We know that there are some use cases where it makes sense to integrate your existing web experience into your native app, I’m Pete a developer advocate on the web team at Google. Let’s take a look at how you can do this today and what we’re doing to make your web development experience better today, you can do this either using a webview or a custom tab.
Well, each of these has their own benefits. They’re also drawbacks to each with web views. The content runs fullscreen and supports many of the PWA features. It has the ability to use post message to send messages back and forth between the webview and your native code, which makes it possible to invoke certain native functionality that isn’t available on the web. On a flip side, web views our sandbox completely from the user.
They don’t share the same cookie, store or storage and they don’t have access to the users, safe passwords and so on. The other challenge that comes up is that web views may be out of date. Web views on devices running pre, lollipop, aren’t updatable custom tabs also support content in full-screen mode and because they’re powered by the user’s default browser they share cookies, storage, passwords and more.
It’s always up-to-date and supports the full gamut of capabilities required for progressive web apps. But there is that name and address bar across the top. The user knows that they’re looking at web content, which isn’t always what you want. We’ve heard from you that you want an easier way to launch full-screen web content from a native app, but do it using the users preferred browser at the chrome dev summit.
Last year we announced a new type of activity that Android developers can use to embed trusted. First party web content trusted web activities provide a new way to integrate parts of your web experience into your native Android, app they’re powered by custom tabs, which means the content is rendered by the users up-to-date browser instead of an out-of-date webview. It shares the same cookies and storage within the browser.
It has access to AP ice that aren’t available in web views. This isn’t designed as a mechanism to simply wrap your site and dump it in the Play Store. A simple mistake can cause some drastic problems. For example, the user installs your app from the store hops on a plane and launches your app. The user is going to see the dinosaur because the app hasn’t installed the serviceworker yet trusted web activities are designed to make it possible for you to use the investment that you’ve made in your progressive web.
App within your Android, app, similar to chrome, custom, tabs trusted web activities run full screen. Each activity of your app is either completely provided by the web or an Android activity. There’s no way to combine them. For example, you can’t use Android components for navigation and content, rendering via the trusted web activity. Transitions between web and native content are between activities trusted web activities do have some constraints, you can’t just show any content, it must be yours, and you must be able to prove that it’s yours by adding a set of digital asset links, you must include an intent Filter for the opened URL in your Android manifest your app must pass the chrome, PWA install ability, checks which includes being served over HTTPS, registering a serviceworker and including a manifest and very important.
Your app must still meet all of the normal Play Store guidelines. Let’s take a look at what’s involved in adding a trusted web activity to your Android app. There are essentially two steps that we need to complete to embed or progressive web app in our Android app. First, we need to add a set of digital asset links. These links establish a relationship between our web content and the trusted web activity.
By establishing this relationship, our android app can verify that the content is served is ours and meets that first party requirement. Then we can add the activity to our Android app and show our web content and our manifest file. We need to tell it about an asset statement by adding this metadata attribute. Next, we need to update the strings.Xml file and our Android app and tell it about our web content where it lives and give it the permission that it needs oh yeah and all those quotes there.
Sorry they do need to be escaped like that. Now we need to create and deploy the assets link JSON file, using key tool on the certificate that we use to sign our Android app, we’ll get the sha-256 hash so that later Android can verify the certificate and that hash, then, in the asset, links JSON file. Will include that hash, our package name and a few other boilerplate pieces and deploy it to the dot well-known directory.
The file makes it possible for Android to verify the relationship between what’s being served and our Android app. We’ve set up the digital asset links we need now. We can create the activity. There’s a bunch of boilerplate code required to launch the activity that I’ve kind of glossed over here, but we’re working on adding that to the Android support library, so that you won’t have to deal with it in the future.
Once the boiler stuff is complete, you can create the new intent set, the URL and open the web content in your trusted web activity. Today, this is available on android and chrome 68, which is currently chrome, dev and we hope to see it land and stable sometime in q3 of 2018 to learn more check out gqo slash trusted web activities. There’s a great post there with everything you need to know to get started and a sample that you can use to try it yourself.
”. My guest is Marcy Sutton Head of Learning at Gatsby and former Developer Advocate at Deque Systems and today we’re talking About web accessibility, Let’s get started: [ MUSIC PLAYING ], So Marcy thanks for being here. What exactly does Accessibility mean MARCY SUTTON To me. It Means building websites that include people With disabilities, both building for People with disabilities and with people With disabilities, including them as Stakeholders hiring them to work on our teams.
Paying them for their work to review things. For accessibility and give us feedback Along the way, RICK VISCOMI, So when a Website isn’t accessible. What’s at stake, MARCY SUTTON A lot! If you think about how many Services are moving online if accessibility isn’t Built in then, it could present Barriers for people with disabilities, where They can’t use the service They might give up and Leave or worse, it might cause harm to Them if they have something like a traumatic Brain injury or seizure risk So there’s actually Quite a bit at stake if the web isn’t accessible, RICK VISCOMI, So even with The Domino’s lawsuit recently that came out where They lost their appeal.
Do you think that Websites will actually have a push towards more Accessible websites, especially now that lawyers Realize the legal risk MARCY SUTTON In The United States legislation can certainly Help and people can lean on the Law in this country to enforce their civil rights, So having rulings like The Domino’s ruling could potentially Help since there has been an absence of rulings, In favor of including websites under the Americans, With Disabilities Act, but I think there will be More to read in that space I have seen and read and Heard about companies looking at competitors, That have been sued and sort of feeling like Oh, maybe we’re next, so there can be some Market pressure, if there are legal actions being taken And if that’s what it takes, To make something accessible, then I think that’s moving.
In the right direction, RICK VISCOMI, Where do The breakdowns typically happen when a website Becomes inaccessible, Are the managers just Not buying into it Are the developers unaware Of the importance of it, lack of developer Tools all of the above MARCY SUTTON, I think It’s mostly an education issue and awareness, So to sort of try and Solve this problem, I advocate building a Culture around accessibility, so that everyone at the company Is involved and invested From project managers to Designers and developers, we all have a part to play in Making the web more accessible – And it is true that A lot of people just aren’t aware of the Impact that they could have There’s also the misconceptions That accessibility is costly and maybe not worth it.
It’s too niche of an audience, But actually it can improve. Things for a lot of people, If you think of it in Terms of inclusive design, the benefits that we Put into our websites like keyword, support, improving Contrast and font size those can help a lot of people, So it’s definitely worth it. And it’s easier and less costly. If you do it from the beginning, RICK VISCOMI. Is it something –? 10 % of the population has Some form of disability, so it’s more than niche, It actually affects A lot of people, MARCY SUTTON – I think it’s More than that, actually one in five people – RICK VISCOMI, Oh wow, MARCY SUTTON And the range of Disabilities is pretty wide, so there’s all Kinds of scenarios that people can be Browsing your website and they might have situational Or temporary disabilities People are born With disabilities There’s a whole spectrum of How people use the web that’s really kind of beautiful And if we can Embrace that, like we did with responsive Design and letting go of some of that control.
Over pixel perfection and how the user actually Visits our website there’s some real opportunities. There to innovate and make things that are way more robust, RICK VISCOMI. What did you Mean by situational disability, MARCY SUTTON, If You break your arm if you have a baby in one arm. Or a cup of tea or coffee, you might hold your Phone in a different way or have to switch arms If you are born with Something like that, you might permanently not Be able to use your arms, And so you have to use other Input modalities like voice, or maybe you use a joystick With your mouth or something And so there’s new Devices and ways of navigating that don’t rely.
On the default of perfectly working limbs and the abilities That most people, think of So there are some Opportunities and people are pretty resilient. They figure out ways. To navigate the web And if we can Support them better, then that’s pretty awesome, RICK VISCOMI That Reminds me of Android Auto, where, if I’m driving My car, my phone, is not necessarily a thing. I’r putting Right directly, in my face So their way of Interfacing with devices changes entirely depending On your situation, MARCY SUTTON, Yes and a Lot of those technologies were developed for People with disabilities, so it’s worth Considering that, maybe some of the things that We appreciate, and we can use every day were invented.
For people who needed it, RICK VISCOMI, I want to go back. To something that you mentioned earlier about having Users with disabilities, or even people with Disabilities on your team, as part of the Development process, How can you implement Accessibility as part of the Process in a way that ensures that the website’s Going to be accessible, MARCY, SUTTON Well, Certainly including people on your teams to be Stakeholders and provide feedback in regular intervals.
That would be the best way. Is to have people embedded on your teams who Have disabilities mainly because they Have experiences and perspectives that, as Able-Bodied developers, we just can’t make that up. It’s not your lived experience. So having that feedback, all the Time would be truly valuable And people get to Work on your teams and you pay them for Their work and I think that’s a really good way to go: RICK VISCOMI, How about Part of the design process, If a website, for example, Is built to be entirely using Canvas or Flash or Something if people have a specific technology, In mind where it’s just never going to be accessible, How can you actually prevent that from happening Where, in the design Process, do you actually make those decisions? To be accessible, MARCY SUTTON, I think Having some requirements about how users should be able To navigate the site should definitely start in design, I mean hopefully you’re Not getting too locked down on a given technology, — RICK, VISCOMI Hopefully not Flash MARCY SUTTON — in The design phase Yeah Flash no way But Canvas –.
There have Been whole websites built with Canvas And accessibility Unfortunately, was an afterthought in A lot of those cases – And we do have some Standards for Canvas that are better than They were four years ago, but you still have To re-implement a lot of native Functionality that you would get for free if you used The DOM or the Document Object Model RICK VISCOMI. Are you referring To the Accessibility Object Model, MARCY SUTTON, No, So with Canvas.
If you Provide fallback content, there’s a method called Draw focus if needed, You can pass off some Of these interactions from the two-dimensional Canvas Which is essentially a bitmap to that fallback content. And try to create some sort of a Semantic experience, but that’s a lot of work And if you can use the Document Object Model which does feed into what’s. Called the accessibility tree –, which is a fancy Term for a structure with accessibility, information – –: you can do a lot and Communicate to users of assistive technology, What’s going on on the screen, RICK VISCOMI, What’s the Current state of accessibility in developer tools, Either in the browser or as part of testing MARCY SUTTON, Pretty Great actually From when I got started as a Front-End developer everything for accessibility in terms Of this accessibility tree that I mentioned all Of that information was sort of hidden Under the hood And you had to go, Crawl through the Dom and go look at what was on The page and sort of just know what was going on there And now we have developer tools.
