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GDS’s Accessibility Personas

If you’re a designer or engineer and have never dug in to accessibility personas or cognitive walkthroughs before, I’d recommend checking out GDS’s accessibility persona homepages and their accompanying blog post about how they use persona profiles to test accessibility. As of right now, their profiles include the following personas:

  • Claudia – a sight impaired screen magnifier user
  • Ashleigh – a severely sight impaired screenreader user
  • Ron – an older user with multiple conditions
  • Chris – a user with rheumatoid arthritis
  • Pawel – an autistic user
  • Simone – a dyslexic user
  • Saleem – a profoundly deaf user

It’s no substitute for testing with real users, but it’s a big step in the right direction if it’s not already a part of your design and engineering process.

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A long-overdue work update

It’s been a wild few months professionally.

Earlier this year, I was asked to be the Engineering Manager at SuperHi and started in that role in May. That same month, I gave a talk at Parsons on the invitation of Eric Li and Michael Fehrenbach for their Typography and Interaction students in the MPS CD program. Maybe a month or two ago, SuperHi CEO and friend Rik Lomas and I were interviewed by Aja Singer for the recently-released first episode of her new podcast “Interview Stack” which offers a “deep dive on the engineering hiring process”. She’s a great interviewer, I’d keep an eye on her work.

And then over two thirds of us were laid off from SuperHi yesterday!

It’s unfortunate but understandable given the circumstances, it’s a tough world out there for startups right now. I really wish nothing but the best for the remaining SuperHi team and hope they’re able to reach the lofty goals that we set for ourselves. It’s a great platform and community with so much potential. I recommend checking out the courses and workshops that we recently released including one on generative art, one about Squarespace, and another on integrating AI on the web. There should be a lot more to come soon, SuperHi’s newsletter is the best way to get updates if you’re interested.

We achieved so much together. Personally, I’m really proud to have improved a lot of the accessibility practices, project management, QA, knowledge transfer processes, and documentation at SuperHi, even though some of that isn’t publicly visible just yet. I’m proud of the code I wrote and the languages and frameworks that I learned while there, going from working largely with CSS, HTML, JS, and PHP before to working heavily with TypeScript, Next.js, and React across multiple interconnected projects in a monorepo. I’m also really proud of the quality of our collaboration both across SuperHi in general and particularly within the Engineering team specifically. We shared extremely trusting working relationships which isn’t easy, especially when working remotely.

It’s sad to not be a part of that anymore, and it’s tough when you’ve been working towards a goal so hard for so long and then suddenly the next morning is a blank page.

But I am looking forward to pottering a little. A little blog gardening, improving performance on this site (when did it get so effing slow?! the cobbler’s children have no shoes etc. etc.), maybe finally setting up the bookshelf site I always wanted to make. Will have to do a little bit of LinkedIn cleanup. ::makes gagging sound:: And I had the last week of summer scheduled off anyway so I’ll be spending that fully focused on B, probably wandering in and out of all the water features in every playground within a 5 mile radius.

If anyone has interesting opportunities to share, please give me a shout.

And please do share this with your friends. I think I’m looking for another software engineering role at a remote USA- or UK-based company, or in-person at a NYC-based company. But I’m going to think about it a little more and am aiming to post again soon with more specifics.

Of course I wasn’t the only one, there is a lot of other ex-SuperHi talent out in the world now too including top-notch designers, razor-sharp teachers, meticulous engineers, brilliant strategists, and community management geniuses. I’m not going to post names here just yet because I want to verify who would like what shared, but if you have any opportunities along those lines, send them my way and I’ll make sure they reach the right eyeballs.

Now, time to relax a little during our remaining few days visiting family in the UK. Below are the flowers that my mother in law picked from her garden for me after she heard the news. I wish Smell-O-Vision was a thing, because these are pretty fantastic.

I’ll be back in Brooklyn on Sunday. If you happen to be nearby in the coming weeks, let’s get a coffee or go for a stroll in Prospect Park or something.

Until soon x

A small bouquet of pink and purple sweet peas in a glass bottle on a white kitchen counter

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The serial (“Oxford”) comma and screen readers

People think that serial / “Oxford” commas should be an optional style thing. But if you’re writing for the web, please use it.

Here’s an example of a sentence without a serial comma:

Please bring Jack, your brother and your uncle to the party

And an example of a sentence with a serial comma:

Please bring Jack, your brother, and your uncle to the party

First point: the second sentence makes it much clearer that Jack isn’t some questionable relative and that you’re meant to bring three people to the party.

Second point, and more the point of this post: the sentence with the serial comma is much more intelligibly read by screen readers, particularly when content is being read quickly.

Use the serial comma!

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What to do if Command + R won’t reload your VSCode window

So CommandR hasn’t been reloading my VSCode window. But the “Reload window” command in the palette (ShiftCommandP to open palette) shows that it should work. Charles told me how to fix it!

To sort it out, click the cog icon next to the “Reload window” command in the palette to open the Keyboard Shortcuts settings for that command. Then under the “When” column, right-click isDevelopment and select “Change when expression”. Delete the contents, then press enter. There should now be a dash under “When” to indicate that it’s empty. Close the Keyboard Shortcuts file, then try reloading a window by typing CommandR and it should work.

