Zoë Bijl is an accessibility specialist who works with companies to assess and improve the accessibility of their products.
One of the perks of working for Igalia is that Alice gets to travel to A Coruña in Spain each year. This is where Igalia hosts its annual Web Engines Hackfest conference. This year was the first time that I joined her for the conference, which is now a W3C endorsed conference ! What made this year extra special is that we made the entire trip by public transport. Trains for the most part with a…
Finished reading All Systems Red by Martha Wells yet again; I love that book so much. Murderbot is such a likeable character and the humour in these books is fantastic. It’s my last month with the ministry of infrastructure and water management. It’s been an interesting year in which I’ve learned a few things. It makes me sad to think about the things that it could’ve been. I look forward to my…
In 2018 I switched from Twitter to Mastodon. I was rather confused in the beginning. I didn’t quite grasp the concept of all these servers being connected but that you should login on your home server. I also struggled to find people to follow. After I read up on how Mastodon worked the concept landed. I hadn’t quite found a place I wanted to call home though. What I really wanted was my own…
Alice finally arrived! We’ve been apart since September of last year—which has been entirely too long. I’m so incredibly happy that she’s here 💕.
Note: this interview was originally published on CrowdStrike’s blog on the 30th of June 2021 . CrowdStrike had a dedicated pride team at the time. © CrowdStrike 2021 June is Pride Month in the U.S., a time to give the metaphorical mic to people within the LGBTQIA+ community who want to share their perspectives and experiences. Joining us today for a conversation about being transgender is…
Started as a Senior Accessibility Advisor at the Dutch government. After a two year hiatus it’ll be an adjustment to get back to work. The road to recovery from my burnout has been long. I hope this new job gives me the energy to get back into it! Working on accessibility, in whatever capacity, is something I’ll always enjoy.
Alice and I spent two weeks in California to visit friends and attend TPAC. It was my first time visiting San Francisco. It was a real treat driving around in a city I’ve explorer in games so often. We rented a cabin in the El Cerrito hills with a view of the Golden Gate bridge. After our week in San Francisco, we picked up a friend from the airport on our way to Anaheim. We made a stop near Los…
Australia here I come! It’s been a wild few months. After all it’s not every day that you fall madly in love with someone. Much less so someone from the other side of the planet. And yet here we are. Thanks to a (now shared) friend we were able to spend a week together before Alice had to fly back home, to Australia. That was at the end of June. Falling in love and immediately having to be apart…
Hello beautiful faces 💕. First I’d like to thank everyone that sent in submissions: thank you! We’ve reached out to several artists. We’re figuring out ways in which we can support all of them. Our main winner this year is Artist Marcia X (Fediverse: @CaribenxMarciaX@scholar.social ). We’ll support their project “The Vocal Void”! Impression from Marcia’s work © Artist Marcia X Marcia’s…
TL;DR Prevent your sticky header from obscuring your main content with some scroll-padding on the <html> element. What we want to prevent: our heading being chopped in half by our sticky header. Table of contents (These are also skip links!) What is a skip link? How to make skip links work with sticky headers Browser Support References What is a skip link? A skip link lets keyboard users skip over…
Dear parents of the world, Being trans is hard. Having parents that don’t accept you is harder. If your kid comes out to you as trans, non-binary, or perhaps agender the first thing you should do is hug them and tell them you love them. The second thing you should do is to read up on the subject. If you don’t inform yourself on the subject all you will achieve with your kid is exactly nothing. If…
We often come across forms that have multiple fields for what is in essence a single piece of data, like a phone number or credit-card number. Doing so can pose some usability issues if they aren’t marked up in the right way. Would it be better to ask for these chunks of data with single text fields instead? Note: Please read this article as me pondering about these benefits rather than presenting…
This article was originally written for the June edition of net magazine . When I started to learn HTML, I began with basic elements like h1 , p , div , and button . I learned about semantics, creating sections with headings, and styling elements with CSS. Unconsciously, I was laying a foundation of knowledge on how to build accessible websites. When I began specialising in accessibility, this…
It’s important to keep up with what’s going on in the accessibility world. Luckily there are lots of people that share their knowledge and experiences via talks, articles, websites, and books. This article lists several resources about accessibility that I’ve enjoyed this year. I hope you enjoy them too! Articles Permalink: “Articles” The future of accessibility for custom elements by Rob Dodson…
In December of 2015 I made a list of interesting accessibility resources like articles, talks, and projects that I enjoyed that year. This is a follow up on that and lists some things that I have read, watched, or otherwise enjoyed over the last 16 months and would recommend to anyone interested in accessibility. Articles Permalink: “Articles” Accessibility and me: Molly Watt Be wary of nesting…
Yesterday Brian sent me a link to a little something they had worked on. It was a script that added a role attribute to all HTML elements with an exposed ARIA role. But why? you might ask. To feed our browser rendering engine overlords of course. No, to make it possible to use a CSS attribute selector to select elements based on how they’re exposed. Brian goes into detail in their post Reflecting…
This year marks my first time at CSUN in San Diego . It’s also my first time in the United State of America. Better yet, it is the first time I travel outside Europe! More importantly though, it will give me the chance to learn a whole lot, meet lots of new people and finally shake hands with—or give hugs to—people I have been talking to for quite a while as part of my work for the W3C. So you…
Accessibility is very interesting. A lot of people in the community seem to agree, because there are loads of great articles, talks, and other resources! This article lists some that I have read, watched, or otherwise enjoyed this year and would recommend to anyone interested in accessibility. Articles Permalink: “Articles” What is WAI-ARIA, what does it do for me, and what not? by Marco Zehe…