A nice run-down of incremental accessibility improvements made to Gov.uk (I particularly like the technique of updating the title element to use the word “error” if the page is displaying a form that has issues).
Crucially, if any of the problems turned out to be with the browser or screen reader, they submitted bug reports—that’s the way to do it!
Following on from that excellent blog post about removing jQuery from gov.uk, here are the performance improvements in charts and numbers.
It may sound like 32 kb of JavaScript is nothing on today’s modern web with quick devices and fast broadband connections. But for a certain cohort of users, it makes a big difference to how they experience GOV.UK.
This is a great thorough description of the process of migrating gov.uk away from jQuery. It sounds like this guide was instrumental in the process—I love that they’re sharing it openly!
Removing jQuery means that 32Kb of JavaScript has been removed from the majority of pages on GOV.UK. GOV.UK is already quite fast to load and for many users this will make no noticeable difference. However, the change for users on a low bandwidth connection or lower specification device will be much more noticeable, resulting in significantly improved page download speed and performance.
This is a really good description of the role of a front-end developer.
That’s front end, not full stack.
I always loved the way that Gov.uk styled their radio buttns and checkboxes with nice big visible labels, but it turns out that users never used the label area. And because it’s still so frickin’ hard to style native form elements, custom controls with generated content is the only way to go if you want nice big hit areas.
I really like the clear styling of checkboxes and radio buttons in the GDS pattern library. Fitts’s law in action.
Make your links beautiful and accessible.
When it comes to sustainable web design, the hard work is invisible.
Catching some accessibility issues doesn’t need to be left to the experts.
Business, sustainability, and inclusivity.
Separate your concerns.