When we put together a design system, we typically spend a good chunk of that time building components that will live on the web. When we start doing that, there’s an obvious question to ask: what browsers will we support?
ePub is the W3C standard for ebooks. It lets you take your knowledge of the web, and use it to produce little self-contained sets of documents that can be freely distributed as a single file ready for reading on extremely low-power devices, and they even reflow to fit any screen. Yet while I said that you can use your knowledge of the web to build ePubs, the technology in use is twisted in…
For the longest time, if you mentioned IKEA to a designer they’d say the word Futura. We’d used the Futura font since only a few years after the company was founded — the first use I can find is in the 1954 catalogue — and it had become pretty synonymous with our branding. This all changed however in 2010. As Futura was only a default installed font on Macs, our digital branding was lagging behind…
Last time around, I talked about the probable requirement for dark mode in ecommerce sites under the European Accessibility Act. The situation has now changed somewhat.
Update: this assessment is no longer correct, based on new decisions since this was written. I’ve detailed this in a follow-up post.
I recently spent some time checking IKEA.com in Windows high contrast mode, and found quite a few places where easy improvements could be made. There’s a handful of techniques that I used to do this that seem worth writing down, in the hope more people will benefit.
You know the drill. The product owner and designers have researched and decided on a load of great new features, and now it’s time to build and test them. Every backlog gives you more and more chances to test out what new ideas could work well for your users. But sometimes the pressure of getting this launched means that you don’t have time to do everything you’d like to the quality you’d like to…
Today’s screenreader PSA, discovered by a colleague, concerns prices.
A hobby of mine is converting Gutenberg transcriptions into nice ebooks for the Standard Ebooks project. Most recently I’ve been working on Pepys’s Diary which, in the edition I’m working with, is stuffed full of footnotes. Because footnotes aren’t very meaningful in a format where pages shift, the default approach is to convert them to endnotes. That worked fine for the initial build, but plenty…
Google recently announced that they were extending AMP to email, and for me that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’ve been gradually reducing the amount of Google services I use over the past few years: DuckDuckGo has mostly replaced Google Search, archive.org and Hathi have mostly replaced books.google.com, and for better or worse I use iOS instead of Android. I still use YouTube and…