Robuta

Magazine on CSS, JavaScript, front-end, accessibility, UX and design. For developers, designers and front-end engineers.

I'm done with the performative allyship and toxic positivity

Accessibility advocate, writer, developer, and speaker

Naming things is hard

Goodbye, little friend.

If it is important enough to need words, it is important enough to use text content.

Get valuable insight about how your digital experience works for disabled people.

Zombie Slack channels are indicative of a culture that does not know how to communicate with itself

There is now choice where there was none before.

Code syntax highlighting themes need to meet minimum color contrast values

The backlash was immediate, understandable, and entirely predictable

The problem is we don’t know the initial state of the ham biscuit sign and who it is intended for

Culture impacts how icons are interpreted, understood, and used

Eric Bailey joins Jerod to discuss everything Dungeons & Dragons taught him about writing alt text, building accessible websites, Primer, the problem with...

Jul 21, 2022 - In recent years, accessibility has evolved from a way to avoid legal landmines, to a specialization developers are taking a serious approach to for the sake of...

I am not a fan of Windows Recall the same way I am not a fan of most AI

Mega Man games are light on plot, but do a lot of showing not telling. This happens to be my favorite form of storytelling, so of course I spent too much time...

Could spoiling a joke be an accessibility issue? You better believe it.

Here’s a sampling of some of the newsletters I look forward to

I swear this isn’t a sponsored post

We don’t live in a purely deterministic world of technology anymore

There’s a secret mode that comes with almost all large ovens, refrigerators, dishwashers, and other large kitchen appliances

Liking an idea does not mean the idea is exempt from criticism

While a custom CSS cursor may seem flashy and fun, consider that it may present a significant, unnecessary barrier to access

Browsers are a failure of imagination

The “more options” button is emblematic of how something can be technically usable by everyone, but also how its use is also confusing for all involved

Creating and using an oh shit banner treatment requires investment in process as much as, if not more than it does a technical implementation

Links do so, so many things

This is the thought process that kicks in when I look at a something as mundane and everyday as a pair of pants

It is difficult to quantify a void

Perception of Comic Sans as an inferior typeface is a bit of a self-reinforcing phenomenon in the design community, and that’s a problem.

I am able to extensively modify my instance’s UI to suit my specific needs because of deliberate architectural decisions Mastodon’s maintainers have made

A design token ugly mode is a direct and powerful way to visualize the current state of the world

It turns out you can just pay people to do things

Does this all sound compelling to you? Interested in running your own #WorstWorkWednesday meeting?

This is real, this happened. There is no way to emotionally understand the totality of this experience.

A lot of the following is an attempt of a highly motivated individual trying to recapture what I once had.

I think about these things a lot. Now you are thinking about these things too.

This post is about interactive lists on GitHub, and how to use them

Describe the most important thing first

User-facing state is what someone experiences when they interact with (or try to interact with) an element in some capacity

Performance, accessibility, and usability are more than just inconvenient truths you can pretend don’t exist. They have a direct impact on the quality of...

Personas as a contemporary practice are inherently tokenizing and reductionist

ericwbailey.website is a really nice personal website.

That’s it, that’s the post

I’m not sure I’d recommend doing what I did, but I do think RSS is an incredibly powerful, under-appreciated, and under-utilized technology.

News and podcasts for developers

It is a proxy phrase, often born of an inability or unwillingness to articulate other concerns

I guess I came up being blog-adjacent

A thing you should know is that you get put on a lot of lists

No hierarchy other than what people create for themselves

You can’t solve culture with technology

The idea of “solving” alternate text descriptions by automating them away so that they are not a consideration is a bad frame