Like in Chrome and in Firefox, and it’s amazing how much you Can learn about accessibility through those tools? It would be great to Have more but we’ve come a really long way. Both with built-in dev tools and browser extensions, And automated tools, so I think the future is pretty Bright in terms of tooling RICK VISCOMI, What was your Experience with axe-core and what did it do? Marcy SUTTON, axe-core Is an accessibility API written with JavaScript? It’s an open source library that I used to work on full-time And it’s used in both Lighthouse And Accessibility, Insights from Microsoft, so it’s sort of An engine and a common rule set for testing accessibility And its used a lot of places.
It’s pretty cool, There’s other APIs. As well like WAVE and some others that aren’t Coming to mind at the moment, but it’s nice to have a common Set of rules and the engine that people can Count on and they can use it in different ways: Such as in browser extensions and in automated tooling To use a common rule set so that some Testers on your team aren’t using a different set. Of rules than the developers, for example, Because then you’re working Off two different sets of requirements, and it can Be hard to meet in the middle RICK VISCOMI You had Mentioned that axe-core’s integrated with Lighthouse The HTTP Archive runs Lighthouse On 5 million websites, so we can get some Of that analysis from axe-core aggregated To the scale of the web, I actually have a few stats, So 22 % of web pages tested Passed the color contrast audit from axe-core 50 % of pages are passing the Lighthouse image alt attribute being present audit, So it’s kind of surprising To see how low accessibility adoption is in certain Areas of the web and having a tool like Axe-Core is just really great to be able to get That visibility, MARCY SUTTON, Sadly It’s actually better than I expected RICK VISCOMI That Is pretty sad, MARCY SUTTON? It is sad Yeah, it’s depressing.
There is a project from WebAIM Called The WebAIM Million, where they ran the WAVE automated tool. Against the top 1 million home pages – And that was also a Very sad set of results because, as an industry, We have a lot more work to do a lot of work to Do to make that better Tools are helpful. In highlighting some of these low-hanging fruit, Things that we need to fix. But if we look at It in aggregate the picture is not very Pretty at the moment, RICK VISCOMI You Co-Authored “ Smashing Book 6” with your chapter titled “ Accessibility in Times of Single-Page, Apps.
”. So in what ways do accessibility, And single-page apps not play well together: MARCY SUTTON, Quite A few, unfortunately, I mean all of the Basics of accessibility apply if you’re building A website that’s heavy, with JavaScript So things like image, alt text and color contrast, But when we have this Javascript layer, that’s taking over a lot of The interactions that would be happening, In a web browser, we have to do a bit more To support users who are navigating with Assistive technology and using the keyboard Things like focus management, making announcements Using unobtrusive motion, If we’re using a Lot of JavaScript to try and delight Users, we have to try not to cause Harm with those But I’d say, probably the Focus management piece is the biggest Thing that we have to handle because If the browser is not refreshing, the page When the page changes a user using a Keyboard might be stuck in the prior part of The screen, or they have no idea what happened – If they’re in a screen reader or something So we have to manage Their experience going through the Application and that can be pretty cool.
Actually, I think it’s another area, That we can innovate And I’m hoping that frameworks And potentially browsers could help make this easier, So that would be a good space. To try and move the needle a bit to support developers without Them all having to re-implement all of the same things: RICK VISCOMI, Even kind of More of an old-school UI component, like modal dialogs Has its own focus problems? Can you describe some of The accessibility issues with modal dialogs and What’s being done on the HTML standard side to fix that MARCY, SUTTON Sure yeah, So modal dialogs are An example of some of these same Things I was talking about with focus management, So you have a layer that Opens up over the screen, It probably has content Behind it, maybe a screen curtain to gray it out When that modal opens, you Have to send focus into it, so the keyboard user Or screen reader user is in the right.
Part of the page they’re not left behind The modal window, So that means that you Also need to disable any interactive content. Behind that modal window and that part can Get pretty tricky You have to do some DOM Walking potentially set aria-hidden and tabindex On interactive controls and most people are not Going to do that DOM walking It’s hard. It’s expensive performance, Wise and you have to do it –, you know every time the modal Opens walk it down and –.
It’s like you’re doing it. In inverse both directions, So what would be great Is in the standard space, if we could have Something like HTML inert. It’s an attribute that Was proposed a while back, I think it was at Risk of being removed – and nobody is convinced, That we really need it. This is me officially Saying yes, we need it because the alternative Is a lot of DOM walking that, frankly, very little People are going to do So.
What that would do for us Is make it a lot easier to set a Boolean attribute in Html to effectively disable whole subtrees of the HTML Dom And that way when we send focus into a Modal, we don’t have to do as much in the background. It helps to have Sibling elements, so maybe the modal and the Content behind it are siblings. That way, you can just turn Off all the other content, So that does take a bit Of work from the developer to structure their DOM that Way, but that attribute would solve a whole Lot of pain, as well as the dialog element in HTML, That’s another one.
That’s At risk of being removed, I think it’s Firefox At this point that we need to implement dialog That could give us some of this Behavior for free, like focus management having a Semantic HTML element that would tell users of Assistive technology that it is a dialogue, So there’s some Patterns here that — to have every Developer in the world have to re-implement the same Things over and over again, it seems like we should Have some more primitives for making that easier, RICK, VISCOMI Yeah That sounds super important MARCY SUTTON And complicated [ CHUCKLING ], RICK VISCOMI, You’ve advocated In the past, for something called an accessibility, Statement, What is that, and why is that? So good for accessibility, MARCY, SUTTON, Accessibility, Statements are great tools, no matter what kind of a website You’re making, whether it’s with heavy JavaScript or not So an accessibility, Statement is generally a page on your website.
That’s easy to find: maybe it’s linked. Your website footer, and it has things Like what you’re doing to improve accessibility, Maybe what level of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines? That you’re aiming for It’s nice to have that Goal and that target whether or not you’ve Actually met it, but you have to keep actively Working at that to improve You can also collect Any accessibility, tips or information about Keyboard shortcuts or ways to use your website For accessibility and ways for users To contact you, That’s one of the Most important pieces having an affirmative Statement that says: hey, we might not Be perfect at this, but we’d love your feedback.
And get in touch with us And if people do Act on that feedback, So it’s opening That conversation to bring people in and Make them feel included and give them a way To give you feedback, Because a lot of These websites that have glaring Accessibility issues: we have no way to contact them, So you might see some tweets Of people calling out companies because they can’t use the Website or the service, Maybe an update to the Website or application breaks, what used to work? So if you have That statement it gives people a way to contact You in an official blog so that you can act On that feedback, RICK VISCOMI, It must be really Reassuring to go to a website and see that they actually Care about accessibility, MARCY, SUTTON, Absolutely RICK, VISCOMI, So What resources would you recommend for Web developers, who want to learn more about Creating accessible websites, MARCY SUTTON, So many –, The A11Y Project, Is really great? There’s an accessibility, Course, from Alice Boxhall and Rob Dodson at Google, on Udacity, I have a page on my website.
It’s MarcySutton.Com, There’s a web accessibility. Resources guide there and I collect things like Books and tools and articles and things that I refer to a lot There’s quite a bit out there. From companies like WebAIM, They have really great articles Deque. My former employer has A thing called Deque University: They offer free Accessibility, training to people with disabilities; Which is really great So there’s definitely a wealth.
Of information out there Just getting it to the people, To solve this education problem is sort of the gap that We need to figure out RICK VISCOMI And how About No Mouse Mondays, or what do you call it? Marcy SUTTON? Yes, I released an npm Package this week to sort of put a tool in the Hands of developers to turn off the mouse cursor for everyone, It was sort of a Joke but it actually could be useful as a Dev tool so something to pull into your Project maybe one day a week to actually have a No mouse day of the week, RICK VISCOMI, That reminds me Of 2G Tuesdays or something to get the feel for Slow performance, MARCY, SUTTON, Yeah, RICK VISCOMI.
I think That’s a good idea: MARCY SUTTON Yeah, It’s sort of a Chaos Monkey Approach to things of you know, if you Unplug, your mouse or don’t have that capability. How resilient is your design? Can you actually use it And some of the most Glaring accessibility challenges I see are with color Contrast and a lack of keyboard access, So if we could Somehow, culturally, build in tools and processes. To get us thinking about that, that would help So the No-Mouse Mondays is the First experimental version, but I have plans for it: RICK VISCOMI, It’s a good idea, All right Marcy.
This has been great Thanks for coming on the show MARCY SUTTON. Thank you. So much for having me RICK VISCOMI, You Can check out links to everything we talked about? In the description below, Thanks for reading and We’ll see you next time, [ MUSIC PLAYING ]
”. My guest is Marcy Sutton Head of Learning at Gatsby and former Developer Advocate at Deque Systems and today we’re talking About web accessibility, Let’s get started: [ MUSIC PLAYING ], So Marcy thanks for being here. What exactly does Accessibility mean MARCY SUTTON To me. It Means building websites that include people With disabilities, both building for People with disabilities and with people With disabilities, including them as Stakeholders hiring them to work on our teams.
Paying them for their work to review things. For accessibility and give us feedback Along the way, RICK VISCOMI, So when a Website isn’t accessible. What’s at stake, MARCY SUTTON A lot! If you think about how many Services are moving online if accessibility isn’t Built in then, it could present Barriers for people with disabilities, where They can’t use the service They might give up and Leave or worse, it might cause harm to Them if they have something like a traumatic Brain injury or seizure risk So there’s actually Quite a bit at stake if the web isn’t accessible, RICK VISCOMI, So even with The Domino’s lawsuit recently that came out where They lost their appeal.
