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Webmentions up and running

Finally sorted out how comments and webmentions are displayed on this site. It was kind of a hefty task since it involved sorting out WordPress comments as well. If everything works as intended (big if), webmentions should be displayed in a discussion thread below the post contents on permalink pages regardless of whether or not WordPress comments are enabled on that post. We’ll see how that goes!

As an experiment, I’ve turned on comments here, here, and on this note. Overall though, I’ll probably leave them disabled for the majority of my notes. This 2013 article by Kartik Prabhu sums up my feelings on the subject pretty well.

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Some background and selected projects

I’ve just added a Work & Background page to this site that provides a bit more context for what I do and some selected projects. It’s a WIP, there are some thumbnails I would like to swap out and I’m sure the text will need tweaking. Nice to have a version up at any rate.

I’m really hoping to explore a few new-to-me bits of tech in the near future, particularly related to our books index. SB has been doing some very cool experiments with that recently.

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Site update: a new taxonomy index and a11y improvements

Just pushed an update to this site.

The Browse page is now mainly an index of taxonomies and archives (years, post formats, categories, tags). This new index replaces the opacity-based tag cloud. I kind of miss it, but it was problematic. Very hard to digest, and the lighter greys were way too low-contrast.

Besides the index, most of the changes are related to accessibility. I focused on making the tabbing experience a bit better, introducing a couple skip links. Note that I haven’t totally ironed out the tabbing… Most of my manual testing for this update was done in Chrome. I checked it briefly in Safari and it’s pretty weird, but I think it may have to do with the default Safari settings. I haven’t adjusted these yet, read more about Safari tab settings on a11yproject.com. Besides the tabbing, I also had a handful of links that weren’t suitably descriptive, particularly on the new term index. I added more aria-label attributes where I could. See the “Using aria-label for link purpose” page on the WCAG wiki for more info.

I’m trying to work on accessibility a bit more on an ongoing basis. Need to take a little dive in to this Hacker News thread, via this tweet.

See also:

There are probably a million a11y optimisations I can / should still make on this site. Suggestions are very welcome.

Edit 08.11.19 – Added Mozilla accessibility blog post