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Doubts about the drought that kicked off our latest geological age, and a faceoff between stink bugs with samurai wasps

We now live in the Meghalayan age—the last age of the Holocene epoch. Did you get the memo? A July decision by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is responsible for naming geological time periods, divided the Holocene into three ages: the Greenlandian, the Northgrippian, and the Meghalayan. The one we live in—the Meghalayan age (pronounced “megalion”)—is pegged to a global drought thought to have happened some 4200 years ago. But many critics question the timing of this latest age and the global expanse of the drought. Staff writer Paul Voosen talks with host Sarah Crespi about the evidence for and against the global drought—and what it means if it’s wrong. Sarah also talks to staff writer Kelly Servick about her feature story on what happens when biocontrol goes out of control. Here’s the setup: U.S. Department of Agriculture researchers wanted to know whether brown marmorated stink bugs that have invaded the United States could be controlled—aka killed—by importing their natural predators, samurai wasps, from Asia. But before they could find out, the wasps showed up anyway. Kelly discusses how using one species to combat another can go wrong—or right—and what happens when the situation outruns regulators. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Download a transcript of this episode (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts. [Image: Melissa McMasters/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook] 




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Measuring earthquake damage with cellphone sensors and determining the height of the ancient Tibetan Plateau

In the wake of a devastating earthquake, assessing the extent of damage to infrastructure is time consuming—now, a cheap sensor system based on the accelerometers in cellphones could expedite this process. Host Sarah Crespi talks with Contributing Correspondent Lizzie Wade about how these sensor systems work and how they might assist communities after an earthquake. In another Earth-shaking study, scientists have downgraded the height of the ancient Tibetan Plateau. Most reconstructions estimate that the “rooftop of the world” reached its current height of 4500 meters about 40 million years ago, but a new study suggests it was a mere 3000 meters high during this period. Host Meagan Cantwell speaks with Svetlana Botsyun, a postdoctoral researcher at Tübingen University in Germany, about her team’s new approach to studying paleoelevation, and how a shorter Tibetan Plateau would have impacted the surrounding area’s climate. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Download the transcript (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast [Image: Martin Luff/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]




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Better hurricane forecasts and spotting salts on Jupiter’s moon Europa

We’ve all seen images or animations of hurricanes that color code the wind speeds inside the whirling mass—but it turns out we can do a better job measuring these winds and, as a result, better predict the path of the storm. Staff Writer Paul Voosen talks with host Sarah Crespi about how a microsatellite-based project for measuring hurricane wind speeds is showing signs of success—despite unexpected obstacles from the U.S. military’s tweaking of GPS signals.    Also this week, Sarah talks with graduate student Samantha Trumbo, a Ph.D. candidate in planetary science at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, about spotting chloride salts on the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa. What can these salts on the surface tell us about the oceans that lie beneath Europa’s icy crust? Download a transcript (PDF)  This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Ads on the show: KiwiCo.com; MagellanTV Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast [Image: Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute; Music: Jeffrey Cook]




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Creating chimeras for organ transplants and how bats switch between their eyes and ears on the wing

Researchers have been making animal embryos from two different species, so-called “chimeras,” for years, by introducing stem cells from one species into a very early embryo of another species. The ultimate goal is to coax the foreign cells into forming an organ for transplantation. But questions abound: Can evolutionarily distant animals, like pigs and humans, be mixed together to produce such organs? Or could species closely related to us, like chimps and macaques, stand in for tests with human cells? Staff Writer Kelly Servick joins host Sarah Crespi to discuss the research, the regulations, and the growing ethical debate. Also this week, Sarah talks with Yossi Yovel of the School of Zoology and the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University in Israel about his work on sensory integration in bats. Writing in Science Advances, he and his colleagues show through several clever experiments when bats switch between echolocation and vision. Yossi and Sarah discuss how these trade-offs in bats can inform larger questions about our own perception. For our monthly books segment, Science books editor Valerie Thompson talks with Lucy Jones of the Seismological Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena about a song she created, based on 130 years of temperature data, for an instrument called the “viola de gamba.” Read more on the Books et al. blog. Download a transcript (PDF) This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Ads on the show: MagellanTV; KiwiCo Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast [Image: The Legend Kay/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]