Do you think that Websites will actually have a push towards more Accessible websites, especially now that lawyers Realize the legal risk MARCY SUTTON In The United States legislation can certainly Help and people can lean on the Law in this country to enforce their civil rights, So having rulings like The Domino’s ruling could potentially Help since there has been an absence of rulings, In favor of including websites under the Americans, With Disabilities Act, but I think there will be More to read in that space I have seen and read and Heard about companies looking at competitors, That have been sued and sort of feeling like Oh, maybe we’re next, so there can be some Market pressure, if there are legal actions being taken And if that’s what it takes, To make something accessible, then I think that’s moving.
In the right direction, RICK VISCOMI, Where do The breakdowns typically happen when a website Becomes inaccessible, Are the managers just Not buying into it Are the developers unaware Of the importance of it, lack of developer Tools all of the above MARCY SUTTON, I think It’s mostly an education issue and awareness, So to sort of try and Solve this problem, I advocate building a Culture around accessibility, so that everyone at the company Is involved and invested From project managers to Designers and developers, we all have a part to play in Making the web more accessible – And it is true that A lot of people just aren’t aware of the Impact that they could have There’s also the misconceptions That accessibility is costly and maybe not worth it.
It’s too niche of an audience, But actually it can improve. Things for a lot of people, If you think of it in Terms of inclusive design, the benefits that we Put into our websites like keyword, support, improving Contrast and font size those can help a lot of people, So it’s definitely worth it. And it’s easier and less costly. If you do it from the beginning, RICK VISCOMI. Is it something –? 10 % of the population has Some form of disability, so it’s more than niche, It actually affects A lot of people, MARCY SUTTON – I think it’s More than that, actually one in five people – RICK VISCOMI, Oh wow, MARCY SUTTON And the range of Disabilities is pretty wide, so there’s all Kinds of scenarios that people can be Browsing your website and they might have situational Or temporary disabilities People are born With disabilities There’s a whole spectrum of How people use the web that’s really kind of beautiful And if we can Embrace that, like we did with responsive Design and letting go of some of that control.
Over pixel perfection and how the user actually Visits our website there’s some real opportunities. There to innovate and make things that are way more robust, RICK VISCOMI. What did you Mean by situational disability, MARCY SUTTON, If You break your arm if you have a baby in one arm. Or a cup of tea or coffee, you might hold your Phone in a different way or have to switch arms If you are born with Something like that, you might permanently not Be able to use your arms, And so you have to use other Input modalities like voice, or maybe you use a joystick With your mouth or something And so there’s new Devices and ways of navigating that don’t rely.
On the default of perfectly working limbs and the abilities That most people, think of So there are some Opportunities and people are pretty resilient. They figure out ways. To navigate the web And if we can Support them better, then that’s pretty awesome, RICK VISCOMI That Reminds me of Android Auto, where, if I’m driving My car, my phone, is not necessarily a thing. I’r putting Right directly, in my face So their way of Interfacing with devices changes entirely depending On your situation, MARCY SUTTON, Yes and a Lot of those technologies were developed for People with disabilities, so it’s worth Considering that, maybe some of the things that We appreciate, and we can use every day were invented.
For people who needed it, RICK VISCOMI, I want to go back. To something that you mentioned earlier about having Users with disabilities, or even people with Disabilities on your team, as part of the Development process, How can you implement Accessibility as part of the Process in a way that ensures that the website’s Going to be accessible, MARCY, SUTTON Well, Certainly including people on your teams to be Stakeholders and provide feedback in regular intervals.
That would be the best way. Is to have people embedded on your teams who Have disabilities mainly because they Have experiences and perspectives that, as Able-Bodied developers, we just can’t make that up. It’s not your lived experience. So having that feedback, all the Time would be truly valuable And people get to Work on your teams and you pay them for Their work and I think that’s a really good way to go: RICK VISCOMI, How about Part of the design process, If a website, for example, Is built to be entirely using Canvas or Flash or Something if people have a specific technology, In mind where it’s just never going to be accessible, How can you actually prevent that from happening Where, in the design Process, do you actually make those decisions? To be accessible, MARCY SUTTON, I think Having some requirements about how users should be able To navigate the site should definitely start in design, I mean hopefully you’re Not getting too locked down on a given technology, — RICK, VISCOMI Hopefully not Flash MARCY SUTTON — in The design phase Yeah Flash no way But Canvas –.
There have Been whole websites built with Canvas And accessibility Unfortunately, was an afterthought in A lot of those cases – And we do have some Standards for Canvas that are better than They were four years ago, but you still have To re-implement a lot of native Functionality that you would get for free if you used The DOM or the Document Object Model RICK VISCOMI. Are you referring To the Accessibility Object Model, MARCY SUTTON, No, So with Canvas.
If you Provide fallback content, there’s a method called Draw focus if needed, You can pass off some Of these interactions from the two-dimensional Canvas Which is essentially a bitmap to that fallback content. And try to create some sort of a Semantic experience, but that’s a lot of work And if you can use the Document Object Model which does feed into what’s. Called the accessibility tree –, which is a fancy Term for a structure with accessibility, information – –: you can do a lot and Communicate to users of assistive technology, What’s going on on the screen, RICK VISCOMI, What’s the Current state of accessibility in developer tools, Either in the browser or as part of testing MARCY SUTTON, Pretty Great actually From when I got started as a Front-End developer everything for accessibility in terms Of this accessibility tree that I mentioned all Of that information was sort of hidden Under the hood And you had to go, Crawl through the Dom and go look at what was on The page and sort of just know what was going on there And now we have developer tools.
Like in Chrome and in Firefox, and it’s amazing how much you Can learn about accessibility through those tools? It would be great to Have more but we’ve come a really long way. Both with built-in dev tools and browser extensions, And automated tools, so I think the future is pretty Bright in terms of tooling RICK VISCOMI, What was your Experience with axe-core and what did it do? Marcy SUTTON, axe-core Is an accessibility API written with JavaScript? It’s an open source library that I used to work on full-time And it’s used in both Lighthouse And Accessibility, Insights from Microsoft, so it’s sort of An engine and a common rule set for testing accessibility And its used a lot of places.
It’s pretty cool, There’s other APIs. As well like WAVE and some others that aren’t Coming to mind at the moment, but it’s nice to have a common Set of rules and the engine that people can Count on and they can use it in different ways: Such as in browser extensions and in automated tooling To use a common rule set so that some Testers on your team aren’t using a different set. Of rules than the developers, for example, Because then you’re working Off two different sets of requirements, and it can Be hard to meet in the middle RICK VISCOMI You had Mentioned that axe-core’s integrated with Lighthouse The HTTP Archive runs Lighthouse On 5 million websites, so we can get some Of that analysis from axe-core aggregated To the scale of the web, I actually have a few stats, So 22 % of web pages tested Passed the color contrast audit from axe-core 50 % of pages are passing the Lighthouse image alt attribute being present audit, So it’s kind of surprising To see how low accessibility adoption is in certain Areas of the web and having a tool like Axe-Core is just really great to be able to get That visibility, MARCY SUTTON, Sadly It’s actually better than I expected RICK VISCOMI That Is pretty sad, MARCY SUTTON? It is sad Yeah, it’s depressing.
There is a project from WebAIM Called The WebAIM Million, where they ran the WAVE automated tool. Against the top 1 million home pages – And that was also a Very sad set of results because, as an industry, We have a lot more work to do a lot of work to Do to make that better Tools are helpful. In highlighting some of these low-hanging fruit, Things that we need to fix. But if we look at It in aggregate the picture is not very Pretty at the moment, RICK VISCOMI You Co-Authored “ Smashing Book 6” with your chapter titled “ Accessibility in Times of Single-Page, Apps.
”. So in what ways do accessibility, And single-page apps not play well together: MARCY SUTTON, Quite A few, unfortunately, I mean all of the Basics of accessibility apply if you’re building A website that’s heavy, with JavaScript So things like image, alt text and color contrast, But when we have this Javascript layer, that’s taking over a lot of The interactions that would be happening, In a web browser, we have to do a bit more To support users who are navigating with Assistive technology and using the keyboard Things like focus management, making announcements Using unobtrusive motion, If we’re using a Lot of JavaScript to try and delight Users, we have to try not to cause Harm with those But I’d say, probably the Focus management piece is the biggest Thing that we have to handle because If the browser is not refreshing, the page When the page changes a user using a Keyboard might be stuck in the prior part of The screen, or they have no idea what happened – If they’re in a screen reader or something So we have to manage Their experience going through the Application and that can be pretty cool.
Actually, I think it’s another area, That we can innovate And I’m hoping that frameworks And potentially browsers could help make this easier, So that would be a good space. To try and move the needle a bit to support developers without Them all having to re-implement all of the same things: RICK VISCOMI, Even kind of More of an old-school UI component, like modal dialogs Has its own focus problems? Can you describe some of The accessibility issues with modal dialogs and What’s being done on the HTML standard side to fix that MARCY, SUTTON Sure yeah, So modal dialogs are An example of some of these same Things I was talking about with focus management, So you have a layer that Opens up over the screen, It probably has content Behind it, maybe a screen curtain to gray it out When that modal opens, you Have to send focus into it, so the keyboard user Or screen reader user is in the right.
Part of the page they’re not left behind The modal window, So that means that you Also need to disable any interactive content. Behind that modal window and that part can Get pretty tricky You have to do some DOM Walking potentially set aria-hidden and tabindex On interactive controls and most people are not Going to do that DOM walking It’s hard. It’s expensive performance, Wise and you have to do it –, you know every time the modal Opens walk it down and –.
It’s like you’re doing it. In inverse both directions, So what would be great Is in the standard space, if we could have Something like HTML inert. It’s an attribute that Was proposed a while back, I think it was at Risk of being removed – and nobody is convinced, That we really need it. This is me officially Saying yes, we need it because the alternative Is a lot of DOM walking that, frankly, very little People are going to do So.
What that would do for us Is make it a lot easier to set a Boolean attribute in Html to effectively disable whole subtrees of the HTML Dom And that way when we send focus into a Modal, we don’t have to do as much in the background. It helps to have Sibling elements, so maybe the modal and the Content behind it are siblings. That way, you can just turn Off all the other content, So that does take a bit Of work from the developer to structure their DOM that Way, but that attribute would solve a whole Lot of pain, as well as the dialog element in HTML, That’s another one.
