Category: UsefulLinks

Useful Links: Meritocracy, Primers, Binder fun

you keep using that word is a passionate rant about the word “meritocracy” in response to the post I linked to yesterday called A primer on sexism in the tech industry.

With even more response to that primer post, Laura Sanders wrote A primer on sexism in the tech industry – by an actual girl. Then Kathy Sierra send an email to Faruk Ateş, who wrote the original post, and later gave him permission to publish her email.

On a lighter note, were you on Twitter last night during the debate? I was, and was surprised by how inane some of the tweets were. But you know what, perhaps humor is the only response to politics in our time. Here’s a TechCrunch report about some of the fun people had at the expense of the Romney: ‘Binders Full Of Women’, Romney Gaffe, Gets Tumblr And 200k Likes On Facebook. It’s just amazing what the Internet and social media allow in this day and age – sometimes we forget that.

 

Useful links: Sexism, Job Hunting, Color Contrast, Blog Takedown

A Primer on Sexism in the Tech Industry at .net magazine is by Faruk Ateş. For quite some time, I’ve been impressed with the quality of content appearing at .net magazine. I’ve linked to quite a few articles here. So here’s a belated +1 to .net magazine for being such a great resource.

How do you look for a job in an industry known for biases against women? is an informative post for women looking for work.

Here’s a wonderful addition to color contrast testing tools. Lea Verou created a contrast checker that she describes in Easy Color Contrast Ratios. Here is what this innovative tool can do:

  • Accepts any CSS color the browser does, not just hex colors. To do this, it defers parsing of the color to the browser, and queries the computed style, which is always rgb() or rgba() with 0-255 ranges which be parsed much more easily than the multitude of different formats than modern browsers accept (and the even more that are coming in the future).
  • Updates as you type, when what you’ve typed can be parsed as a valid CSS color.
  • Accepts semi transparent colors. For semi-transparent backgrounds, the contrast ratio is presented with an error margin, since it can vary depending on the backdrop. In that case, the result circle will not have a solid background, but a visualization of the different possible results and their likelihood (see screenshot).
  • You can share your results by sharing the URL. The URL hashes have a reasonable structure of the form #foreground-on-background, e.g. #black-on-yellow so you can even adjust the URL as a form of input.
  • You can adjust the color by incrementing or decrementing its components with the keyboard arrow keys until you get the contrast right. This is achieved by including my Incrementable library.

You’ll find a link to the new contrast checker on Lea’s site (it’s currently on github). I think it deserves a URL of its own, don’t you?

This is one of those “I can’t believe they did that” stories. Textbook Publisher Pearson Takes Down 1.5 Million Teacher And Student Blogs With A Single DMCA Notice. That’s Pearson as in Visual Quickstart Guides and a bunch more books you probably own. Pearson that I’ve worked for several times as a writer or tech editor. I hope something in this situation changes soon.

Useful links: Flexbox, background-size, models of disability, smart objects, HTML5 headings

Opera Dev has a post by Chris Mills called Flexbox: fast track to layout nirvana?

Take advantage of the CSS background-size property is at .net magazine.

Models of disability and their relation to accessibility is a fascinating post by Martyn Cooper. The post conclusion will give you an idea of the different models of disability the article discusses:

Our models of disability are important, they shape our attitudes and impact on how effectively the needs and preferences  of disabled people are met in design. The medical model is now widely seen as outmoded and a perpetuator of  discriminatory attitudes. The social model has had widespread influence. It is important in accessibility considerations because it recognises the importance of the context of the users and supports the view of accessibility as a relationship property; in the case of web accessibility the relationship being between the diversity of users and the web resource or application. Functional models have been asserted as the most useful in design and development and the potential of these for personalisation and analytics highlighted.

Working with Smart Objects in Dreamweaver and Photoshop is by Tom Negrino.

HTML5 Ranked Headings for Screen Readers. Yep, your hierarchy on HTML5. How’s it working in screen readers?

Useful links: Bookmarklet, Toolbar, Sans-Serif

Web Evaluation Tools Bookmarklet comes from NCSU. Here’s the description of this very useful tool:

This tool will visually show you any headings, ARIA landmarks, internal links, and tabindex attributes present on a page. This information is useful for examining the structure of a page as a screen reader user would experience it, without having to actually start up a screen reader to test it.

Speaking useful of accessibility tools, the wonderful WAVE tool now has a Firefox WAVE Toolbar. The tool works completely within Firefox so can be used for “intranet, password-protected, dynamically generated, or sensitive web pages. Also, because the WAVE toolbar evaluates the rendered version of your page, locally displayed styles and dynamically-generated content from scripts or AJAX can be evaluated.”

A new study looked at sans-serif typefaces and tested how they performed in different situations where speed was important – such as reading screens while driving. Here’s what they learned. How Sans-Serif Typefaces Affect Readability.

Useful links: Hacker vs. Maker, Social Media, Prebooks

Hackers and Makers: Language Matters is from Curious for a Living. She said, “Yes, language matters. Especially when we’re inviting community. What feels more welcoming to you: A hackerspace or a Maker Faire?”

NIce summary of how the candidates are using social media in the 2012 election. Do you think it makes a difference?

CSS: The Definitive Guide, Fourth Edition by Eric Meyer is a post about much more than the latest edition of Eric’s CSS opus. It’s about how books are marketed, sold, packaged, distributed and even conceived of as entities. As far as I know, O’Reilly is the first publisher to do something like this. I don’t think O’Reilly will be the last. Even if you aren’t interested in the latest CSS book, you need to read this post.

I tweeted about Eric’s post yesterday. He doesn’t completely share my opinion. Here’s a part the conversation Eric and I had then. (By the way, have you noticed how impossible it is to embed a complete conversation from Twitter? Twitter decides for you what tweets you want to include. This is a patchwork and not complete.)

 

 

 

Useful links: media queries, landmark roles, structural elements

CSS Media Queries is a Mozilla Dev Network basic tutorial on media queries.

Usable landmarks across desktop and mobile is from Henny Swan about which ARIA roles are the most useful and when to use them.

The truth about structuring and HTML5 page at .net magazine is sure to be controversial, as is the book it’s an excerpt from. Be sure to read it.