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Breeding better bees, and training artificial intelligence on emotional imagery

Imagine having a rat clinging to your back, sucking out your fat stores. That’s similar to what infested bees endure when the Varroa destructor mite comes calling. Some bees fight back, wiggling, scratching, and biting until the mites depart for friendlier backs. Now, researchers, professional beekeepers, and hobbyists are working on ways to breed into bees these mite-defeating behaviors to rid them of these damaging pests. Host Sarah Crespi and Staff Writer Erik Stokstad discuss the tactics of, and the hurdles to, pesticide-free mite control. Also this week, Sarah talks to Philip Kragel of the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado in Boulder about training an artificial intelligence on emotionally charged images. The ultimate aim of this research: to understand how the human visual system is involved in processing emotion. And in books, Kate Eichorn, author of The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media, joins books host Kiki Sanford to talk about how the monetization of digital information has led to the ease of social media sharing and posting for kids and adults. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Download a transcript (PDF)  Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast [Image: Steve Baker/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]




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Squeezing two people into an MRI machine, and deciding between what’s reasonable and what’s rational

Getting into an MRI machine can be a tight fit for just one person. Now, researchers interested in studying face-to-face interactions are attempting to squeeze a whole other person into the same tube, while taking functional MRI (fMRI) measurements. Staff Writer Kelly Servick joins host Sarah Crespi to talk about the kinds of questions simultaneous fMRIs might answer. Also this week, Sarah talks with Igor Grossman, director of the Wisdom and Culture Lab at the University of Waterloo, about his group’s Science Advances paper on public perceptions of the difference between something being rational and something being reasonable. This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Read a transcript (PDF) Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast




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Researchers flouting clinical reporting rules, and linking gut microbes to heart disease and diabetes

Though a law requiring clinical trial results reporting has been on the books for decades, many researchers have been slow to comply. Now, 2 years after the law was sharpened with higher penalties for noncompliance, investigative correspondent Charles Piller took a look at the results. He talks with host Sarah Crespi about the investigation and a surprising lack of compliance and enforcement. Also this week, Sarah talks with Brett Finlay, a microbiologist at the University Of British Columbia, Vancouver, about an Insight in this week’s issue that aims to connect the dots between noncommunicable diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer and the microbes that live in our guts. Could these diseases actually spread through our microbiomes? This week’s episode was edited by Podigy. Listen to previous podcasts. About the Science Podcast Download a transcript (PDF). [Image: stu_spivack/Flickr; Music: Jeffrey Cook]




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Discrimination between fresh, chilled, and frozen/thawed chicken based on its skin's spectrochemical and optical properties

Anal. Methods, 2020, 12,2093-2101
DOI: 10.1039/D0AY00324G, Paper
Omnia Hamdy, Zienab Abdel-Salam, Mohamed Abdel-Harith
Monitoring of the spectrochemical and optical properties of biomaterials has been widely utilized in many biomedical applications for both diagnosis and therapy.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Between Rome and Persia [electronic resource] : the middle Euphrates, Mesopotamia, and Palmyra under Roman control / Peter M. Edwell

London ; New York : Routledge, 2008




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Covid-19 Factoid: Gap between daily new cases and recoveries widening

The world is adding over 70,000 cases everyday while the daily recoveries are still sub-15,000 on an average in the last three days.




