Blog
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Accessibility Concerns Over Chrome Removing Alert, Prompt, And Confirm Modals
Chrome has recently announced its intention to prevent cross-origin iframes from triggering the alert(), prompt(), and confirm() . These modals will still function for the top-level web page, and iframes within the same domain. Websites spanning multiple subdomains on the same domain will not allow these modals. These types of modals have been part of Javascript for decades and have seen their fair…
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Colouring SVG Background Images With SASS
SVG images have two main benefits over traditional raster or bitmap images: they can scale to any size without a loss of quality, and they allow for more control over their appearance, such as changing the colour of parts of the image in response to a particular user action. The Two Types of SVG Background Image There are two ways to set an SVG background image via CSS, and only one allows any…
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Everybody Lost When YouTube Removed Community Captions
I was recently showing my eldest son some bedtime stories, and the ones he loves the most currently are the African folktales about Anansi the spider. However, as I was watching with him, I was shocked at some of the captions accompanying the audio, it was full of profanity! Contents What Happened Who is Affected? Is it Really a Problem for Content Creators to Solve? A Better…
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Testing Exception Not Thrown With PHPUnit
Testing exceptions in PHPUnit is fairly easy, and you can be as specific as you need with testing the details of the exceptions being thrown. But what if you need to test that an exception wasn't thrown? The Exception Problem There are many clean code advocates who will tell you that testing for exceptions not being thrown is a sign that your code is doing something wrong, and that the code…
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Upcoming Changes With The WCAG 2.2 Guidelines
The proposed changes to the Web Content Accessibility Group (WCAG) guidelines defined in the WCAG 2.2 working draft are aimed at improving the experience for people with cognitive disabilities and low vision, as well as improving the overall experience for those using mobile devices. This is meant to be an interim set of guidelines until WCAG 3.0 is completed. There are 9 new guidelines that tie…
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Improvements to the Accessibility Checklist Tool
Since the initial blog post about my accessibility checklist tool, I've made further improvements which make the tool easier to use and more useful. Navigating to Previous Steps The first version was extremely linear, only allowing you to start from the beginning and progress to the next step. Now, you can move back to any previous step by using the link in the main steps outline. This…
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Testing Multiple Calls To One Method With PHPUnit
Typically if you find yourself in a situation where a method needs to make repeated calls to a single other method with varying values, you will look for a way to implement this into some form of batch call. This simplifies it into a single call that takes a single object, list, or array. Sometimes though this isn't possible, perhaps because the method being called belongs to an external class that…
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Teaching Children with the Speech API
My eldest son is in the process of learning the alphabet, so I thought I could put my skills to use by helping him learn using two of the things he loves most: mobile devices and Mario! Like all 3 year olds, he loves technology, and we use it as an incentive for many things, from general good behviour to potty training. I've been incredibly impressed with how well he's taken to using a Switch and a…
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Understanding How To Use The Firefox Accessibility Tools
Browsers today are very different beasts than they were a decade ago, and come with some amazing tools for developers to help them work more quickly and efficiently. I want to introduce you to the accessibility tools built into Firefox. Contents Detecting Issues Automatically Colour Contrast Keyboard Accessibility Text Labels Simulating Colour Blindness Viewing Tab…
