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I recently discovered a YouTube video about a children’s TV show from my childhood.

I signed off on last year’s WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) roundup post wishing for a year focused on refinement, and it looks like that has finally happened!

I wrote about hierarchy in tables a while back, and deliberately avoided talking about clickable table rows; well, now’s the time to tackle them!

I had the privilege to be among some great speakers at this year’s Access:Given conference; there were so many excellent insights, but one has really stuck with me.

Everything should be accessible.

I was writing about how to write the aria-label for <nav> elements and I kept referring to the aria-label as the ‘label’, which bothered me.

When you mark up your website, groups of links are probably going to be wrapped in <nav> elements.

I’ve had the same conversation more than once about how a <figure> element’s caption should be used, and how that differs from an image’s alt text.

We tend to design and build our digital products from our own worldview, not thinking about the many other ways people might use them.

It has been a while since I’ve written an apropos of nothing blog post.

I’ve written about the document outline before, including a reference to how HTML5 introduced a new algorithm for creating a document outline which was never fully supported.

Yes.

At the time of writing my blog contains nearly 300 posts… As the list has grown, the footer has moved further and further out of reach, so I have finally added pagination!

So if we shouldn’t use headers for headings, what should we use instead?

I left Sage in August after five years there.

What we call things is important; for all sorts of reasons but a lot of the time it’s to make communication between team members unambiguous.

Unsurprisingly, I have a tendency to think pretty deeply about semantics and structure.

The last laptop I bought was a Space Grey 13 inch MacBook Pro back in 2017.

I’ve written about how, in my half-decade at one of the UK’s biggest tech companies, I approached creating a culture of accessibility.

The reason to make things accessible to as many people as possible is because it’s the right thing to do, but the sad fact is that that’s rarely how it works.

Over the last five years working at an accounting and HR software company, I’ve seen a lot of tables that should be lists, but there are still a lot of tables that absolutely should be tables.

It’s a shame when things come to an end.

The organisation I’m currently working in has lots of digital products, many of which have some form of integration with UK Government services (tax, payroll, etc.) and, as a result, they come under regular scrutiny by various Government departments.

You probably know by now, but Apple’s WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) opening keynote is one of the big highlights in my calendar.

1.4.1 Use of Color in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) seems straightforward: Color is not used as the only visual means of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or distinguishing a visual element.

I work in a software company that deals with finances, so tables are used a lot.

What’s it called when you click somewhere on a webpage?

Navigation is a central concept in web design, the web being a network of interconnected pages and all that.

I’ve written about the difference between navigation and menubars, where I mention that menubars should be few and far between on the web.

There’s a problem markup and interaction pattern I encounter again and again.

If you’re like me an you’re a bit of a hybrid mouse/keyboard user, you might have noticed something as you browse the web: pressing the ⇥ (tab) key when you land on a website sometimes causes a previously-hidden “Skip to main content” (or words to that ef…

I have a backlog of draft articles in my favourite writing app.

The <iframe> element is a way to embed one web page inside of another.

I really enjoyed Nicolas Steenhout’s recent article on Alt text for avatars or user photos.

I usually get a new phone every 3 years.

I love the idea of Dynamic Island; making lemons into lemonade and all that.

In my opinion, everyone who works in digital product development should be at the very least familiar with screen reader software.

I’ve written about accessible responsive tables before, but something has been bugging me.

In organisations that are getting to grips with accessibility, there’s often a tension between what their users ask for and doing things in an accessible way.

I wasn’t all that blown away by Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) this year.

Some people use the keyboard to get around their computer, whether their laptop or mobile device.

Never mind all the hype around AI, there are only really two things I want Apple to announce as additions to their software offering at this year’s WWDC: Automatic Voice Memos transcription (please!)

An accessibility overlay (or accessibility widget) is one of those wee icon-only buttons you sometimes see floating over a web page; usually in the bottom-right corner.

An accessibility problem I encounter regularly is where the text of an interactive element like a button or link is preceded with an image, and the image is accessible.

There’s an interesting feature in Safari 17.4, released last week.

For a lot of companies, accessibility conversations centre around achieving a certain level of accessibility; usually that’s something to do with WCAG (the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) to a particular version and conformance level.

Screen reader users who use a laptop or desktop computer generally (though not always) use their keyboard to control their screen reader software.

There’s a common misconception that everyone who uses screen reader software is blind.

My wife and I have fully renovated three properties in the last 20 years.

I put a lot of energy into social media in the early days.