UX is not only about the way it works, but about delight, whimsy, wit, and beauty. But when it comes to accessibility, we tend to take the term literally. Why? — Consider this question posted on the UX community on Stack Exchange: Does including a Konami-code triggered Easter Egg negatively impact keyboard accessibility? (Konami code, a sequence of specific keypresses, is a cheat code originating from video games. It’s sometimes used as a way to trigger easter eggs on websites.)

Framework-free, no-build websites: how far can they take you in 2021? — I recently came across a series of articles by Daniel Kehoe introducing The Stackless Way, an optimistic take on web development that proposes we “use the platform” (modern features built into the language) instead of frameworks and build tools that keep getting replaced every few years. It was good timing…

A selection of real search queries, and what they can teach us about designing for developers. — Most of what developers do day to day involves lookups of one kind or another online: referencing documentation, choosing frameworks, investigating errors, checking keyboard shortcuts, and more. Since online search is such an integral part of our work, it can act as a rich source of data about development practices…

Viewport units aren’t going to fix your typography. — We call type “fluid” when the text on a web page scales in relation to screen size without any breakpoints. …

I recently started an epic photo album project chronicling our family life from the last decade. …

I love Dropbox, but I was never a fan of having to keep my files inside that “magic folder” of theirs. The home directory is where my top-level directory structure should be rooted to, whether I want something in the cloud or not. The solution — symbolic links. I was…

The go-to example to illustrate ambiguity in any introductory natural language processing course is Time flies like an arrow. I never realised just how ambiguous the sentence actually is before coming across this passage in Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct: Computer parsers are too meticulous for their own good. They…

With a lot of writing assignments due in the upcoming months, I have been going through different style guides and manuals from Strunk & White to Pinker’s The Sense of Style. Beneath all the instruction on spelling, the Oxford comma, paragraph structure, active vs passive voice, avoiding garden paths (sentences…

People are listing wonderful, surprising, and surprisingly wonderful items on their Stacks. While this is a joy to explore, keeping up with the curation of this flood of content has become somewhat of a race against time. Tom started the week by hunting down the right colours and URLs for…