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Quantifying the effects of preservation treatments on pavement performance / Gonzalo R. Rada, James M. Bryce, Beth A. Visintine, R. Gary Hicks, DingXen Cheng

Barker Library - TE7.N275 no.858




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Better buses, better cities: how to plan, run, and win the fight for effective transit / Steven Higashide

Online Resource




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Relationship between erodibility and properties of soils / J.-L. Briaud, I. Shafii, H.-C. Chen, Z. Medina-Cetina

Barker Library - TE7.N275 no.915




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Railroads and the transformation of China / Elisabeth Köll

Dewey Library - HE3288.K65 2019




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Responsible research for better business: creating useful and credible knowledge for business and society / László Zsolnai, Mike J. Thompson, editors

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The greater good: media, family removal, and TVA dam construction in North Alabama / Laura Beth Daws and Susan L. Brinson

Hayden Library - TC557.A2 D39 2019




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Morituris felicem vitae finem, Mortuis beatem sine fine vitam Silete, Confoederati Amici; quid emortuum Corniculum vestris auribus triste insonet, avidi auscultate, habet secreta ... Translatus est de vita ad mortem ... P. Tobias Herele ...

Autor: Herele, Tobias
Erschienen 1684
BSB-Signatur Res/2 Bavar. 980,2#Beibd.205

URN: urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11121330-5
URL: http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb11121330_00001.html/




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Istanbul : a tale of three cities / Bettany Hughes

Hughes, Bettany, author




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Bearing witness : essays in honour of Brij V. Lal / edited by Doug Munro and Jack Corbett




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Crusade and Jihad : the thousand-year war between the Muslim world and the global north / William R. Polk

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Oral histories of Wanneroo wetlands : recollections of Wanneroo pioneers : changes that occurred between European settlement and the 1950's / Shona Kennealy

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Between fruits, nuts and an organised schedule, no detox needed

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Coronavirus: Cases in India will peak by July end, but will get better, says WHO envoy

David Nabarro said India has managed to keep the virus ‘reasonably well located in specific places’ by imposing timely restrictions.




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Why Is the UK so Much Better at Molecular Profiling?

Drs Jack West and Sanjay Popat discuss the strengths and limitations of their respective US and UK systems for identifying and treating lung cancer with actionable mutations.
Medscape Oncology




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A Comparison of Cancer Stage at Diagnosis and Treatment Initiation Between Enrollees in an Urban HIV Clinic and SEER

A comparison of stage at cancer diagnosis and cancer treatment rates between people with HIV (PWH) and the general US population is needed to identify any disparities by HIV status.




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Shaping natural history and settler society: Mary Elizabeth Barber and the nineteenth-century Cape / Tanja Hammel

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The Relation Between Large-Scale Land Acquisitions and Rural Households: Evidence from Ethiopia and Tanzania / Giulia Barbanente

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Normal and shear forces between boundary sphingomyelin layers under aqueous conditions

Soft Matter, 2020, 16,3973-3980
DOI: 10.1039/D0SM00215A, Paper
Yifeng Cao, Nir Kampf, Weifeng Lin, Jacob Klein
Sphingomyelin boundary layers can maintain extremely low friction under high pressures both in water and at high salt concentration.
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Simultaneous determination of interfacial molarities of an alcohol, bromide ion, and water during an alcohol induced microstructural transition: The difference between medium and long chain alcohols.

Soft Matter, 2020, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/D0SM00665C, Paper
Kaixin Yao, Lijie Sun, Xiaoxuan Ding, Yuzhao Wang, Tianze Liu, Changyao Liu, Jiajing Tan, Li Zhao, Baocai Xu, Laurence S. Romsted
The transitions between surfactant aggregate structures are triggered by changes in chemical or physical stimulations, including addition of additives. Effects of added alcohols on aggregate morphologies correlate strongly with alcohol...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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Evaluation of the subtle trade-off between physical stability and thermo-responsiveness in crosslinked methylcellulose hydrogels

Soft Matter, 2020, Accepted Manuscript
DOI: 10.1039/D0SM00269K, Paper
Lorenzo Bonetti, Luigi De Nardo, Fabio Variola, Silvia Fare
Methylcellulose (MC) hydrogels, undergoing sol-gel reversible transition upon temperature changes, lend themselves to smart system applications. However, their reduced stability in aqueous environment and unsatisfactory mechanical properties limit the breadth...
The content of this RSS Feed (c) The Royal Society of Chemistry




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[ASAP] Near-Field Radiative Heat Transfer between Dissimilar Materials Mediated by Coupled Surface Phonon- and Plasmon-Polaritons

ACS Photonics
DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00404




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Making a Better Custom Select Element

Julie Grundy kicks off this, our fifteenth year, by diving headlong into the snowy issue of customising form inputs. Nothing makes a more special gift at Christmas that something you’ve designed and customised yourself. But can it be done while staying accessible to every user?