That’s At risk of being removed, I think it’s Firefox At this point that we need to implement dialog That could give us some of this Behavior for free, like focus management having a Semantic HTML element that would tell users of Assistive technology that it is a dialogue, So there’s some Patterns here that — to have every Developer in the world have to re-implement the same Things over and over again, it seems like we should Have some more primitives for making that easier, RICK, VISCOMI Yeah That sounds super important MARCY SUTTON And complicated [ CHUCKLING ], RICK VISCOMI, You’ve advocated In the past, for something called an accessibility, Statement, What is that, and why is that? So good for accessibility, MARCY, SUTTON, Accessibility, Statements are great tools, no matter what kind of a website You’re making, whether it’s with heavy JavaScript or not So an accessibility, Statement is generally a page on your website.
That’s easy to find: maybe it’s linked. Your website footer, and it has things Like what you’re doing to improve accessibility, Maybe what level of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines? That you’re aiming for It’s nice to have that Goal and that target whether or not you’ve Actually met it, but you have to keep actively Working at that to improve You can also collect Any accessibility, tips or information about Keyboard shortcuts or ways to use your website For accessibility and ways for users To contact you, That’s one of the Most important pieces having an affirmative Statement that says: hey, we might not Be perfect at this, but we’d love your feedback.
And get in touch with us And if people do Act on that feedback, So it’s opening That conversation to bring people in and Make them feel included and give them a way To give you feedback, Because a lot of These websites that have glaring Accessibility issues: we have no way to contact them, So you might see some tweets Of people calling out companies because they can’t use the Website or the service, Maybe an update to the Website or application breaks, what used to work? So if you have That statement it gives people a way to contact You in an official blog so that you can act On that feedback, RICK VISCOMI, It must be really Reassuring to go to a website and see that they actually Care about accessibility, MARCY, SUTTON, Absolutely RICK, VISCOMI, So What resources would you recommend for Web developers, who want to learn more about Creating accessible websites, MARCY SUTTON, So many –, The A11Y Project, Is really great? There’s an accessibility, Course, from Alice Boxhall and Rob Dodson at Google, on Udacity, I have a page on my website.
It’s MarcySutton.Com, There’s a web accessibility. Resources guide there and I collect things like Books and tools and articles and things that I refer to a lot There’s quite a bit out there. From companies like WebAIM, They have really great articles Deque. My former employer has A thing called Deque University: They offer free Accessibility, training to people with disabilities; Which is really great So there’s definitely a wealth.
Of information out there Just getting it to the people, To solve this education problem is sort of the gap that We need to figure out RICK VISCOMI And how About No Mouse Mondays, or what do you call it? Marcy SUTTON? Yes, I released an npm Package this week to sort of put a tool in the Hands of developers to turn off the mouse cursor for everyone, It was sort of a Joke but it actually could be useful as a Dev tool so something to pull into your Project maybe one day a week to actually have a No mouse day of the week, RICK VISCOMI, That reminds me Of 2G Tuesdays or something to get the feel for Slow performance, MARCY, SUTTON, Yeah, RICK VISCOMI.
I think That’s a good idea: MARCY SUTTON Yeah, It’s sort of a Chaos Monkey Approach to things of you know, if you Unplug, your mouse or don’t have that capability. How resilient is your design? Can you actually use it And some of the most Glaring accessibility challenges I see are with color Contrast and a lack of keyboard access, So if we could Somehow, culturally, build in tools and processes. To get us thinking about that, that would help So the No-Mouse Mondays is the First experimental version, but I have plans for it: RICK VISCOMI, It’s a good idea, All right Marcy.
This has been great Thanks for coming on the show MARCY SUTTON. Thank you. So much for having me RICK VISCOMI, You Can check out links to everything we talked about? In the description below, Thanks for reading and We’ll see you next time, [ MUSIC PLAYING ]
Today, I’m going to talk about web development on Chromebooks. Here is a quote from you. A skilled web developer. Chromebooks are awesome and, if you don’t remember saying this recently, I hope that after reading this article, it will become a daily thing. Chromebooks are known for being lightweight fast, secure web browsing machines.
They are so much more. The device portfolio has grown to include tablets, detachable z’, all-in-one, mini desktops and, of course, laptops and convertibles. Many of these are capable development devices. So what can you run on them? Well, ideas like visual studio code, Atom, webstorm tools like node, react, docker and get, and you can test your web apps with multiple browsers, including real mobile browsers as well.
You can check how your mobile app interacts with your web server all right on the same device. Okay, let’s get started and get your Chrome OS device ready for development. We are going to set up a Linux environment and then install the tools you need to start open, Chrome settings and search or scroll down to Linux. Click turn on this will download and setup a Linux environment when it’s complete, you’ll see a terminal prompt pro tip.
If you will be doing a lot of development, pin the terminal by right-clicking and choosing pin now we have a Linux environment. Let’s install some tools head over to the visual studio code website and download the Linux dot de Bie package, double click and choose install once it’s installed. You can find vs code in your app launcher. If you’re going to be using this IDE a lot, you can pin it like, we did with the terminal.
Any application with a dot de Bie package can be installed in a similar way. Let’s install atom, the process is exactly the same: download install and launch not every app has a dot de Bie package, but you can install any of your favorite tools that support Debian Linux, for example, to install sublime text, follow the Linux instructions on the website to Setup, the apt, repo and install the editor using the command-line when we install node in a few seconds, we’ll take a closer look at command-line installation and the same thing goes for apps like webstorm.
Just go to the website, follow the Linux download and install instructions. I won’t do a web storm right now. Let’s get right on to the server side of things, oh and by the way, at the end of this article, I will direct you to a page by the Chrome, OS Deverell team, with installation instructions for all the apps and more discussed in this article. Now, beyond what I mentioned today in this article, if your favorite tool is supported in Linux, it should run on Chromebooks.
For example, I, like G edit for text, editing FileZilla as an FTP, client and Inkscape for vector, graphics, editing. Today, web development usually takes more than a text editor an IDE or an FTP client. Let’s get to some other tools, so we can make some really nice web apps nodejs requires GnuPG to open up your terminal and install it with apt that command is sudo apt, install GnuPG 2. If you’re new to apt, you can probably guess that by replacing GnuPG 2 with whatever package name you want, it will install that package now.
Finding the right package name can sometimes be the tricky part note, as we continue with this article and other terminal commands. I won’t read every line out loud, but, as mentioned, I will provide a link at the end that has them all now that the dependency is installed. Let’s get nodejs run this curl command, followed by another apt, install command for node. That’s it. No js’ is ready to go, don’t believe me! Well, let’s try it out with procs use git to clone the procs repo an NPM to install, build and serve the proxy web app navigate to localhost 8080 in your web browser and check it out pretty cool.
So much minesweeping to be done. Let’s try react using NPM, you can install, create react. App, then use create react app to create a skeleton project. Here I call it hello. World react navigate into the directory where it was created and call NPM start now, navigate to localhost 3000 in your browser and check it out. If you prefer angular install that too, the steps are almost the same again. We use NPM to install at angular slash CLI, create an angular app using ng new.
My angular project change directories into the project folder using CD for change directory. My angular project now ng serve browse to localhost 4200 and check it out here. You’ll notice that I have procs a react, app and an angular app all running on different ports, all on the same Chromebook. I think this is pretty handy. What’s more, this is all local. So as long as your tools are already installed, you could do all of your development offline say like on a plane.
What about docker, no problem again we’re going to follow the normal Linux installation steps. First, we double check that all the dependencies are installed. We add the docker repository to apt and then we update the apt package list. Since we just added a new repository. We use sudo apt update to do this, then install docker test it out by running hello world. This is done with sudo docker run hello world.
You should get a nice mess showing that everything is working. Let’s do something a little bit more advanced by running an Ubuntu Linux container and docker sudo docker run it Ubuntu bash and there you go. Your output is going to look something like this in the Ubuntu container. I’ve taken a look at the OS version with cat, slash et Cie / OS version, and you can see it’s really Ubuntu now, once an app is ready to deploy, it should be tested because Chromebooks have web Android and Linux.
You can test across multiple browsers on multiple platforms: alright, on the same device, let’s install a whole pile of browsers to prove this point using the terminal in apt. You install Firefox for Linux note in debian the package name is Firefox ESR. Then, let’s also install the chromium browser for Linux feeling brave. Let’s install the brave browser for Linux. I won’t walk through all of these lines right now, but again they are just the standard installation instructions for Debian Linux.
We install the GPG key. We install the repo and finally brave now if for browsers, aren’t enough, let’s add a few more head over to the Google Play, Store and install some Android browsers. Let’s go with Firefox for Android opera for Android and Chrome Beta for Android. We now have seven browsers installed, which can give us a reasonable first attempt at test coverage. We have the Chrome, OS Chrome browser three Android browsers, that is Firefox Chrome, Beta and opera, three Linux browsers Firefox for Linux, brave and chromium, and here you can see that our procs web app is running on all seven one.
Last thing to mention in case you have a mobile app that interacts with your web service. You can do Android, TBWA and flutter development on Chrome OS devices, which means you can build and package your mobile app on your Chromebook test it right on the device. You were coding on, like any other Android app build your web component, start your web server and then test everything on multiple browsers and see how it interacts right on the device.
Android studio is as easy to install as visual studio code or atom head over to the Android studio site and download the dot de Bie file. Then you can code. Your app like you’d expect an Android studio with one cool difference: you’ll notice that you can push directly to the Chromebook you’re working on pretty cool full instructions on how to set this up can be found on the link. At the end of this article on the android page, so with your chromebook, you can build web apps with the tools you are used to develop and test right on device with tools like nodejs docker and angular tests across multiple browsers, including mobile, browsers and even test Mobile app and web interaction right on device, and all of this could even happen offline like on a long flight.
So now, don’t you agree. Chromebooks are awesome, as promised. Here is a link to a guide to get your Linux environment customized. Just the way you like. It’s cross dot, page dot, link slash web dev. Thank you can’t wait to see what you build.
