WDRL — Edition 259: Break Boxes, Common Voice, And Automated Accessibility Audits

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Hey,

do you sometimes feel like your brain doesn’t want to learn, read anymore during work? That’s normal, it’s something most of us experience from time to time when we have too much to do and then overload our brains with even more. I’m totally aware that my newsletter is not helpful in that regards, as it contains more things to learn. But it’s the very reason why I try to add a diverse, open minded set of articles that aren’t entirely frontend or tech related. And in weeks like this one where there aren’t too many articles I realize how relieving it is to not have fifty articles to read and summarize but only a few. Let’s give our brains a way of escape when it tells us to — by switching topics and winding down a bit.

Here’s one more thing: The periodic — yet not regular — reminder to give a bit back if you enjoy reading my weekly writings and summary of articles. I rely on it and cashflow has been dropping again over the past months significantly. Any amount, any type of contribution is something I’m thankful for — no matter if one time, each year, each week.

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• Voice is becoming more and more important in our lives, mainly because we use more tools without real display interfaces today — devices like Homepod, Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant or Amazon Echo. Mozilla together with a couple of institutes around the world is creating an open source pool of high-quality voices that wants to help teach machines how real people speak.
• Of course it’s provocative to say “We need Chrome no more”, as Reda Lemeden does. But there’s a good point in Chrome dominating (not leading) the browser market at the moment and this being a bad thing for the ecosystem. By embracing diversity, telling people about alternatives to Chrome like Firefox or Safari we can ensure to not land in a monopoly system that we can hardly influence anymore. We know that diversity matters, we see that everytime a product doesn’t work in different areas of the world. If we look at plants, we have evidence that monocultures are prone to diseases and bugs whereas diversity makes plants stronger. It is the same in every part of our lives, let’s keep that in mind. Even we as developers will grow, will become better developers if we switch our browsers constantly and are aware of the different issues in each of them.

UI/UX

• Nikita Prokopov has tried to analyse and redesign Github’s repository page and wrote the details down. While I don’t like the visual approach of the final result too much, there are a lot of key points we can learn from the article and how to improve existing design patterns, how to improve the user experience with simple methods.

Accessibility

• Ben Robertson shares five tools we can use for automated accessibility audits. This is great because it allows us to use these tools in CIs, in regression testing (e.g. via Selenium or Chrome/Firefox headless browsers) or in our browsers directly.

CSS

• Rachel Andrews explains us how we’re going to break boxes with the new CSS Fragmentation specification. I heard of the spec first today when stumbling over the article and it seems to be a big specification that hopefully replaces a couple of old ones. With CSS Fragmentation, we can do things as we used to with float but more flexible. We will also be able to control page breaks and more things relevant for print or ebooks.

Go beyond…

• Sara Soueidan shares what led her to become someone living a (as much as possible) waste-free lifestyle.

—Anselm