If you’ve been writing CSS for any length of time, the chances are you’ll have come across situations where you need to hide some text visually, but still have that text available to assistive technologies (such as screenreaders). Icon buttons and skip links are just two examples. (There are plenty more.) Simply using display: none hides text from assistive technologies, which is not useful to us in this scenario. So developers over the years have come up with clever ways to hide text visually, which usually manifest as a utility class that gets copied and pasted into every project, often called .visually-hidden or .sr-only — something like:
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I recently dusted off a relatively old (~5 years) MacBook and replaced the battery with the plan that I could use it as a secondary machine, for my “non-work” stuff. The last couple of times I’ve got a new Mac I’ve gone for the option of cloning my old setup, so I don’t need to install everything again. This time, however, the whole point was to keep things simple, minimal and (hopefully) fast, so I decided to completely wipe it and start from scratch.
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In case you missed it, container queries landed in all stable browsers this week! It’s a pretty exciting time to be working with CSS, seeing this long-awaited feature finally become useable.
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There are many different ways of using colour informatively when it comes to data visualization. But we also need to ensure our use of colour conveys the right information, and that it is used accessibly. In this article we’ll walk through some examples of using colour in different types of visualizations with the data visualization library D3.js. Some familiarity with D3 will be assumed, but there will be some helpful pointers regardless of how you create your visualizations.
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I often use the WebAIM colour contrast checker to check my colours against WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) standards while building websites. Recently I noticed a handy feature in Firefox dev tools to make checking for sufficient colour contrast really easy.
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Last year, Interop 2022, a collaborative cross-browser initiative, was hugely successful in getting 15 key features implemented interoperably. As developers, we can enjoy the fruits of this collaboration, with features like container queries, cascade layers and dynamic viewport units going from little or no browser support to almost full support in the space of a year.
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In this article we’ll walk through how to use Github Actions to automate regular deployment of a static site hosted on Netlify.
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In my 2023 review I mentioned that I wanted to give this site a revamp. This week I carved out some time to do just that. So, here it is: Welcome to the new and improved CSS { IRL }!
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Do you find yourself needing to switch between development environments frequently? That's often the case for me. I work on a web app for wind turbine operators, and I regularly need to test my front end code with different databases.
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The other day I came across a pretty much textbook use case for container queries in the web app I was working on. We have this card component that displays a health summary for the section of the app the user is currently inspecting (which could be a wind turbine, a system within that turbine, or the entire wind farm). Generally we want to show that towards the top left of the screen, with some other information on the right. On certain pages however, the information on the right will be absent, so we want the health summary component to go full width. Easy enough, but we also want to style the component differently when it takes up the entire width by aligning the text to the left and giving it a more horizontal layout.
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As is tradition, it’s time to do a little round-up of the past year!
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Quite a lot of us tech writers don’t get everything 100% right all of the time. Sometimes a small typo might elude us, sometimes we make the odd factual error despite our best efforts and research. Sometimes we phrase something clumsily, giving the wrong impression, omit some piece of information (intentionally or unintentionally), or perhaps misinterpret something we’ve read elsewhere. I’m as guilty as anyone. Especially on this blog, where I don’t always have time to proofread as thoroughly as I should. I worry a lot about being “correct”, particularly as my readership has increased over the past few years, and always endeavour to ensure my articles are as accurate as possible. It’s part of the reason why writing for others takes me so much longer than writing for myself. I always want to make sure the information I’m providing is 100% reliable. Even then, inevitably the odd mistake can slip through.
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