Articles

Recently, I added a dark mode setting to my website. Dark mode is a color theme feature that’s pretty common these days. Letting users adjust the color of content so it’s easier to see is a nice usability improvement.

Many developers I follow have written great articles about their implementations, which are full of valuable insight. To name a few: Hidde de Vries, Sarah Fossheim, and Josh Comeau all have smart approaches with valuable takeaways.

However, I decided to take a slightly different approach than a lot of the solutions I’d seen – a progressively-enhanced version that works with or without JavaScript (JS).

The other day I was skimming Webkit’s Safari Technology Preview 153 release notes and noticed that they had added support for aria-description.

I always found it odd that developers could set an element’s accessible name/label with the aria-label and aria-labelledby attributes, but only had aria-describedby for setting accessible descriptions. So seeing aria-description being added to Safari was an interesting surprise.

I decided to do a mini dive and test of support for aria-description to fill in my knowledge gap and be prepared to use it when the time comes. A sort of crash-course, if you will. I’m sharing my findings here in case it’s valuable for anyone else.

I’ve been using the HTML Drag and Drop API (DNDAPI) a fair amount lately, which is a native way to build draggable interfaces. Despite some quirks, it works pretty well – making it easy for developers to create drag-and-drop functionality.

But the DNDAPI has a big flaw: there’s no built-in accessibility features. This means screen reader users (and many others) won’t be able to use interfaces built with it without a lot of mindful, additional work from developers (which, let’s face it, most don’t do).

Last year, I worked on a project which contained a reorderable list component – essentially, a group of items that users can rearrange in any order. Though I had no prior experience designing such a pattern, the end result worked well for our purposes. But I was sure that my lack of familiarity meant that there were improvements to the usability and experience that I could implement for the future.

As a result, I dove deep into the pattern – learning, creating, and testing versions of it to deduce as much as I could. In this article, I'm going to channel my findings into how we can create a reorderable list with a great user experience (UX).

The title element is often one of the first elements covered when learning HTML. But because changing a page’s title is trivial, many website creators mistakenly view it as optional or purely decorative, leaving it neglected. But the truth is that the title is a functional element that aids users in a variety of situations.

This is part 2 of an article series on the title element. If you missed it, check out part 1 where I cover some functional uses of the title element. Here, we’ll review some best practices that give a title its meaning and usefulness.

The title element is often one of the first elements covered when learning HTML. But because changing a page’s title is trivial, many website creators mistakenly view it as optional or purely decorative, leaving it neglected. But the truth is that the title is a functional element that aids users in a variety of situations.

This is part 1 of an article series on the title element. Here, we’ll look at what this element is and does, and how it affects a user’s experience.

When building interfaces, it's common to have a series of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) images that need to be aligned in some way, but the composition of the assets doesn't easily allow for it. Sometimes, you know this from the start and can plan accordingly. But other times you have to accommodate graphical changes mid-project that can be a mess to deal with.

In this article I'm going to dive into this issue and show an interesting way we can solve it by laying out our graphics a certain way in Adobe Illustrator and then displaying them on our page by modifying the CSS overflow property.