Damian’s notes

Allen Pike offers ever-timely advice in the use of hyperlinks in prose to best serve your readers, if any.

A tool for measuring contrast value Lᶜ as proposed for WCAG 3. The Lᶜ value (written with upper case L with lower case c superscript) is intended to be a better match for how the human eye perceives contrast in light-on-dark displays and dark colours generally than the relative luminance calculation used by WCAG 2.1.

If for some reason you want to replace HTML’s default ‘select’ element with a web component of your own, it is way more complicated than you might think. This article outlines some of the complications that will need to be addressed in your quixotic mission to reimplement the unimplementable.

The HTML standard is broadly accessible by default and a lot of front end code makes it less accessible in the name of aesthetics or branding or advertising. Here’s a sweary rant site on the subject.

Web tool that tells you how well colour combinations work, with simulations of various forms of partial vision. (It has the usual limitation that is your site uses translucent backgrounds or ink you need to screen shot it and find the effective colours via your favourite graphics editor’s eye dropper.)

People browsing Twitter with a screen reader get emojis and ASCII art read out to them verbatim which means the latter is a frustrating experience at best and entirely fails at communication. Jacques Favreau was sufficiently annoyed to make a Twitter bot that reads out tweets to show you what you’re saying to blind readers.

Browsers will helpfully try to autocomplete text as you type it in to an HTML form. The autocomplete attribute allows the page designer to hint to the browser what sort of information is required—and also to suppress completion when the site provides its own automatic suggestions via JavaScript.