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Inclusive Design Patterns - Coding Accessibility Into Web Design
Published:
A good book on how to think about inclusive web design. Inclusive web design includes (hehe) accessibility, usability and performance. Heydon goes over how to implement certain web patterns, like site navigation and forms in an inclusive manner. It also has many citations which elaborate on certain concepts. A useful thing I’ve picked up from this book is the adjacent sibling selector.
While he does a good job doing this, I have two reservations. For one, I’m not sure about the perfomance suggestion to base64 fonts. See Web Font Anti-Patterns: Inlining by Bram Stein for more about that. The second thing is that this book was published in 2016, and many things have changed since then.
Either way, it’s a good book to read to learn about how to approach inclusive web design. I’m looking forward to (re-)reading Laura Kalbag’s Accessibility for Everyone since it’s more recent and goes into more detail as to how to interperate WCAG’s accessibility guidelines, involve various shareholders and how to test1.
Heydon’s book did go over testing, although it’s mostly focused on how to use CSS to identify markup errors. ↩︎