Posts about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility and browsers from the perspective of a curious front-end developer.
The earth is heating up and AI isn't helping. It drives major increases in electricity use, water use and CO2 emissions. Yet, industry and governments alike seem keen to leverage the latest tech. Can we make greener choices? Yesterday, I spoke at a conference on AI in government about sustainable choices. The presentation and slides were in Dutch, this post is a high level summary of what I…
At last week’s W3C Advisory Committee meeting, I ran a breakout session on what to do about threats to the open web. We had an interesting conversation. Many interesting points were raised, and some disagreed the web needs saving at all. Disclosure: as the breakout was part of a Member-confidential event, I generalised and synthesised what was raised, and left out attributions to specific…
Today I was at an event on sustainability reporting. It was hosted by Digital Catapult and excellently moderated by Jo Lindsay Walton and Chanell Daniels . I was glad I was able to to join, given my interest in AI ethics (at work and W3C), a greener future (as a contributor to WSG ), and in reporting methodologies (but for accessibility, as an editor of WCAG-EM ). I don't know a lot about…
WCAG-EM describes a process for checking if a large website conforms to WCAG. More than 10 years after it first came out, WCAG-EM 2.0 updates it to broaden the scope of products it applies to be more than just websites. It was published by the Accessibility Guidelines Working Group at the W3C—who work on WCAG, among other deliverables, and I was one of the co-editors. The publication followed…
Over the past months, I realised it was about time I moved away from music streaming, to keeping a personal music collection that I control. Trust issues Over the last years I have consumed most digital music via Tidal. At some point, I realised I didn't really have much trust in my music streaming situation anymore. Two things specifically pushed me over the edge: choice paralysis in and…
My concern is that Mozilla is too excited about a technology that has inherent downsides and ethical problems, and I would like to see (even) better defaults and (even) clearer risk mitigations. In this post, I want to offer one more perspective on the recent backlash about AI functionality in Firefox, because I like Mozilla (full disclosure: used to work there), and despite everything, I think I…
2025 was quite the year, and it is almost over! Here's some of my reflections and highlights in work, music, and travel. Note: like my posts about 2024 , 2023 , 2022 , 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 and 2017 , this post is mostly ‘highlights’, lowlights left out intentionally. Work I changed jobs. After almost 20 years of mostly contracting, I am now mostly a full time civil servant, working on web…
One of the busiest breakout sessions I attended at this year's TPAC was the one about the open web and what threats to consider . I regretted not bringing up my greatest worry: that when people stop visiting websites directly, they're filtering content through an opaque system. The discussion was about threats to the open web due to the emergence of large language models (LLMs). Large parts of the…
Last week, W3C TPAC 2025 happened. It brought hundreds of people together to work on the W3C's mission of making the web work for everyone, with group meetings and break-outs , and an AC session . As TPAC unites so many groups and people, any visitor will experience FOMO at one point or another. In my case, it was a dazzling 4 super interesting breakouts scheduled at the same time, overlap between…
A prominent vendor of accessibility tooling made the case for teaching AI agents about accessibility, because developers use them and therefore this teaching is a way to shift left. Shifting left, just so we're on the same page, is a strategy for increasing accessibility at scale. It moves efforts from being late in the process, like fixing an app long after it's gone live, towards being as early…
LLM vendors promise huge time savings, while many people experience these tools cost them time. Can both be true at the same time? Yes, when it saves some, but costs others. “Second-hand burdening” can be a huge problem to productivity in organisations that introduce LLMs to their workflows at scale, or indeed outside those organisations. (I'll use “AI” and “LLMs” interchangeably in this post, but…
A couple of years ago, I published an AI reading list with five books I found helpful. As lots of great books came out recently, this post has five more. I realise this post comes just after most return from their summer holidays, but also, that's why I had extra reading time. It checks out. The common thread in these books is that they provide a critical look at the current wave of AI: the…
