The lang attribute is an essential component in the basic structure of an HTML document. It’s important that we define it correctly because it affects many aspects of user experience. Unfortunately, the negative effects a missing or wrong attribute can have aren’t always evident. Austrian news site orf.at learned that the hard way recently.
In the first article of this series, I explained how important progressive enhancement is for web accessibility. Building websites layer by layer allows for a cleaner separation of concerns and more resilient experiences. This second article is about user preferences and how to respect them when writing CSS.
About 4 years ago, I began to focus on web accessibility professionally. I read many articles and books, watched talks, followed experts, and I also shared my knowledge at meet-ups and online. The first 3 articles I wrote were Writing HTML with Accessibility in Mind, Writing JavaScript with Accessibility in Mind, and Writing CSS with Accessibility in Mind. I've shared the most exciting new things I've learned about creating inclusive experiences in each language.
According to WebAims annual accessibility analysis, 98.1% of home pages of the top 1,000,000 websites have detectable WCAG 2.0 failures. Some of these sites may only have minor contrast issues or maybe just a single missing id, while others are highly inaccessible. However, this number is pretty damn high, considering the fact that automatic testing tools only report obvious accessibility issues.
I’m working on a project where I have a list of items in reverse order. The list starts with the latest item and ends with the oldest. I wanted to express that both semantically and visually. I did some research and found interesting solutions, some of them good, others not so much.
This is part 3 of my series Here’s what I didn’t know about… in which I try to learn new things about CSS. This time I'm trying to find out what I didn’t know about the content property.