In my work as an accessibility consultant, there are some frequent problems I find on people’s websites. One that’s come up a lot recently is that people are making custom select inputs for their forms. I can tell that people are trying to make them accessible, because they’ve added ARIA attributes or visually-hidden instructions for screen reader users. Sometimes they use a plugin which claims to be accessible. And this is great, I love that folks want to do the right thing! But so far I’ve never come across a custom select input which actually meets all of the WCAG AA criteria.

Often I recommend to people that they use the native HTML select element instead. Yes, they’re super ugly, but as Scott Jehl shows us in his article Styling a Select Like It’s 2019 they are a lot easier to style than they used to be. They come with a lot of accessibility for free – they’re recognised and announced clearly by all screen reader software, they work reliably and predictably with keyboards and touch, and they look good in high contrast themes.

But sometimes, I can’t recommend the select input as a replacement. We want a way for someone to choose an item from a list of options, but it’s more complicated than just that. We want autocomplete options. We want to put images in there, not just text. The optgroup element is ugly, hard to style, and not announced by screen readers. The focus styles are low contrast. I had high hopes for the datalist element, but although it works well with screen readers, it’s no good for people with low vision who zoom or use high contrast themes.

Figure 1: a datalist zoomed in by 300%

Select inputs are limited in a lot of ways. They’re frustrating to work with when you have something which looks almost like what you want, but is too restricted to be useful. We know we can do better, so we make our own.

Let’s work out how to do that while keeping all the accessibility features of the original.

Semantic HTML

We’ll start with a solid, semantic HTML base. A select input is essentially a text input which restricts the possible answers, so let’s make a standard input.

<label for="custom-select">User Type</label>
<input type="text" id="custom-select">

Then we need to show everyone who can see that there are options available, so let’s add an image with an arrow, like the native element.

<label for="custom-select">User Type</label>
<input type="text" id="custom-select">
<img src="arrow-down.svg" alt="">

For this input, we’re going to use ARIA attributes to represent the information in the icon, so we’ll give it an empty alt attribute so screen readers don’t announce its filename.

Finally, we want a list of options. An unordered list element is a sensible choice here. It also lets screen reader software understand that these bits of text are related to each other as part of a group.

<ul class="custom-select-options">
  <li>User</li>
  <li>Author</li>
  <li>Editor</li>
  <li>Manager</li>
  <li>Administrator</li>
</ul>

You can dynamically add or remove options from this list whenever you need to. And, unlike our <option> element inside a <select>, we can add whatever we like inside the list item. So if you need images to distinguish between lots of very similar-named objects, or to add supplementary details, you can go right ahead. I’m going to add some extra text to mine, to help explain the differences between the choices.

This is a good base to begin with. But it looks nothing like a select input! We want to make sure our sighted users get something they’re familiar with and know how to use already.

Styling with CSS

I’ll add some basic styles similar to what’s in Scott Jehl’s article above.

We also need to make sure that people who customise their colours in high contrast modes can still tell what they’re looking at. After checking it in the default Windows high contrast theme, I’ve decided to add a left-hand border to the focus and hover styles, to make sure it’s clear which item is about to be chosen.

This would be a good time to add any dark-mode styles if that’s your jam. People who get migraines from bright screens will thank you!

JavaScript for behaviour

Of course, our custom select doesn’t actually do anything yet. We have a few tasks for it: to toggle the options list open and closed when we click the input, to filter the options when people type in the input, and for selecting an option to add it to the input and close the list. I’m going to tackle toggling first because it’s the easiest.

