was the idea that you could select “view source” on any page and easily teach yourself what went into making it display like that.

This article makes a great point about how this promise only truly works if you can speak English.

The process described above is exactly how I learned HTML. The fact that I would have to use “color” instead of “colour” is a mildly amusing inconvenience. I hadn’t really considered before how it must feel if you don’t speak any English.

I don’t speak Russian, and assuming you don’t either, does <заголовок> and <заглавие> and <тело> and <п> still feel like something you want to tinker with?