My guest today is Emily Schecter who’s here to tell us about HTTP, you probably know of it as the thing you need to enable to make your site secure, but Emily’s here as product manager on Chrome security team, to explain how it’s so much more than that. Let’s get started so Emily. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, I’m excited to be here.
Can you start by telling us about what is HTTPS and why is it so important yeah, so HTTPS is actually just HTTP but over a secure connection and what HTTPS actually gives us is identity, encryption and integrity. So what that means is, if you type HTTP google.Com into a web browser, you can be sure that you’re talking to the real google.Com, not some fake google.Com and also means that no attacker on the network can actually see or modify any of the traffic.
And this is actually really important, because the collection of sites that you’re browsing actually says a lot about your intentions, your behavior and your identity and the web isn’t really continuing to get even more powerful, as chrome tends to add new features to the web platform. For example, the web now has the geolocation API, which means that sites can see where I live, where I work, maybe where my doctor is, or my kids go to school, and we really only want that information to be private between myself and the site that I Trust so HTTP gives us these guarantees, and this is why we think it’s really important for the whole web to be HTTPS by default, so it’s been around for a while and it has kind of accumulated some misunderstandings around it.
Can you kind of help dispel some of the myths around it sure yeah, so HTTPS has actually been around for quite a long time, but for many years it actually was very expensive and very slow and really hands-on and confusing to set up HTTPS. But the reality is that people all over the web have worked hard to make that change and it’s become a lot cheaper and a lot easier to set up. Https people still now think you know some of these myths about how it used to be are still true, but the reality is that that has changed.
So, for example, you should be really expense to set up HTTPS because you had to buy a certificate from what’s called a certificate authority, but now their certificate authorities out there that will give you a free certificate and make it really automatic and easy to set up. One of the examples is, let’s encrypt, so this is actually changed HTTPS and made it much easier to adopt. So what is the state if HTTPS? Now I look at HTTP archive data and it says that adoption is around like sixty percent and when you go back and look through like seven years of data, you can see it’s actually rising like pretty steeply.
So what are the tools that you use to understand? The state of HTTPS and what is it so Chrome, has a public transparency report where we published out about what we’re seeing in chrome in terms of the amount of HTTPS usage, that’s out there on the web. So, for example, what we’re seeing is the usage in Chrome on all of the different chrome platforms on desktop and on mobile is been rising over the years and if you go on to the HTTP transparency report, you can see chrome platform how the usage is increasing.
You can also see not only this in terms of the pages that are loaded over HTTPS, but also browsing time, because, as you might imagine, people are spending different amounts of time on different sites, and we can see that that across the different chrome platform is growing. As well, it’s also broken down by country, which is pretty interesting, because you can see how different countries all over the world are doing on their adoption of HTTPS.
Some other things that are on the transparency report are HTTPS adoption actually at Google. So you can see you know, Google, it is a big site, just like any other site. It took us a long time to actually get this ramped up, and so it’s pretty cool that the transparency report also shows how HTTPS usage has grown at Google. For all of our different products, so what kinds of things is chrome doing to increase HTTPS adoption? So I would say there are two main areas where chrome has made slow changes over time to encourage HTTPS adoption and the first is in Chrome’s UI for connection security.
So chrome shows an icon in the address bar that indicates connection security and we’ve actually changed this icon over time to help users understand the lack of security in HTTP connections. So chrome used to show just this plain circled, I icon for HTTP connections and we thought that was actually a problem because it really doesn’t indicate to people at all that there’s no security with an HTTP connection and what we’d actually like to get to for all.
Http connections is this kind of scary: read not secure warning, but we think that if we just roll that out for all HTTP sites right away, it actually could cause some panic right because we don’t want the web to seem scary. We don’t want people to see this morning all the time and we’ve also seen that people get what’s called warning fatigue, which is that if they see warnings too many times over and over, they start to ignore them.
They stop paying attention to them. So we want to be honest with users without sort of inciting chaos and panic. So what we’ve done is we’ve actually rolled out the warning slowly over time increasing, so we first started showing this gray eye not secured in the address bar just for HTTP pages with passwords or credit cards, and then, sometime later, we started showing the warning also when Users enter data or for incognito pages, and we actually just announced that in July of this year, we’re going to start showing it on all HTTP pages.
So we’ve actually rolled that out over time we’ve seen the amount of HTTPS usage increase and because HTTP unit has increased, then we’re not too scared about the warning fatigue that would be shown from the warning, and so what about the technical API is on the web. Right so another thing that we’ve done in chrome, to encourage HTTPS adoption and also to you know make the web more secure is to require HTTPS for web api s that are very powerful so for new api’s that have come out like service workers, because serviceworker is Such a powerful API we’ve actually required HTTPS to use it.
This also goes for HTTP two, which really improves performance, and it actually requires HTTPS, but we’ve also taken a look at api. Is that already exists on the web and we’ve actually deprecated usage over? Not secure connections for the api’s that are very powerful, so an example here is geolocation, there’s also getusermedia, which is about getting the photos on your phone, and so now sites can no longer use those overage.
This is like patching holes and security on exactly that’s great. So where do you think we’re heading with HTTP? Are we going to achieve a hundred percent adoption and we can all like go home or is our job not yet done? As we talked about earlier, adoption is still, you know not at a hundred percent, yet there. So we still definitely have you know a ways to go. I don’t know that we’re going to get to a hundred percent because I think there’s always some kind of driftwood sites on the web, things that people don’t maintain, but I do.
I would like to see us get close, so you know, if you know any sites out there that are still HTTP, you should go, tell them to turn on HTTPS. They said. No then tell them to come talk to me and tell them why they should, and you know users on the web can also vote with their feet if, like their bank, isn’t secure like go, find a secure banking website put your money somewhere else. So what are some of the knots that websites need to untangle when they need to make that switch from HTTP to HTTPS yeah? So you know migrating your web site to HTTPS.
It’s not as easy as just you know, putting an S on the end of the name of the web site. It’s not as easy as just getting a security certificate. You actually have to look and make sure that all of the services that your site depends on. Also support HTTPS, so, for example, a large complex site might depend on many ad networks, maybe analytics providers, and so the sites have to sort of take an inventory to first see what are all of these third-party dependencies that I have and then do.
They actually support. Https and then, if they don’t, they might have to go out there and actually convince them to start supporting HTTPS. So it can actually be sort of a project management type project as well to like make sure that you you’ve sort of done spring cleaning of the whole site. Well, Emily. Thank you so much for being here and telling us about HTTPS, and I learned that there’s so much more to it than just the S at the end of the URL, where at the end of the protocol in the URL and how it’s actually like deeply ingrained With the API is that people use for being Sheriff thanks for every week, so if you’d like to weigh in on the HTTP discussion, leave a comment below we’re going to have links to everything we talked about in the description tune in next time.
”, My guest is Dave. Crossland He’s the program manager For Google Fonts And today we’re Going to be talking about the state of web fonts –, what are they, how to use them? Effectively and what’s new, Let’s get started, [ MUSIC PLAYING ], So Dave. Thank you. For being here, My first question is: About why web fonts, What do they bring to a website? Beyond the standard fonts like Helvetica DAVE, CROSSLAND Well, Web fonts really express a certain kind of Feeling for organizations They express a brand And you can have a web Page without a article, but you can’t have a Web page without text You have to have fonts And so a brand at its core Would be like a logo, a color and a typeface or a font, And so web fonts bring The kind of rich design that we have in print Media to the web, RICK VISCOMI And according To the HTTP Archive nearly one third of Websites use a font from the Google Fonts API, So why are developers turning To the Google Fonts API DAVE CROSSLAND, I would say That Google Fonts is fast, easy and free And so on.
Our Analytics page we’ve clocked up over 22 trillion. Font views in total since the service Launched in 2010 – And I think that being on Google’s content, distribution networks, we benefit From cross-site caching, So when you visit the First website that uses a font like Roboto, it’s downloaded and you may see Some latency there, But then on all Subsequent websites, which use the font From Google Fonts, then it’s in a cache And loads instantly across the different websites, We also try and Make it really easy So the font’s API Abstracts, a lot of the complexities of web Font technology from you, So we serve different formats.
To different browsers, For example, with better Compression formats, like WOFF2, only the newer Browsers support those, And so we serve WOFF2 files. To those newer browsers And we serve other Formats to older browsers And then finally We make things free and we have a directory of Hundreds of choices which everybody can choose from Now, of course, if you Want a particular typeface, then it may not be Available in Google Fonts and you would go and license That font for your usage, But not everybody, has the Sophistication in design or the resources To license fonts And I think it’s important That everyone in the world is able to do typography, RICK VISCOMI, So I don’t Know if developers truly appreciate how complicated Web fonts are under the hood.
I got a taste of this when I Was at YouTube a few years ago, I helped change the Default font to Roboto, and it was not as easy as just Changing the font-family CSS style, There’s a lot you need to do to Make sure that it goes smoothly for the users and they Have a good experience, For example, like YouTube users, Are from all around the world, They have different languages. Different alphabets, What are some of the Things that developers need to be concerned about For an international audience, DAVE CROSSLAND International Users face a challenge because the file sizes Of fonts, for them can be larger than just For European languages Traditionally Google Fonts has done a kind of slicing of Fonts into language or writing system sets, So we might have, for example, Latin Latin Extended Cyrillic Cyrillic Extended Greek Greek, Extended and Vietnamese: That’s your current support for Roboto that’s used on YouTube.
We also support Other languages — Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Many different Indian writing systems And the biggest Challenge has been for Chinese Japanese And Korean fonts, A typical font for Indian languages can maybe be two or three times Larger than a European font, But for East Asia it can Be a hundred times bigger And so we’ve been able to Use a number of technologies, for example WOFF2 Compression which is now a W3C standard this year, And also the @ font-face Css has a new aspect called unicode-range.
