I was honored to write on “Design Systems for Figma” recently. In the article, I explain some of the ways we tackled accessibilty in Pega’s latest design system Cosmos. I hope the article is as fun for you to read as it was for me to write! Read “Accessible Design Systems: Look Good While Doing […]
If you’ve ever used WordPress (and there’s a pretty good chance you have), you may have noticed that they provide some convenient, albeit confusing, options on ways to add secondary content to your images. So, how do these settings affect screen readers and image metadata? I figured I’d dive into this and other methods of […]
While compiling a video recently for my company’s design site, I was flagged for forgetting a web captions file. Being both an accessibility advocate and having never created one of these assets before, I did some research and manually crafted one for the minute-long piece. It was fascinating. It’s practically never talked about in the […]
In part 1 of Respecting Font Preferences, I discussed how in almost every major browser, users have the option to adjust the font family and sizes of their fonts to meet their unique needs. However, just because one font family is set to an equivalent of 16 pixels (the common default), does not mean another […]
Content is king. So respecting how users choose to consume that content is absolutely critical. (PS: If you’re just here to see how to scale iOS font sizes to respect user preferences, click here for that and the TLDR) Out with the old Early in my career, I consistently chose a fixed pixel size for […]
A while back when reviewing common animation transitions for pages & elements I compiled a massive list of web-based motion and how I recommend you use them. Remember, using a ‘prefers-reduced-motion’ fallback doesn’t mean you must remove all animation. Reduce X or Y pixel movement and keep transition speeds gentle. Crossfades, color shifts, and blurs […]
Emojis. Love them or hate them, they’re part of our online experience. Well for most of us. I was recently messing around with these fun little pictograms and thought “Hey. What do they sound like to a screen reader? Is it possible to make screen-reader-friendly emojis?” Unsurprisingly, the support for readback was very patchy. Testing […]
