I finally made it through the entire book, and I learned several new things about creating inclusive experiences as a front-end developer. It’s not a book you read from cover to cover but one you keep on hand to find solutions when you encounter specific problems. I approached it with the goal of understanding what to look for when working with a WordPress framework and what patterns to pay attention to while building inclusive websites.
The book is structured by different case studies, divided across 13 chapters:
- Structuring Documents
- Structuring Pages
- Linking Content
- Performing Actions
- Styling Content
- Managing Focus
- Navigating Sites
- Toggleling Content Visibility
- Constructing Forms
- Filtering Data
- Presenting Tabular Data
- Creating Custom Elements
- Debugging Barriers.
It’s built around real examples using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with comments offering different approaches. However, reading it in print can be challenging due to long lines of code and the use of short links to external documentation, which are difficult to access when copying them manually into a browser (e.g., https://oreil.ly/pBjIq).
The book is aimed at professional front-end developers, but other creatives may also find it valuable. Many of the case studies are complex, with a lot of detail on accessible approaches.
It’s a great resource for learning to think for accessibility, follow patterns, and test the code you write.
I discovered the visually-hidden helper class and learned that Greyd.Suite uses it, while Kadence does not. I also found that using list-style: none removes the semantic information of lists in VoiceOver on Safari, and it’s recommended to use an empty string for list-style-type instead.
I learned about media query, prefers-reduced-motion, for users that prefer less motion due to sensitivity to animations, such as those with motion sickness. By detecting this preference, developers can adjust or disable animations, ensuring a more comfortable and accessible experience for these users.
I also found many valuable insights in the links provided at the end of each chapter. I’ve bookmarked a few:
- Focus-management and inert;
- Jakob’s Law: Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.
- Skip Navigation Link;
- Designing the perfect accordion checklist;
- Inclusively Hidden;
- 2024 Report of Accessibiliy
Nevertheless, this is a first-hand, valuable book for building inclusive digital experiences. I found it helpful to better understand the most common issues and situations on the front-end side. I will keep browsing through it, and I’m sure I will discover more insights.
