Cassey Lottman

This is a newsletter I sent out via TinyLetter.

CSS Algorithms - on a process for writing CSS like you were solving an algorithmic puzzle CSS Inheritance, Cascade, and Global Scope - use the cascade and inheritance in CSS, not just classes.

I learned that when list-style: none is used, Safari does not expose the semantics of a list to assistive technology, meaning Voiceover won't announce your list as a list.

I watched "Rethinking Color and Contrast", a talk by Jared Smith at Inclusive Design 24 in 2017.

I just learned about react-axe, which runs while you’re developing and highlights the kinds of errors in the rendered DOM that browser extensions like Accessibility Insights (which I usually use) or the Axe browser extension also detect automatically.

Updated 2025-12-17: Since Glitch as 'the friendly community to build on the web' is shut down now, I removed the direct links to Glitch.com that no longer work or won't work soon enough.

I'm watching: "Designing Against Domestic Violence" by Eva PenzeyMoog.

A coworker & I were talking about the <details> element and I had a hard time finding up to date info on how well supported it is by assistive technology.

I'm watching Therapeutic Refactoring by Katrina Owen.

Welcome, readers!

Updated 2025-12-17: Since Glitch as 'the friendly community to build on the web' is shut down now, I removed the direct links to Glitch.com that no longer work or won't work soon enough.

Hello, readers!

Originally shared on Twitter.

I'm watching "From Puzzles to Products" by Jessica Kerr, a talk from Velocity Conf 2019, along with some coworkers.

I've read a lot about web accessibility today.

A newsletter I sent via TinyLetter.

I'm watching Disruptive Design: Harmful Patterns and Bad Practice by Laura Kalbag.

Reading Every Layout on "Units", I came across a link to an analysis of how many users set custom font sizes in their browsers.

A response to The Lincoln Journal Star's coverage of a new thrift shop on 14th & B that displaced The Commons, possibly permanently.

Today I read this blog post on the difference in link and button in HTML and why it matters.

Updated 2025-12-17: Since Glitch as 'the friendly community to build on the web' is shut down now, I removed the direct links to Glitch.com that no longer work or won't work soon enough.

In Eleventy (the static site builder used to create this site), you can access Node environment variables (process.env.MY_VARIABLE) in your templates.

I'm reading the WHATWG HTML Specification on 'Element Definitions' to learn more about what constitutes valid HTML, so that I can correct HTML parsing errors on Glitch.com to support our goal of eventually reaching WCAG 2.1 AA compliance for accessibility.

Did you know 15% of all crashes between a car and a bike in Lincoln are classified by LPD hit & runs?

Books 🔗 Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond.

I'm watching the talk today called "Making Badass Developers", by Kathy Sierra with some coworkers at Glitch.

Someone on Twitter built a website that has a perfect Lighthouse score for accessibility, but is nowhere near accessible).

Updated 2025-12-17: Since Glitch as 'the friendly community to build on the web' is shut down now, I removed the direct links to Glitch.com that no longer work or won't work soon enough.

This was a good read on navigating anger & sadness in the workplace, both as a manager and a not-manager.

I learned a lot for example from this blog on remote culture, and it would be great to see more people speaking the same language around remote needs & processes we can use to make it easier, as well as have some dedicated time to talk about things we can…

A friend asked today what they can eat if they want to avoid meat, but also can't eat peanuts, soy, or a lot of wheat.

Found this article on why remote meetings suck through a link provided in the Glitch D&I training, and it makes SO MUCH SENSE.

You can use a 'live expression' in the chrome dev tools to track what element has focus, if you're trying to debug where focus disappears to when you tab through.

TIL that I wasn't using a new feature on Glitch, hidden behind a feature toggle, even though I thought I turned it on a week or more ago.

This is a good read on choosing the tools that you'd like to use to build the web, how those affect users, and how those affect other (future) developers.

This post initially appeared on dev.to.

Learning for today: react material-ui is a good tool for quickly getting something that looks nice, but any customizations you make to the provided examples will be very difficult to debug.

TIL firefox has a built-in tool for measuring a portion of the page, but you have to toggle it on in the settings menu of devtools How to turn it on

I found this in the readme of a cool art tool someone made on Glitch.

TIL about the itemscope attribute in html

The only valid children of a <html> tag, according to the spec, are <head> and <body>.

Read about React component design patterns & anti-patterns

When should I use useReducer in React?

Stock photos on your site aren't necessarily 'purely decorative' - one of a family on your business website might be trying to say "We're family friendly" and so that's what the alt should say.

Reading about useEffect in React.

Reading about (the state of accessibility on the most popular websites on the internet)[https://webaim.org/projects/million/].

I'm a web developer, but first and foremost, I'm a community member.

I learned from a coworker that the Glitch logo changes colors based on time of day, and my mind is blown.

One non-code thing I'm learning lately is that the levers of power are more obscured than I thought, even for local issues here in Lincoln, Nebraska.

I learned from Dan Abramov's latest post about how class components are different than function components in React.