This week I attended a symposium called ”The Politics of AI: governance, resistance, alternatives” at Goldsmiths in London. In this post, I'll share some takeaways. The Goldsmiths building The event was organised by Fieke Jansen , Dan McQuillan , Jo Lindsay Walton and Pat Brodie , academics working in the fields of critical AI studies, technology infrastructure and sustainability. The overlap…
In On Connection , the British poet and rapper Kae Tempest explains how creative works can lead to connection, through the power of three parts: the writer, the text and the audience. These parts are equally important for art to be experienced as profound. They need to be equally “activated”: It is the connection between the author, the text and you as you, at a particular point, with a particular…
We can build UI components with accessibility in mind. We can also document accessibility specifics alongside them, or review them for obvious barriers during development. All helpful and recommended. What about claiming conformance? In this post, I'll talk about how WCAG technically doesn't allow for that , and why I believe WCAG is right. This post is partially based on a series of talks I've…
Two words that are often confused: conformance and compliance. What do they mean? Listening to this Muse song while reading is optional. Conform to a standard When something conforms to a standard, it “meets” or “satisfies” specific requirements in a standard. For instance, in the case of WCAG, those requirements include that: the requirements in a specific Level are met (eg Level A or Level AA).…
A few thoughts on the philosophical perspective, which I'd rebrand here as a useful perspective. When I studied AI and then philosophy in university, pretty much every course prepared me to be annoyingly critical of AI. Sometimes I wish I wasn't aware of any of it. Ethics, philosophy of language, epistemology and philosophy of science, aesthetics, history of philosophy, medieval philosophy, logic,…
If we're not cautious, we may accidentally feed the AI hype by talking about it in specific ways. When we hype up the technology, we mostly help the people who put money into it. This post isn't about those people or that money, maybe they could use the help… my point is, they are irrelevant when we want to understand the merits of AI . They muddy the waters and overshadow the important questions.…
AC members can vote via the voting form (AC-only). They can also contact me for questions. I'd be happy to chat more about anything mentioned in this post or my statement. What are the challenges facing W3C as an organization in the next two years, and what skills and interests will you bring to the AB to help with addressing them? As a web standards organisation, we're not immune to general…
My name is Hidde de Vries, accessibility standards specialist at Logius (part of the Dutch government). I would appreciate your support of my running for the W3C's Advisory Board. AC members can vote via the voting form (AC-only). I fell in love with the web ever since I built my first website in high school, almost 20 years ago. What a cool platform to build for! Since then, I worked…
It depends on who you ask. But the current wave of generative AI has unpleasant side effects that are hard to ignore: large-scale copyright infringements, environmental impact and bias. (In this post, I'll use “AI” as a shortcut for generating or modifying content, like text, code, images and videos, and asking questions using LLM-based systems.) Our industry seems divided on generative AI. Some…
People have been blogging about questions about blogging. Steve tagged me . There are multiple projects I haven't procrastinated on nearly enough, so let's go! Why did you start blogging in the first place? When I went on a one year trip and had been asked by worried family members to provide regular updates on my whereabouts. I ended up really enjoying capturing moments, surprises and stories.…
Today, the ICT sector accounts for about 1–2% of global greenhouse gas emissions. That’s more than aviation, and the number is growing. These statistics may be unnerving, but they do mean that we can make a lot of impact at work. I wrote this as an aricle for the latest edition of The Service Gazette, a newspaper that has been in print for 10 years now, collecting stories for and from over service…
If WCAG 3 would adopt the word “view” instead of “web page”, the standard would be more useful in non-web contexts like native apps, documents and XR . Because many wish to understand how accessible such environments are, we should consider adopting a unit that isn’t “web page”. To me, “view” is the strongest contender. Update 16 July 2025 : we've currently adopted a developing definition for…
It's only a few days until 2025. That means one thing: it is time for my yearly tradition of reviewing… some of my year . I'll cover work, conferences, reading, writing and music. This will inevitably sound cheesy, but I am once again genuinely grateful for the opportunities I got… there were fun projects at work, I got to see some of my dearest artists live and I got to share knowledge and…
