I made my web best practices article about twice as big as before: https://seirdy.one/2020/11/23/website-best-practices.html
Excerpt:
> My primary focus is supporting *underrepresented ways to read a page*. Not all users load a page in a common web-browser and navigate effortlessly with their eyes and hands. Authors often neglect people who read through accessibility tools, tiny viewports, machine translators, “reading mode” implementations, the Tor network, printouts, hostile networks, and uncommon browsers.
Cross-browser compatibility is easy. Supporting these niches while sticking to open standards is as hard as you can make it. WCAG compliance is necessary but insufficient.
Feedback welcome, especially from anyone with an accessibility background or with special needs! I hope to expand the article with technical approaches to accommodating neuro-atypical people soon, including recent WCAG discussions on clarifying sarcasm, idioms, and jokes.
I'd also like to hear about other underrepresented ways to read, or if anything I wrote impacted how you design pages.
Excerpt:
> My primary focus is supporting *underrepresented ways to read a page*. Not all users load a page in a common web-browser and navigate effortlessly with their eyes and hands. Authors often neglect people who read through accessibility tools, tiny viewports, machine translators, “reading mode” implementations, the Tor network, printouts, hostile networks, and uncommon browsers.
Cross-browser compatibility is easy. Supporting these niches while sticking to open standards is as hard as you can make it. WCAG compliance is necessary but insufficient.
Feedback welcome, especially from anyone with an accessibility background or with special needs! I hope to expand the article with technical approaches to accommodating neuro-atypical people soon, including recent WCAG discussions on clarifying sarcasm, idioms, and jokes.
I'd also like to hear about other underrepresented ways to read, or if anything I wrote impacted how you design pages.
What are some underrepresented ways to read webpages that webdevs/authors frequently ignore? Some I covered, in no particular order:
- Screen readers
- Switch access
- Content extraction (e.g. "Reader Mode")
- Low-bandwidth connections
- Unreliable/lossy connections
- Very narrow viewports (much narrower than a phablet)
- Printouts
- Textual browsers
- Uncommon graphical browsers
- through the Tor Browser (separate from "uncommon browsers" bc of how "safest" mode is often incompatible with progressive enhancement and graceful degradation)
- Non-default color palettes
- Hostile networks
- Aggressive content blocking (e.g. blocking all 3p content, frames, images, and cookies)
- Non-default fonts, esp. for a11y needs
- Stylesheet removal, alteration, or replacement
- Frequent window-resizers (e.g. users of tiled-window setups)
- machine translators
Please share any I missed. Boosts welcome for visibility: the more people who share, the better.
- Screen readers
- Switch access
- Content extraction (e.g. "Reader Mode")
- Low-bandwidth connections
- Unreliable/lossy connections
- Very narrow viewports (much narrower than a phablet)
- Printouts
- Textual browsers
- Uncommon graphical browsers
- through the Tor Browser (separate from "uncommon browsers" bc of how "safest" mode is often incompatible with progressive enhancement and graceful degradation)
- Non-default color palettes
- Hostile networks
- Aggressive content blocking (e.g. blocking all 3p content, frames, images, and cookies)
- Non-default fonts, esp. for a11y needs
- Stylesheet removal, alteration, or replacement
- Frequent window-resizers (e.g. users of tiled-window setups)
- machine translators
Please share any I missed. Boosts welcome for visibility: the more people who share, the better.
i mean, reading the page source is one.
often i `curl` a page and am met with huge blobs of unreadable metadata and/or scripts.
slapping rel="noopener noreferer nofollow" on every link certainly doesn't help.
Follow
Tip (for anyone curious), you can have a kind of global noreferer like so:
<meta name="referrer" content="no-referrer" />And you can also make use of <base>:
<base target="_blank" />https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/base
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/meta
I'd recommend against over-using the "_blank" target, though. It might make sense when a page contains unsaved changes or playing media, but it's otherwise unnecessary. Users who want to open a link in a new tab will do so on their own.