Web development Blog

It happened. I finally have a website.

Of course, it's not my first website but the first one in a long time. My very first personal site went online about 17 years ago. It was a table-based layout with no CSS at all. All styling happened by adding HTML attributes.

Last year I attended JS Conf Budapest and I watched many great talks but “YES! Your site can (and should) be accessible” by Laura Carvajal was the most thought-provoking talk for me. Laura explained how the Financial Times made accessibility a core part of their development process and she shared several lessons she and her team had learned. In her third lesson Throw away your mouse, Laura mentioned that just testing with the keyboard wasn’t enough and that only going keyboard-only all the time made a difference.

Last year, I assembled A Collection of Interesting Facts about CSS Grid Layout after giving a workshop. This year, I worked on another workshop and I've learned some more exciting facts about the layout spec we all so love.

Of course, I'm not going to keep my knowledge to myself. I'm happy to share my findings once again with you, the CSS-Tricks community.

Last year I gave a talk about CSS and accessibility at the stahlstadt.js meetup in Linz, Austria. Afterward, an attendee asked why I was interested in accessibility: Did I or someone in my life have a disability?

I’m used to answering this question—to which the answer is no—because I get it all the time. A lot of people seem to assume that a personal connection is the only reason someone would care about accessibility.

About a year ago I started to focus more on web accessibility. The most effective method of learning for me is teaching others. That’s one of the reasons why I’m talking at meetups and conferences and why I’m writing articles about the topic. I wrote about Progressive Enhancement for Smashing Magazine and about accessibility basics here on Medium. This article is the third in a series of collections of accessibility tips. They’re in no particular order, you can read Writing HTML with accessibility in mind and Writing JavaScript with accessibility in mind now or later if you’re interested.

Grid Layout finally gives us the ability to define grids in CSS and place items into grid cells. This on its own is great, but the fact that we don't have to specify each track and we don't have to place every item manually makes the new module even better. Grids are flexible enough to adapt to their items.

This is all handled by the so called explicit and implicit grid.

When can I start using CSS grid layout?” “Too bad that it’ll take some more years before we can use grid in production.” “Do I need Modernizr in order to make websites with CSS grid layout?” “If I wanted to use grid today, I’d have to build two to three versions of my website.” The CSS grid layout module is one of the most exciting developments since responsive design. We should try to get the best out of it as soon as possible, if it makes sense for us and our projects.

A few weeks ago I held a CSS Grid Layout workshop. Since I'm, like most of us, also pretty new to the topic, I learned a lot while preparing the slides and demos.

I decided to share some of the stuff that was particularly interesting to me, with you.

Tips on how to improve the accessibility of your JavaScript components and provide users with more and better ways to interact with your website or web app.

An introduction to web accessibility. Tips on how to improve your markup and provide users with more and betters ways to navigate and interact with your site.