Unicode-Range allows us to Slice, the fonts into pieces, dynamically And the browser will Only download the pieces that it needs, So that means that We were able to slice a Chinese, Japanese or Korean Font into over a hundred slices And therefore the Latency of each slice is similar to your European font, This means that the experience Latency is much better And because the Slices are cached across different Domains then the font gets faster and faster To load over time, RICK VISCOMI Custom fonts have Also been used for icon fonts to show images And more recently, they’ve Been used for emoji as well, So we’re moving beyond just Text and on to these other ways that we’re using to communicate, But it’s not without its Own challenges, right, DAVE, CROSSLAND, That’s right! Font technologies are always Improving and evolving And the use of emoji as a kind Of special case of icon fonts is particularly interesting.
I think that there’s a Debate in the web development community about how To best approach this Using images for icons, whether That’s PNG or SVG vector images is –. There are some advantages there. One of the advantages To using icon fonts is that aligning icons with Text in labels is often is a common use case And getting the alignment Onto the baseline of text can be tricky when You’re dealing with two elements: — a text Element and a image element And so icon fonts can Play a good role there.
They also have good legacy. Support because obviously text systems work everywhere. Unfortunately, for Emoji and color fonts that’s a little bit. More complicated because there are Different color formats for different platforms, And so one font file needs To have a lot of data to support all of the Platforms at once And they can look different On different platforms, So yeah emoji as web fonts Is still I think, kind of — is a cutting-edge thing, But it can add.
Consistency – and I hope we see more developments – Of that in the future RICK VISCOMI And going Back to the Roboto at YouTube example: one Of the things I remembered that was kind of tricky Was when we would have font-weight bold in our styles, That would default to Weight 700 by the browser, But our designers decided that It looked best as weight 500, So we actually had to go back. And change all of our styles from font-weight, bold To font-weight 500 And it became kind Of a new way that we had to ingrain into Our style development, But there’s something new.
That’s Coming out called variable fonts, How would they help Address the situation, DAVE, CROSSLAND, Yeah Variable fonts can help a lot. It’s a very exciting. New technology, It’s part of the Opentype standard, which is the font format that that’s Widely supported in pretty much all platforms today And variations allows you To do runtime interpolation between different sort of styles, Or faces within a font family, So traditionally you would Have like a thin weight, a regular weight, a bold Weight and extra bold weight And in CSS you’ve only Had up to nine weights — 100 through 900 With variations, then you are Able to specify weight, 154 and dial in a very specific And dynamic weight You can animate these weight.
Changes using CSS animations And in CSS4 there’s more Direct support for this RICK VISCOMI So does that Mean that every font is now going to be able to be Completely customizable, Or are only a few fonts going To be eligible for this DAVE CROSSLAND Well, it is something that font developers Need to add to fonts, And so in that Way it breaks down the traditional wall between the Font maker and the font user And so variable Fonts create a kind of dialogue between the two, So as a font user, you Can customize the font, but only in ways which the Font maker has provided for, And so that means that you don’t Need to become a type designer yourself, but it means that you Have that flexibility that you didn’t have before And the variations are Not only for font weight, There’s, also font width, There’s slanting And there’s also optical size, And those are all part of The OpenType standard today Optical sizing, means that When you change your font size from 10 point to 70 Point then, the letter forms will actually react and Respond to that change, And so, as your font Size gets larger.
The letter forms will Become more elegant And as it gets smaller They can become more legible, more readable And there’s also all other kinds. Of variations, you can imagine, which aren’t part Of the standard and are specific to each font, Things like rounding and many creative options. Google Fonts is commissioned. To sort of experimental trial fonts from type designer David Berlow at Type Network.
The first is Decovar, which Has a lot of variations which are decorative so rounding Different kinds of serifs different kinds of Stroke patterns And this can be used as a Kind of graphical device, Because variations Can be animated, I think there’s a lot. Of potential there, The other typeface is Amstelvar And Amstelvar is A text typeface and it has a set Of parametric axes which go far beyond Just weight and width and into things like The ascender length descender length and A lot of variations which can be used together, To create more readable text, RICK VISCOMI, I’m Especially interested about variable fonts, We’re going to have to Have you back on the show once they’re a little Bit more established, Then we can talk about The state of them, But where could Developers go if they want to learn more about Any of these technologies DAVE CROSSLAND Microsoft Edge has on their developer site a Really good variable, fonts demo site That’s a great place to learn.
More about variable fonts, There’s also the Design.Google.Com/Fonts articles website, where the Google Fonts team publishes articles about type and Typography in collaboration with the Google Design team And then there’s Also material.Io, where you can get the Material Design, icons, font and learn more about Material Design guidelines, RICK VISCOMI, Well, there you go, The links are in The description so go check them out.
Share your web fonts stories. In the comments below Don’t forget to Like and subscribe so you can tune in For another episode of “, The State of the Web” Every other Wednesday, Thanks for reading and We’ll see you next time, [ MUSIC PLAYING ]
”. My guest is Marcy Sutton Head of Learning at Gatsby and former Developer Advocate at Deque Systems and today we’re talking About web accessibility, Let’s get started: [ MUSIC PLAYING ], So Marcy thanks for being here. What exactly does Accessibility mean MARCY SUTTON To me. It Means building websites that include people With disabilities, both building for People with disabilities and with people With disabilities, including them as Stakeholders hiring them to work on our teams.
Paying them for their work to review things. For accessibility and give us feedback Along the way, RICK VISCOMI, So when a Website isn’t accessible. What’s at stake, MARCY SUTTON A lot! If you think about how many Services are moving online if accessibility isn’t Built in then, it could present Barriers for people with disabilities, where They can’t use the service They might give up and Leave or worse, it might cause harm to Them if they have something like a traumatic Brain injury or seizure risk So there’s actually Quite a bit at stake if the web isn’t accessible, RICK VISCOMI, So even with The Domino’s lawsuit recently that came out where They lost their appeal.
Do you think that Websites will actually have a push towards more Accessible websites, especially now that lawyers Realize the legal risk MARCY SUTTON In The United States legislation can certainly Help and people can lean on the Law in this country to enforce their civil rights, So having rulings like The Domino’s ruling could potentially Help since there has been an absence of rulings, In favor of including websites under the Americans, With Disabilities Act, but I think there will be More to read in that space I have seen and read and Heard about companies looking at competitors, That have been sued and sort of feeling like Oh, maybe we’re next, so there can be some Market pressure, if there are legal actions being taken And if that’s what it takes, To make something accessible, then I think that’s moving.
In the right direction, RICK VISCOMI, Where do The breakdowns typically happen when a website Becomes inaccessible, Are the managers just Not buying into it Are the developers unaware Of the importance of it, lack of developer Tools all of the above MARCY SUTTON, I think It’s mostly an education issue and awareness, So to sort of try and Solve this problem, I advocate building a Culture around accessibility, so that everyone at the company Is involved and invested From project managers to Designers and developers, we all have a part to play in Making the web more accessible – And it is true that A lot of people just aren’t aware of the Impact that they could have There’s also the misconceptions That accessibility is costly and maybe not worth it.
It’s too niche of an audience, But actually it can improve. Things for a lot of people, If you think of it in Terms of inclusive design, the benefits that we Put into our websites like keyword, support, improving Contrast and font size those can help a lot of people, So it’s definitely worth it. And it’s easier and less costly. If you do it from the beginning, RICK VISCOMI. Is it something –? 10 % of the population has Some form of disability, so it’s more than niche, It actually affects A lot of people, MARCY SUTTON – I think it’s More than that, actually one in five people – RICK VISCOMI, Oh wow, MARCY SUTTON And the range of Disabilities is pretty wide, so there’s all Kinds of scenarios that people can be Browsing your website and they might have situational Or temporary disabilities People are born With disabilities There’s a whole spectrum of How people use the web that’s really kind of beautiful And if we can Embrace that, like we did with responsive Design and letting go of some of that control.
Over pixel perfection and how the user actually Visits our website there’s some real opportunities. There to innovate and make things that are way more robust, RICK VISCOMI. What did you Mean by situational disability, MARCY SUTTON, If You break your arm if you have a baby in one arm. Or a cup of tea or coffee, you might hold your Phone in a different way or have to switch arms If you are born with Something like that, you might permanently not Be able to use your arms, And so you have to use other Input modalities like voice, or maybe you use a joystick With your mouth or something And so there’s new Devices and ways of navigating that don’t rely.
On the default of perfectly working limbs and the abilities That most people, think of So there are some Opportunities and people are pretty resilient. They figure out ways. To navigate the web And if we can Support them better, then that’s pretty awesome, RICK VISCOMI That Reminds me of Android Auto, where, if I’m driving My car, my phone, is not necessarily a thing. I’m putting Right directly, in my face So their way of Interfacing with devices changes entirely depending On your situation, MARCY SUTTON, Yes and a Lot of those technologies were developed for People with disabilities, so it’s worth Considering that, maybe some of the things that We appreciate, and we can use every day were invented.
For people who needed it, RICK VISCOMI, I want to go back. To something that you mentioned earlier about having Users with disabilities, or even people with Disabilities on your team, as part of the Development process, How can you implement Accessibility as part of the Process in a way that ensures that the website’s Going to be accessible, MARCY, SUTTON Well, Certainly including people on your teams to be Stakeholders and provide feedback in regular intervals.
That would be the best way. Is to have people embedded on your teams who Have disabilities mainly because they Have experiences and perspectives that, as Able-Bodied developers, we just can’t make that up. It’s not your lived experience. So having that feedback, all the Time would be truly valuable And people get to Work on your teams and you pay them for Their work and I think that’s a really good way to go: RICK VISCOMI, How about Part of the design process, If a website, for example, Is built to be entirely using Canvas or Flash or Something if people have a specific technology, In mind where it’s just never going to be accessible, How can you actually prevent that from happening Where, in the design Process, do you actually make those decisions? To be accessible, MARCY SUTTON, I think Having some requirements about how users should be able To navigate the site should definitely start in design, I mean hopefully you’re Not getting too locked down on a given technology, — RICK, VISCOMI Hopefully not Flash MARCY SUTTON — in The design phase Yeah Flash no way But Canvas –.