Generative AI features have a large climate impact and water consumption . We can weigh that impact against those features' benefits, but what if they are left unused? If lots of people don't in fact use the thing? That seems like lots of avoidable waste. Which matters, we're in a climate emergency and we're dangerously far from that 1.5 degrees target . I know, we all want people to use features…
Taking the train for work travel can cost more time than going by car or plane. But it's one of the most energy efficient ways to travel, and I get this weird productivity boost from them. Note that you can absolutely also chill out, read, sleep or listen to music on trains. I like that too, sometimes. But this post is about when I use train time to work. In Europe. Enjoy the benefits As mentioned…
Yesterday, I was at State of the Browser in London. It was great to catch up with friends and make new ones, and the talks were once again very well curated. In this post, I'll share some notes from the day and the takeaways that stood out to me the most. The Barbican tube station Think about funding the web ecosystem Stephanie Stimac kicked us off with a brilliant talk on how to fund the critical…
It's not easy to build very good UI components. A global effort to try and find the best qualities of components would be a great opportunity to improve components everywhere. Aren't design systems ultimately a quest to collect the best UI practices across an organisation? Or across multiple organisations, or for anyone in general. This kind of work brings excellent opportunities to improve…
Today I was at the IAAP-EU event in Paris, where we spent a morning workshopping and clarifying parts of EN 301 549 , the procurement standard that is used in the Web Accessibility Directive . I managed to get a spot in the group that focused on 11.8, the part of EN 301 549 that focuses on authoring tools. In this post, I'll share some insights from that session. This post was written, as always,…
One of the premises of the new popover attribute is that it comes with general accessibility considerations “built in”. What does “built in accessibility” actually mean for browsers that support popover? See also: Scott's post Popping preconceived popover ponderings and Hidde's talk on popovers , and other posts about popover semantics , positioning popovers and the difference with dialogs and…
Yesterday I spent all day in a cinema full of design system nerds. Why? To attend Patterns Day 3 . Eight speakers shared their knowledge: some zoomed out to see the bigger picture, others zoomed in on the nitty-gritty. It was nice to be at another Patterns Day, after I attended the first and missed the second. Thanks Clearleft and especially Jeremy Keith for putting it together. In this post, I'll…
Companies are rushing to add generated AI capabilities to their products. Some promise to produce front-end components for you. Is that even possible, given the nature of accessibility and the nature of generative AI? And is it desirable? The short answer is no, to both questions. The risk: that our rush to technlogical solutions comes at the expense of users. To find out why, let's consider: how…
The amount of content on the web is so large, that it's tricky to find the stuff worth reading. One of my strategies is to follow people I trust and read what they share. For anyone with interests similar to mine, I've opened a Links section on this website, too (with it's own RSS feed). My plan is to publish no more than a couple of links per day (if any). They will mostly be related to…
In the nineties, Clippy lived inside the Microsoft Office suite. It was an avatar of an actual paperclip that would interrupt your writing with tips. Did it provide lots of value? I can't remember. I recall there were good easter eggs. But I don't think it really fixed our productivity in some groundbreaking way. A cute relic of the past, in a time where a lot less people were using computers…
Wait, what, it's only a week until 2024? Time for what has become a yearly tradition… in this post, I'll review some of my 2023 in work, conferences, reading, writing, listening, music and learnings. Note: like my posts about 2022 , 2021 , 2020 , 2019 , 2018 and 2017 , this post is mostly ‘highlights’, lowlights left out intentionally. Work The work year was different than usual: my full time job…
Inspired by Chris Coyier' Answers to common (web) design questions , which was inspired by Dan Mall's earlier post , here's list of common accessibility questions. Should I use links or buttons? Yes. Links if it takes the user somewhere, buttons if it performs an action. Also buttons if the action is submitting a form (even if the user is then taken somewhere). Trying to avoid nuance in this post,…
