Fall Digest Quick Clicks

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• Mad genius Lea Verou melds CSS variables with the Cicada Principle to create the effect of randomness in layout flourishes.
• Improve the legibility and readability of your text, with “The Designers Guide to Letter-Spacing,” by Denis Valentin.
• In “Webwaste” on A List Apart, An Event Apart speaker Gerry McGovern shares tips on how web designers can design better websites while helping to save the planet. (For more tips, catch Gerry at our Fall Summit!)
• The :focus-within pseudo-class (already supported in Firefox) is landing in Chrome 86. It “lets developers opt-in to the same heuristic the browser uses when it's deciding whether to show a default focus indicator. This makes styling focus more predictable.”
• On YouTube: Accessible Color Standards–Designing in the Browser. Free video mini-tutorial by AEA speaker Una Kravets. This short film is all about accessible color, with topics including A, AA, and AAA compliance levels; developer tools for color selection and testing; preference media queries, and more.
• Who Can Use tells you whether a color combination will pass WCAG guidelines for people with various types of color blindness and vision loss. A great little service by Corey Ginnivan.
• Get a quick visual guide to where your site’s accessibility could be improved with a11y.css, which aims “to warn developers about possible risks and mistakes that exist in HTML code.” Available for both Firefox and Chrome, as well as in a bookmarklet!
• Adrian Roselli goes deep into details of ARIA Grid As an Anti-Pattern. “Before using ARIA grid on a project, identify your goals and be prepared to test with users.”
• “Approach a design system as you would a marathon, not a sprint. You’re laying the groundwork for an extensive effort. By understanding your organization through its product portfolio, you’ll … achieve a stronger and more cohesive experience.” Promoting a Design System Across Your Products by Nathan Curtis in A List Apart. (From 2016 and still just-baked fresh!)
• Safari has some powerful visualization tools that help you find much better rendering performance by balancing the number of rendering layers. As they note: “Creating too many layers (intentionally or otherwise) can have disastrous results on memory-constrained devices.”