There have Been whole websites built with Canvas And accessibility Unfortunately, was an afterthought in A lot of those cases – And we do have some Standards for Canvas that are better than They were four years ago, but you still have To re-implement a lot of native Functionality that you would get for free if you used The DOM or the Document Object Model RICK VISCOMI. Are you referring To the Accessibility Object Model, MARCY SUTTON, No, So with Canvas.
If you Provide fallback content, there’s a method called Draw focus if needed, You can pass off some Of these interactions from the two-dimensional Canvas Which is essentially a bitmap to that fallback content. And try to create some sort of a Semantic experience, but that’s a lot of work And if you can use the Document Object Model which does feed into what’s. Called the accessibility tree –, which is a fancy Term for a structure with accessibility, information – –: you can do a lot and Communicate to users of assistive technology, What’s going on on the screen, RICK VISCOMI, What’s the Current state of accessibility in developer tools, Either in the browser or as part of testing MARCY SUTTON, Pretty Great actually From when I got started as a Front-End developer everything for accessibility in terms Of this accessibility tree that I mentioned all Of that information was sort of hidden Under the hood And you had to go, Crawl through the Dom and go look at what was on The page and sort of just know what was going on there And now we have developer tools.
Like in Chrome and in Firefox, and it’s amazing how much you Can learn about accessibility through those tools? It would be great to Have more but we’ve come a really long way. Both with built-in dev tools and browser extensions, And automated tools, so I think the future is pretty Bright in terms of tooling RICK VISCOMI, What was your Experience with axe-core and what did it do? Marcy SUTTON, axe-core Is an accessibility API written with JavaScript? It’s an open source library that I used to work on full-time And it’s used in both Lighthouse And Accessibility, Insights from Microsoft, so it’s sort of An engine and a common rule set for testing accessibility And its used a lot of places.
It’s pretty cool, There’s other APIs. As well like WAVE and some others that aren’t Coming to mind at the moment, but it’s nice to have a common Set of rules and the engine that people can Count on and they can use it in different ways: Such as in browser extensions and in automated tooling To use a common rule set so that some Testers on your team aren’t using a different set. Of rules than the developers, for example, Because then you’re working Off two different sets of requirements, and it can Be hard to meet in the middle RICK VISCOMI You had Mentioned that axe-core’s integrated with Lighthouse The HTTP Archive runs Lighthouse On 5 million websites, so we can get some Of that analysis from axe-core aggregated To the scale of the web, I actually have a few stats, So 22 % of web pages tested Passed the color contrast audit from axe-core 50 % of pages are passing the Lighthouse image alt attribute being present audit, So it’s kind of surprising To see how low accessibility adoption is in certain Areas of the web and having a tool like Axe-Core is just really great to be able to get That visibility, MARCY SUTTON, Sadly It’s actually better than I expected RICK VISCOMI That Is pretty sad, MARCY SUTTON? It is sad Yeah, it’s depressing.
There is a project from WebAIM Called The WebAIM Million, where they ran the WAVE automated tool. Against the top 1 million home pages – And that was also a Very sad set of results because, as an industry, We have a lot more work to do a lot of work to Do to make that better Tools are helpful. In highlighting some of these low-hanging fruit, Things that we need to fix. But if we look at It in aggregate the picture is not very Pretty at the moment, RICK VISCOMI You Co-Authored “ Smashing Book 6” with your chapter titled “ Accessibility in Times of Single-Page, Apps.
”. So in what ways do accessibility, And single-page apps not play well together: MARCY SUTTON, Quite A few, unfortunately, I mean all of the Basics of accessibility apply if you’re building A website that’s heavy, with JavaScript So things like image, alt text and color contrast, But when we have this Javascript layer, that’s taking over a lot of The interactions that would be happening, In a web browser, we have to do a bit more To support users who are navigating with Assistive technology and using the keyboard Things like focus management, making announcements Using unobtrusive motion, If we’re using a Lot of JavaScript to try and delight Users, we have to try not to cause Harm with those But I’d say, probably the Focus management piece is the biggest Thing that we have to handle because If the browser is not refreshing, the page When the page changes a user using a Keyboard might be stuck in the prior part of The screen, or they have no idea what happened – If they’re in a screen reader or something So we have to manage Their experience going through the Application and that can be pretty cool.
Actually, I think it’s another area, That we can innovate And I’m hoping that frameworks And potentially browsers could help make this easier, So that would be a good space. To try and move the needle a bit to support developers without Them all having to re-implement all of the same things: RICK VISCOMI, Even kind of More of an old-school UI component, like modal dialogs Has its own focus problems? Can you describe some of The accessibility issues with modal dialogs and What’s being done on the HTML standard side to fix that MARCY, SUTTON Sure yeah, So modal dialogs are An example of some of these same Things I was talking about with focus management, So you have a layer that Opens up over the screen, It probably has content Behind it, maybe a screen curtain to gray it out When that modal opens, you Have to send focus into it, so the keyboard user Or screen reader user is in the right.
Part of the page they’re not left behind The modal window, So that means that you Also need to disable any interactive content. Behind that modal window and that part can Get pretty tricky You have to do some DOM Walking potentially set aria-hidden and tabindex On interactive controls and most people are not Going to do that DOM walking It’s hard. It’s expensive performance, Wise and you have to do it –, you know every time the modal Opens walk it down and –.
It’s like you’re doing it. In inverse both directions, So what would be great Is in the standard space, if we could have Something like HTML inert. It’s an attribute that Was proposed a while back, I think it was at Risk of being removed – and nobody is convinced, That we really need it. This is me officially Saying yes, we need it because the alternative Is a lot of DOM walking that, frankly, very little People are going to do So.
What that would do for us Is make it a lot easier to set a Boolean attribute in Html to effectively disable whole subtrees of the HTML Dom And that way when we send focus into a Modal, we don’t have to do as much in the background. It helps to have Sibling elements, so maybe the modal and the Content behind it are siblings. That way, you can just turn Off all the other content, So that does take a bit Of work from the developer to structure their DOM that Way, but that attribute would solve a whole Lot of pain, as well as the dialog element in HTML, That’s another one.
That’s At risk of being removed, I think it’s Firefox At this point that we need to implement dialog That could give us some of this Behavior for free, like focus management having a Semantic HTML element that would tell users of Assistive technology that it is a dialogue, So there’s some Patterns here that — to have every Developer in the world have to re-implement the same Things over and over again, it seems like we should Have some more primitives for making that easier, RICK, VISCOMI Yeah That sounds super important MARCY SUTTON And complicated [ CHUCKLING ], RICK VISCOMI, You’ve advocated In the past, for something called an accessibility, Statement, What is that, and why is that? So good for accessibility, MARCY, SUTTON, Accessibility, Statements are great tools, no matter what kind of a website You’re making, whether it’s with heavy JavaScript or not So an accessibility, Statement is generally a page on your website.
That’s easy to find: maybe it’s linked. Your website footer, and it has things Like what you’re doing to improve accessibility, Maybe what level of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines? That you’re aiming for It’s nice to have that Goal and that target whether or not you’ve Actually met it, but you have to keep actively Working at that to improve You can also collect Any accessibility, tips or information about Keyboard shortcuts or ways to use your website For accessibility and ways for users To contact you, That’s one of the Most important pieces having an affirmative Statement that says: hey, we might not Be perfect at this, but we’d love your feedback.
And get in touch with us And if people do Act on that feedback, So it’s opening That conversation to bring people in and Make them feel included and give them a way To give you feedback, Because a lot of These websites that have glaring Accessibility issues: we have no way to contact them, So you might see some tweets Of people calling out companies because they can’t use the Website or the service, Maybe an update to the Website or application breaks, what used to work? So if you have That statement it gives people a way to contact You in an official blog so that you can act On that feedback, RICK VISCOMI, It must be really Reassuring to go to a website and see that they actually Care about accessibility, MARCY, SUTTON, Absolutely RICK, VISCOMI, So What resources would you recommend for Web developers, who want to learn more about Creating accessible websites, MARCY SUTTON, So many –, The A11Y Project, Is really great? There’s an accessibility, Course, from Alice Boxhall and Rob Dodson at Google, on Udacity, I have a page on my website.
It’s MarcySutton.Com, There’s a web accessibility. Resources guide there and I collect things like Books and tools and articles and things that I refer to a lot There’s quite a bit out there. From companies like WebAIM, They have really great articles Deque. My former employer has A thing called Deque University: They offer free Accessibility, training to people with disabilities; Which is really great So there’s definitely a wealth.
Of information out there Just getting it to the people, To solve this education problem is sort of the gap that We need to figure out RICK VISCOMI And how About No Mouse Mondays, or what do you call it? Marcy SUTTON? Yes, I released an npm Package this week to sort of put a tool in the Hands of developers to turn off the mouse cursor for everyone, It was sort of a Joke but it actually could be useful as a Dev tool so something to pull into your Project maybe one day a week to actually have a No mouse day of the week, RICK VISCOMI, That reminds me Of 2G Tuesdays or something to get the feel for Slow performance, MARCY, SUTTON, Yeah, RICK VISCOMI.
I think That’s a good idea: MARCY SUTTON Yeah, It’s sort of a Chaos Monkey Approach to things of you know, if you Unplug, your mouse or don’t have that capability. How resilient is your design? Can you actually use it And some of the most Glaring accessibility challenges I see are with color Contrast and a lack of keyboard access, So if we could Somehow, culturally, build in tools and processes. To get us thinking about that, that would help So the No-Mouse Mondays is the First experimental version, but I have plans for it: RICK VISCOMI, It’s a good idea, All right Marcy.
This has been great Thanks for coming on the show MARCY SUTTON. Thank you. So much for having me RICK VISCOMI, You Can check out links to everything we talked about? In the description below, Thanks for reading and We’ll see you next time, [ MUSIC PLAYING ]
The first update is the material theme builder tool on glitch. The tool itself is a self-contained application that showcases each of the material components with prompts to update the base theme shown. It helps teams to leverage the three subsystems of theming within material typography shape and color.
The tool uses SAS variables to show users how to adjust an interface style and make their own brands shine by changing just a few lines of code within a theme file. For example, color can be adjusted via a series of variables, such as primary secondary background and surface colors. These compared with on colors, which represent the text color on top of a variable background, shape, customization, can be made for three component size classes, small, medium and large components.