Toggling

Sometimes folks use opacity or height to hide content on screen, but that’s like using Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. No-one can see what’s under there, but Harry doesn’t cease to exist and you can still poke him with a wand. In our case, screen reader and keyboard users can still reach an invisible list.

Instead of making the content see-through or smaller, I’m going to use display: none to hide the list. display: none removes the content from the accessibility tree, so it can’t be accessed by any user, not just people who can see. I always have a pair of utility classes for hiding things, as follows:

.hidden-all {
  display: none;
}

.hidden-visually {
    position: absolute;
    width: 1px;
    height: 1px;
    padding: 0;
    overflow: hidden;
    clip: rect(0,0,0,0);
    white-space: nowrap;
    -webkit-clip-path: inset(50%);
    clip-path: inset(50%);
    border: 0;
} 

So now I can just toggle the CSS class .hidden-all on my list whenever I like.

Browsing the options

Opening up our list works well for our mouse and touch-screen users. Our styles give a nice big tap target for touch, and mouse users can click wherever they like.

We need to make sure our keyboard users are taken care of though. Some of our sighted users will be relying on the keyboard if they have mobility or dexterity issues. Usually our screen reader users are in Browse mode, which lets them click the arrow keys to navigate through content. However, custom selects are usually inside form elements. which pushes screen reader software to Forms Mode. In Forms mode, the screen reader software can only reach focusable items when the user clicks the Tab key, unless we provide an alternative. Our list items are not focusable by default, so let’s work on that alternative.

To do this, I’m adding a tabindex of -1 to each list item. This way I can send focus to them with JavaScript, but they won’t be part of the normal keyboard focus path of the page.

csOptions.forEach(function(option) {
    option.setAttribute('tabindex, '-1')
}) 

Now I can move the focus using the Up and Down arrow keys, as well as with a mouse or tapping the screen. The activeElement property of the document is a way of finding where the keyboard focus is at the moment. I can use that to loop through the elements in the list and move the focus point forward or back, depending on which key is pressed.

function doKeyAction(whichKey) {
  const focusPoint = document.activeElement
  switch(whichKey) {
    case: 'ArrowDown':
      toggleList('Open')
      moveFocus(focusPoint, 'forward')
      break
    case: 'ArrowUp':
      toggleList('Open')
      moveFocus(focusPoint, 'back')
      break
  }
}

Selecting

The Enter key is traditional for activating an element, and we want to match the original select input.

We add another case to the keypress detector…

case 'Enter':
  makeChoice(focusPoint)
  toggleList('Shut')
  setState('closed')
  break 

… then make a function which grabs the currently focused item and puts it in our text input. Then we can close the list and move focus up to the input as well.

function makeChoice(whichOption) {
    const optionText = whichOption.documentQuerySelector('strong')
    csInput.value = optionText
}

Filtering

Standard select inputs have keyboard shortcuts – typing a letter will send focus to the first item in the option which begins with that letter. If you type the letter again, focus will move to the next option beginning with that letter.

This is useful, but there’s no clue to tell users how many options might be in this category, so they have to experiment to find out. We can make an improvement for our users by filtering to just the set of options which matches that letter or sequence of letters. Then sighted users can see exactly how many options they’ve got, and continue filtering by typing more if they like. (Our screen reader users can’t see the remaining options while they’re typing, but don’t worry – we’ll have a solution for them in the next section).

I’m going to use the .filter method to make a new array which only has the items which match the text value of the input. There are different ways you could do this part – my goal was to avoid having to use regex, but you should choose whatever method works best for your content.

function doFilter() {
  const terms = csInput.value
  const aFilteredOptions = aOptions.filter(option => {
    if (option.innerText.toUpperCase().startsWith(terms.toUpperCase())) {
    return true
    }
  })
  // hide all options
  csOptions.forEach(option => option.style.display = "none")
  // re-show the options which match our terms
  aFilteredOptions.forEach(function(option) {
    option.style.display = ""
  })
} 

Nice! This is now looking and behaving really well. We’ve got one more problem though – for a screen reader user, this is a jumble of information. What’s being reported to the browser’s accessibility API is that there’s an input followed by some clickable text. Are they related? Who knows! What happens if we start typing, or click one of the clicky text things? It’s a mystery when you can’t see what’s happening. But we can fix that.