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How and why I stopped freelancing

A quick disclaimer: This is NOT an article about how to find a full-time job. There are a million posts about that online. And anyways, beyond the general advice1, I’m not sure how useful those articles usually are anyways. Every person’s path to a job is super different.

This is about the steps I took to make the transition from independent work to full-time employment as smooth as possible for my clients, my collaborators, my new employer, and most importantly myself. It’s also about the thought process behind that decision.

In many ways, this is all a long explanation of the feelings behind this earlier post.

It wasn’t without stress, but it worked out pretty well with a lot of prior planning and communication.

Wispy clouds against a blue sky

Before I go in to how, a little about why.

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My custom bash prompt

This is my custom bash prompt, as defined in my profile (~/.bash_profile). It includes a custom character for the prompt, the path, and the Git branch name (if any). The whole thing is colorful to make it a bit easier to identify the prompt in a sea of characters.

When I’m working on this WordPress theme for example, it looks sort of like this (RSS readers, you’ll miss the colors):

→ ~/sites/commonplace-wp-theme (v0.1.5)

To generate something else, try messing around with the Bash $PS1 Generator.

If you want to try something like this, do not delete the rest of your profile. Just add this at the top.

# Get the Git branch
parse_git_branch() {
  git branch 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/ (\1)/'
}

# Custom bash prompt
# Includes custom character for the prompt, the path, and Git branch name. With colors!
# Source: kirsle.net/wizards/ps1.html
export PS1="\n\[$(tput bold)\]\[$(tput setaf 5)\]➜ \[$(tput setaf 6)\]\w\[$(tput setaf 3)\]\$(parse_git_branch) \[$(tput sgr0)\]"

Note: I got this from someone else at some point… I’m trying to figure out who but haven’t gotten to the bottom of it.

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Fluid type sizes and spacing

I’ve been using a fluid type and spacing system on the most recent builds I’ve completed. Here’s why I use it, and how I approach it. I mainly use SCSS (a Sass syntax), but it’s also very do-able with plain CSS.

Screencast of Gort Scott’s homepage, resizing it in Chrome’s inspector

The example above demonstrates the result on gortscott.com, resizing the window from about 2300px down to about 640px and back again. The type and spacing across the page begins scaling down when the window is 2095px wide and stops shrinking at 1047px wide. At that point the text begins to reflow as the CSS Grid layout continues to shrink. Eventually at 703px wide the layout shifts, and again at 543px wide.

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CSS blend modes: beware the stacking context

I’m working on a site with a complex entanglement of blend modes, SVG backgrounds, gradient backgrounds, positioning, and transitions. I’ve run in to a bunch of issues with mix-blend-mode not working as expected, and it almost always has to do with an inappropriate stacking context.

For posterity, this StackOverflow answer is a really good run-down of CSS combos that create new stacking contexts.

Now to see what I can do about browsers rendering color profiles slightly differently… 💀

Edit: UGHHHHHH it’s different in different browsers. Check out this CodePen in Chrome and Firefox vs Safari. This is why we can’t have nice things.

Edit 2: See the answer to the cross-browser problem from the previous CodePen, via Gregory Cadars (view thread). So Safari is actually behaving correctly, but it’s still a stacking context issue.

To recap: I’m trying to display a “fixed” gradient background with content that scrolls over the top of it. Within this content, only the images have mix-blend-mode: overlay. In the original CodePen, I’m achieving this via a fixed position, 100% width + 100% height element with a linear gradient. This is within the same wrapper as the content.

My example is working in Chrome and Firefox. In Safari, it is effectively as if the blend mode hasn’t been applied. Though I’m not sure why the difference between browsers, it does make sense that a fixed position element would still create a new stacking context regardless of its parent.

In Gregory’s example, he’s removed the fixed position element with the gradient and instead applied the gradient background to the wrapper, as well as background-attachment: fixed via the background shorthand. This achieves the exact same effect, without stacking context issues.

The only thing that gives me pause is performance… I remember running in to some issues when I considered using background-attachment: fixed for Elizabeth Peyton’s Eternal Return. I can’t remember what it was exactly but it had to do with repainting on every scroll event (so, a lot!). I think that this article may give some context, but I’ll have to dig in to it further.

Related: See this CSS gradients resampling tool by Rutherford Craze for smoother gradients, shared by Gregory in the thread.

Twitter is a crappy place a lot of the time, but I love it for things like this.

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Gemma’s site in AIGA Eye On Design

Read “There’s More Than One Way to Share Your Design Work: Four fresh takes on the portfolio” on AIGA Eye On Design.

They spoke to Carly Ayres, Prem Krishnamurthy, David Reinfurt, and Gemma Copeland about their approaches to an online portfolio / website. Gemma spoke a bit about how we designed and built her site together, it was a lot of fun. See her site gemmacope.land, or take a look at the GitHub repo. BIG thanks to Howard Melnyczuk for fixing a bug I totally missed. 🤦🏻‍♀️ 🙏