Small components include buttons and input, medium components include modal’s and dialogs, and large components include menus and drawers, there’s a great shape tool on material diode to help you visualize. These changes on our components before applying them to your codebase and finally, we can adjust typography through the generalized MVC typography variable or through SAS maps that allow you to customize individual typographic levels, such as having a separate, wait and fought family for primary headlines, rather than The body copy in the end, your theme could look something like this.
This is just one example that comes from Google developer days in China. We’ve made thousands of themes around the world so far so head over ticklish. To add your own, we’re also working on a set of guidelines for adapting dark themes, using material components, for example, and a dark theme. Google materials, color palette reduces intensity to mitigate visual vibration or strong color contrast against a darker background.
Instead of solely adding drop shadows to illustrate elevation and depth and a dark theme, a lighter overlay is applied check out the material Daioh guidelines for more design guidance on how to transition your designs to a dark theme, considering contrast, depth, desaturation and limiting colors for accessibility To help with this transition, MDC web has released a set of typography theme variables that respond to background shades for text styles.
You can now also use the theme variables in three different ways. The most supported and robust technique is, with our SAS styling API, using variables and mix-ins to override styles. You can also create CSS classes, with the variable names to style them by and finally, for modern, browsers, CSS custom properties can be used for the theme styling. We’re still working on full support for custom properties.
At this time we provide so many options, because theming should not be limiting. You can extend the theme builder to make your own theme as unique as your product leverage our code and build on top of our material components to quickly and easily get started building product on the web. The next new feature and material is data tables. You asked we listened our designers consider these three principles when it comes to data tables.
The first is that data must be organized in a meaningful way. Data tables should also be allowed for user interaction, and, finally, those interactions should be as logical as a structure of the data table itself. Data tables come with some basic default functionality such as row selection, but you can also hook them up to other components such as these filter chips, check out the links provided below for a deep dive into how you can actually implement data tables in your web projects And combine material components for orchestrated actions.
We also have a new density subsystem option in material material design, uses low-density space by defaults with large tap targets and margins, but offers high density space when it improves the user experience. We brought density into our system for the following reasons: the first is for scan ability, scan ability is improved for data heavy applications with a higher density interface. The second is that dense UIs may actually help users focus by reducing space between Asians and, finally, more content is available to the user on a single screen in more high-density applications, whether or not to increase your us density can be determined by how users interact with A component components with high density, enable users to process and take action against large amounts of information in a more manageable way.
Lists tables and long forms are components that benefit from increased density, but density shouldn’t be used for every component. For example, don’t apply, density to components that involve focused tasks or alert. The user of changes such as snack bars or dialogues, applying high density to alerts reduces their ability to command attention. A series of new styling classes on the web allows for us to access density in three ways: the default component size a comfortable size which provides a higher density display, while respecting minimum touch, target size and compact, which may be used for pages.
With a lot of information but may be inappropriate for user actions, materials at i/o got an update as well. We now provide a cross-platform view of all of our component offerings on a dedicated components page. This page allows for quick access to components and an overview of cross platform. Availability should make it easier to navigate our product and implement it, for your needs, check out material, do slash components to browse them all yourself and finally, we’re kicking off a new initiative.
This year to focus on supporting material across web frameworks, why we know that most of you are developing web apps using a framework and the open source community has stepped up immensely, both in components for some of the most adopted web frameworks out there. We want to celebrate this work and help bring the material design vision to life along with our open source community. So many of you have already built your own wrapper libraries using MVC, webs components, foundations and adapters and we’re working more closely with the rest of the open source community as well.
We’ve updated material to i/o to link to three of the most popular open source component. Libraries they’ve already uncovered bugs in the material design guidelines and asked great questions, helping us to make material even better and we’re helping them to follow the spec and the material guidelines more closely as well. We look forward to continuing the conversation and working to bring the material design vision to every platform and framework, making it easier for everyone to use material design on the web.
There’s so much to explore and play with from theming to density, to data tables to new website features and our open source community. It’s an exciting time to be building of material, so check out material, dot, IO and the links below where you can find all the resources that I mentioned today can’t wait to see what you build material I’ll, see you on the web. You
It’s good. Did you get a haircut? I did a haircut new accent, new new new. Look. You feel it’s good! It’s good you’re, looking better than before. You feel better than before. You’re, not mad. I am NOT no hi, I’m Rob Dodson, I’m a developer advocate on the chrome team, sure Rob just just sell, sell yourself. I mean hello and also uh you’re selling stuff, also host a little show on the chrome Developers.
Youtube blog called alley cast world-renown. Is that what we’re calling it yes well world renowned, I see people around the world have renowned it. I think, okay, all right, believe what you want to believe, but today we’re going to be talking about accessibility, audit, Angley right. What is your workflow for that? Look? Like yeah, so over here on, my laptop I’ve got a site that I’ve been working on.
This is called lifestyle. It’s got some cool like hipster photos and stuff, like that people have styles of the accessible and famous all right yeah, and what I usually do when I’m you know working on improving the accessibility of a site is, I will use the new audits panel in chrome, Dev tools, which is very very nice if you go to create a new audit, you’ll, see that you’ve got like a number of options inside of there, so you could look at PW, anus, best practices, etc.
One of the topic areas is accessibility, so you can just go run, just an accessibility audit. If you don’t, you don’t feel like doing the other tests. Here’s one that I ran against the page and it’s doing pretty. Okay right. It’s got on anyone not so bad, but there’s definitely a few issues that we need to fix and in particular one that I see a lot is, is color contrast, so you’ve got your your your foreground text.
Maybe is a little too light on the background. Color one of the nice things that we can do with the audits panel is we can actually dive in and we can see which elements specifically have failing contrast. So here I can see that I’ve got this like product card price element and if I click on that and stretch this out a little bit, you can see. It’ll take me over to my elements panel and I can actually scroll in to view the actual element that is failing just this price right, y’all, nice and it already selects the domnode for you, that’s cool, yeah, and so one of the things that’s really helpful.
Is you know really this is this? Allow me to sort of quickly identify this node, but one of the things we’re working on, which is over here in Chrome, Canary right now, is actually a color picker. That will make it a little bit easier for you to fix those contrast issues. So if you’re in something like Chrome Canary, you can go into Chrome, colon, slash, slash flags, you can look for the word: developer tools, experiments, oh you’re, in flags and experiments.
You look like to live dangerously, oh yeah, oh yeah, so dangerously, so we enable the developer tools, experiments right. We step into the future, it’ll refresh our browser for us. We can go back over here pop up in as the dev tools click on this little Settings. Menu good, where it says experiments da da and here we can see, we’ve got accessible the inspection as well as color contrast ratio line.
So let’s see what that does so we’ll go, find that same node. That was giving us problems over here. Inspect it and then we can see in our Styles panel I got a little color sread and click on that and you’ll see that there’s this little line inside of my color palettes. This is actually a sea mmmmm-hmm. This was actually telling us like. Where are our colors needs to be in order to have sufficient color contrast? So, since we’re above the line, we get this little warning that says, we’ve got a little contrast.
I happen to know that this is not like the final look for this piece of UI. It’s still being iterated on, but it’ll be something like this, where you’ve got a line and you can sort of tell which side is the good side of the bad side. So I can actually just drag this below the line. That warning goes away. You can see over here. It’s also like updating my element live in the document and it’ll sort of tell me what the good color contrast ratio is.
So I can just grab that value right off here and then go back and just fix it in my CSS. That’s pretty neat, so I was trying this out the other week and something that occurred to me was that you know if, if you use a developer, realize that the contrast is a little bit off, do you need to go back to your designers at that point, And say: well, is this okay for our brand and thing is that’s when they should be factored in earlier on in the process I ideal.
Yeah like this is there’s, there’s definitely other design tools out. There there’s, I think, there’s plug-ins for sketch, and things like that, which will also help you look at the color contrast for your designs and make sure things are not too low. Contrast, anytime, you can catch that earlier in the process, make sure all the designers are on board and all the stakeholders are on board and and that sort of like makes it easier when those things come downstream for folks to implement it, and it doesn’t kind of, Like a contentious issue or anything cool, that’s that’s awesome.
The house audit also had some other accessibility stuff in there as well right. So it had contrast. No, I was highlighting all the tributes to alt attributes, yep yep, so yeah. If we go back to that report, let’s see here so yeah a few of the things that that this site was failing. It’s missing some alt attributes. We’ve got form elements that don’t have associated labels: the big problem there is you land on a control, and maybe it says that it’s a button, but it doesn’t tell you what kind of button right is it the you know, sin my social security number to hackers Button, I don’t want to click that button right.
I want to make sure that I’m clicking the right kind of controls. I know what I’m interacting with we’ve got over. I think 32 tests, or maybe even over 35 tests in in the lighthouse accessibility checker here and under the hood. These tests are all based on a library called axe core which is made by some folks at a DQ so yeah. We we work at the axe, core library we leverage to the test from inside of it and we sort of integrated into dev tools.
You can hop around and inspect the notes. Real, quick, that’s awesome, so this is great again for locally checking on your accessibility issues. What about CI and continuously monitoring your accessibility? Is there a story for that too yeah? Absolutely so the the lighthouse library itself can be used as a standalone node module. So you can pull that into your CI process. If you want to do that or alternatively, you could use the axe core library that is powering these tests and you could use that standalone.
The the nice thing there is, you can sort of decide which accessibility tests you want to turn on or off, depending on sort of the criteria that you’re trying to meet very cool. So we’ve got lots of great tooling for accessibility, auditing. What about docks or education material? Yes, we have that as well. So if you go to developers.Google.Com/live Sunda mental, slash accessibility, we have a whole section there on getting started with accessibility for the web, and it also includes links to our Udacity course.
So that’s like a multi-week kind of hands-on experience where you actually like build stuff and read a bunch of articles and kind of get up to speed on accessibility, very cool yeah. I feel, like my lifestyle, is more accessible, already yeah cool yeah, thanks for having me today, yeah thanks for coming down awesome yeah people should check out ala cast: oh yeah, oh yeah,
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