An official statement from the European Commission on accessibility "overlays" and EAA compliance. The outcome? Overlays are insufficient and potentially damaging to accessibility. Whilst they don't go as far as to actively state "do not use" or "considered harmful" both conclusions are supported by their statements:

Claims that a website can be made fully compliant without manual intervention are not realistic, since no automated tool can cover all the WCAG 2.1 level A and AA criteria. It is even less realistic to expect to detect automatically the additional EN 301549 criteria.

In other words, overlay tools may make a website less accessible for some users.

Ashur has voiced something I've been doing for years: feed readers may be efficient, but that efficiency robs websites of their individuality. I've long had sites that I subscribe to but will always press the button to "open in new tab" rather than read them in the browser, from the genuinely art-directed (e.g. ILoveTypography) to the beautifully simple (e.g. adactio or Ethan Marcotte's site). Some sites are information-first and don't need this treatment, but I wish readers wouldn't try so hard to sanitise the web.

Of course, the action suggested here – set your feed to excerpt only – doesn't actually solve the problem for some modern readers. My own tool of choice, Readwise Reader, doesn't even use the RSS feed to aggregate data, but instead uses it as a list of links to scrape. I don't love this behaviour and find it less reliable than just using RSS most of the time, but it's also a slight reaction to excerpt feeds. Ah well, I can still open in new tab myself 😉

On the joy that is lost by consuming content in a sanitised "reader" environment:

... it’s not just the occasional art-directed post that goes unseen, but the personality — and, dare I say, humanity — of a site altogether, by treating my feed reader as the de facto way of catching up

On shifting from viewing items in the reader versus using it as a notification system:

... the feed transforms from a lifeless simulacrum of the original text to a gentle reminder to check in on something that's bound to be quite lovely.

On how excerpts can help guide readers to treat feeds differently:

Truncate those posts, embrace the beauty of "Read More" links, and drive people to your actual site! You and your readers both deserve it.

A beautiful and extremely clever animation that takes you on a journey through the major theories and breakthroughs in physics, with an excellent score and an ultimate twist that makes me desperately want someone to adapt it into a Journey-like video game, with no dialogue and mind-bending sequences. Seriously, how cool would that final bit be, crafted three-dimensional objects on a world line and controlling time to retroactively help your own prior playthrough progress 🤯

A playful and fun new variable font, which lets you control the amount of thickness in three novel ways: ink trap, ballooning, and curve. The result are letterforms that almost seem to disassemble as you max out the variability, but that can still snap back to a (fairly) typical sans-serif if wanted:

Sara proposes some broader microformats support for media consumption, beyond the existing u-watch-of. The existing option does little to differentiate the type of content (YouTube versus cinema, for instance), which makes it almost too broad. But there's also the evergreen issue of: why add microformats if no consuming case exists, countered with, how can you create a consuming case without broad prior implementation. As they say, it's a classic "chicken versus egg" conundrum.

The thing is, I quite like the concept of a service that pulls in recent reviews of movies, books, TV shows etc. from people I already follow on feed readers and social media. That kind of one-step-away network effect is appealing, and the first "social" feature that something like a social reader could implement that would actually be a net draw for me.

Perhaps I need to consider marking up my own reviews, in that case.

On a future service that could utilise microformats for media consumption:

Basically, to see what the people around are watching and how much they are liking the thing, they are watching.

On the broad abstraction of the existing u-watch-of microformat:

It also does not really indicate, that this is a movie, right? I guess this could also be use to indicate watching a Youtube videos

A useful rundown of some of the considerations worth keeping in mind when evaluating the "green" credentials of a web host or service.

Michelle also links out to the Green Web Hosting Directory, which I've seen pop up a bit recently. It seems my own host, Krystal, isn't well represented there, which is a shame given all they're doing to reduce their environmental impact. I've reached out to the company to see if they can maybe increase their verification level.

An interesting insight into the business arc of Google from a long-time (but now former) employee. There's lots that could be gleaned about a company that infamously removed a motto of "don't be evil", though I don't fully buy the narrative presented about early Google genuinely putting users over profit (and, given the level of candour later in the article, if you're going to make those kinds of claims, you need to bring receipts). But the more interesting point here is that redundancies and layoffs are hard to walk back from. Once a company shows that version of itself to the employees, trust is shattered and company culture is destroyed. If we can learn anything from Google's attempts at "disrupting" the concept of running a company, that should be the key takeaway.

The deterioration of Google's culture will eventually become irreversible, because the kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same kinds of people who don't join an organisation without a moral compass.

A few careful thoughts about the utility of "web marginalia", in this case for discovery; things like blogrolls, feed lists, and webrings. John wonders if their demise is in part due to the loss of sidebars as responsive design/smaller viewports became the norm. I'm not sure I fully agree; I feel like most of the loss is due to the "brandification" of the web and the removal of personal space (and personality) alongside it. But regardless, I absolutely love this way of phrasing that thought:

Websites have been wind tunnelled, the edges stripped. The interesting sidebars and columns where once you would wander into new ideas from other minds have fallen far from view.

A thoughtful diatribe on the current state of web design and the web industry as a whole, with a specific focus on how the rise of that industrial complex has (possibly inevitably) reduced the craft and related skills that were once the core of these professions. Specifically, Thomas takes aim at at KPI culture, used to seek eternal growth; a culture that has homogenised web design, over-engineered development platforms, and now seems poised to be cannibalised by the AI models it has built. It's a fairly bleak take – albeit a sympathetic one – but there is a glimmer of hope. A hope that, as the industry matures, a counter-balancing craft revival may also flourish, as we have seen with so many industries before.

I consider this a conflict between two identities: the craftsperson and the factory worker. The craftsperson wants to do what honors the values of the craft, but the factory worker needs to do what will keep them employed or employable.

On where we are heading – a reduced industry, largely automated, with a smaller niche for "bespoke" and "hand-crafted", as with all things:

Because the craft will remain even after most of it is automated. You can order mugs online, yet there are still potters out there.

So the next time you are approaching a website, ask yourself, "What would the craftsperson do?" And also ask yourself, "What would the factory worker do?" See what answers you come up with!

A tool for generating colour palettes which are perceptually consistent in terms of lightness, contrast, and saturation. Usefully, it automatically calculates WCAG 2 contrast ratios; it also attempts to guess at WCAG 3 scores, though this remains an unknown in terms of how it will ultimately be applied (it is useful to sanity check perceived contrast versus calculated contrast, though). You can also modify the underlying colour space per colour, and set hue shifts, to stop colours morphing across the calculated gradient (e.g. prevents blues from becoming too purple, or yellows turning too green). In other words, a very powerful colour calibration tool.

A fascinating (albeit quite technical) dive into how colours spaces work, and why the typical HSL colour spaces of the web and software result in problematic inconsistencies within colours. The key is that most classic colour spaces do not account for perceptual contrast and lightness within our own biological colour space (how we perceive colours), which makes standardisation between colours very difficult. But more modern colour spaces – including LCh – are designed to account for that perceptual difference and should therefore be considered a marked improvement/preferable solution.

The Component Kitchen is a sort of app store for web components; a digital directory of useful packages, recipes, and one-shots that can be imported into your projects.