Dev Diary Entry, 28th April 2020
I can’t believe this is the beginning of the sixth week I’ve spent in the house (minus long daily walks). It’s starting to wear thin now. The weather will be changing from sunny to cloudy with a chance of rain this week, which will make things harder. Fingers crossed some restrictions will be lifted by the end of May.
- This week I added a skip link to my blog. As a keyboard user you can skip repetitive areas of a website, i.e. navigation, by using the tab key when you enter a new page. This shows a previously invisible link that, when selected, moves the page focus to the main portion of the page. Test it out on any page with your keyboard. The style was inspired by GOV.UK’s skip link.
- Another change to my site this week was improving the colour contrast of some of my buttons. This applies mainly to the ones in the footer which I hadn’t customised since changing my footer design last year. This tool from aditus does all the hard work for you in checking the contrast ratio with your buttons against different backgrounds.
- A Dao of Web Design - This alistapart article was written in 2000 but its subject of designing adaptable webpages is still relevant today 20 years later. Definitely worth a read.
- Google to phase out user-agent strings in Chrome - I’m glad user-agent strings are going away as I always found them inconsistent and confusing to work with. They will be replaced with ‘client hints’ and the other major browsers are likely to follow suit.