This week, a product launched and claimed to generate “production ready” code. But it also generates code with accessibility problems, which contradicts “production ready”. When someone called this out publicly, a community showed itself from its worst side. What can we learn? I'll state again, I wrote this to share learnings around community respondes to a concern about accessibility issues.…
For the Dutch government, I'm co-organising the third edition of a virtual week-long design systems event , as part of my role in the NL Design System core team. Will it be interesting? Yes! At NL Design System, we work with a lot of government teams to ultimately try and make a “greatest hits” of their components. Heavily simplified: we want to find the best front-end…
OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, now offers a way for websites to opt out of its crawler . By default, it will just use web content as it sees fit. How rude! The opt-out works by adding a Disallow directive for the GPTBot User Agent in your robots.txt . The GPTBot docs say: Allowing GPTBot to access your site can help AI models become more accurate and improve their general capabilities and…
Large language models (LLMs), like ChatGPT and Bard, can be used to generate sentences based on statistical likeliness. While the results of these tools can look very impressive (they're designed to), I can't think of cases where the use of LLM-generated content actually improves an end user's experience. Even if not all of the time, LLM output is often nonsensical, false, unclear and boring.…
This week I joined the CSS Working Group (CSSWG) as an Invited Expert . I'm super grateful for this chance to try and make myself useful in a group whose outputs shaped so much of my professional interests (they make CSS !). I'm somewhat nervous about this, but also not completely new to CSS or web standards. My background with CSS is that I've been a long time fanboy of the language, and a keen…
Popovers are commonly positioned relative to their invoker (if they have one). When we use the popover attribute , anchoring is tricky, as these popovers are in the top layer, away from the context of their invoker. What options do we have? See also: Hidde's talk on popovers , and other posts about popover accessibility , positioning popovers and the difference with dialogs and other components .…
With the new popover attribute in HTML , we can put elements in the top layer and allow them to disappear with ‘light dismiss’. This attribute adds behaviour , not semantics: you're supposed to add your own role when it makes sense. In this post, we'll look at different roles that could make sense for your popover-behaved elements. See also: Hidde's talk on popovers , and other posts about popover…
I have returned to working as an independent front-end / accessibility / devrel person. My first project will be at the Dutch government's NL Design System team. Leaving Sanity I recently left Sanity , where I worked in the developer relations team. After doing some “developer relations”-like work at the W3C/WAI , this was my first full-time role in the space. I loved the variety: I could create…
Large Language Models (LLMs) and tools based on them (like ChatGPT) are all some in tech talk about today. I struggle with the optimism I see from businesses, the haphazard deployment of these systems and the seemingly ever-expanding boundaries of what we are prepared to call “artificially intelligent”. I mean, they bring interesting capabilities, but arguably they are neither artificial, nor…
It would be easier to have an accessible web if all we did with it was publish documents. Blobs of text, images here and there. But modern sites (or “applications”) do a lot more than documents. Often for better, sometimes for worse. To improve accessibility of the web as it is today, I feel we dearly need accessibility guidance that is holistic , well tested and easy to use . Web sites or…
It's meta blogging time, because this is my 200th post. Vanity metrics, I know, but sometimes you've got to celebrate milestones. Even the merely numerical ones. When I wrote my 150th post two years ago, I described why I blog and what about . This time, I want to focus on how I do it and look at the subjects of the last 50. A lot of posts start on my phone There are plenty of tools for writing.…
The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines ( ATAG ) are guidelines for tools that create web content . While reviewing this week, I wondered if the Text Search criterion (A.3.5.1) is met as soon as users can use browser built-in search. You know, Ctrl/⌘ + F . Turns out: yes, if the tool is browser-based and the UI contains all the necessary content in a way that CTRL+F can find it. Let's look…
I have this web page to display the books I've read . Book covers often bring back memories and it's been great to scroll past them on my own page. It's also an opportunity to play around with book data. This week, I added a bit of page count-based visualisation for fun. This is what it looks like: rectangles with colours based on book covers. Each relates to a specific book, and its size is based…