ARIA

ARIA attributes don’t provide much in the way of additional features. Adding an aria-expanded='true' attribute doesn’t actually make anything expand. What ARIA does is provide information about what’s happening to the accessibility API, which can then pass it on to any assistive technology which asks for it.

The WCAG requirements tell us that when we’re making custom elements, we need to make sure that as a whole, the widget tells us its name, its role, and its current value. Both Chrome and Firefox reveal the accessibility tree in their dev tools, so you can check how any of your widgets will be reported.

We already have a name for our input – it comes from the label we associated to the text input right at the start. We don’t need to name every other part of the field, as that makes it seem like more than one input is present. We also don’t need to add a value, because when we select an item from the list, it’s added to the text input and therefore is exposed to the API.

Figure 2: How Firefox reports our custom select to assistive technology.

But our screen readers are going to announce this custom select widget as a text entry field, with some images and a list nearby.

The ARIA Authoring Practices site has a pattern for comboboxes with listboxes attached. It tells you all the ARIA you need to make screen reader software give a useful description of our custom widget.

I’m going to add all this ARIA via JavaScript, instead of putting it in the HTML. If my JavaScript doesn’t work for any reason, the input can still be a plain text field, and we don’t want screen readers to announce it as anything fancier than that.

csSelector.setAttribute('role', 'combobox') 
csSelector.setAttribute('aria-haspopup', 'listbox')
csSelector.setAttribute('aria-owns', '#list') 
csInput.setAttribute('aria-autocomplete', 'both')
csInput.setAttribute('aria-controls', 'list')

The next thing to do is let blind users know if the list is opened or closed. For that task I’m going to add an aria-expanded attribute to the group, and update it from false to true whenever the list changes state in our toggling function.

The final touch is to add a secret status message to the widget. We can use it to update the number of options available after we’ve filtered them by typing into the input. When there are a lot of options to choose from, this helps people who can’t see the list reducing know if they’re on the right track or not.

To do that we first have to give the status message a home in our HTML.

<div id='custom-select-status' class='hidden-visually' aria-live='polite'></div>

I’m using our visually-hidden style so that only screen readers will find it. I’m using aria-live so that it will be announced as often as it updates, not just when a screen reader user navigates past it. Live regions need to be present at page load, but we won’t have anything to say about the custom select then so we can leave it empty for now.

Next we add one line to our filtering function, to find the length of our current list.

updateStatus(aFilteredOptions.length)

Then we send that to a function which will update our live region.

function updateStatus(howMany) {
    console.log('updating status')
    csStatus.textContent = howMany + " options available."
}

Conclusion

Let’s review what we’ve done to make an awesome custom select input:

  • Used semantic HTML so that it’s easily interpreted by assistive technology while expanding the types of content we can include in it
  • Added CSS styles which are robust enough to survive different visual environments while also fitting into our branding needs
  • Used JavaScript to provide the basic functionality that the native element has
  • Added more JavaScript to get useful functionality that the native element lacks
  • Carefully added ARIA attributes to make sure that the purpose and results of using the element are available to assistive technology and are updated as the user interacts with it.

You can check out my custom select pattern on GitHub – I’ll be making additions as I test it on more assistive technology, and I welcome suggestions for improvements.

The ARIA pattern linked above has a variety of examples and customisations. I hope stepping through this example shows you why each of the requirements exists, and how you can make them fit your own needs.

I think the volume of custom select inputs out there shows the ways in which the native select input is insufficient for modern websites. You’ll be pleased to know that Greg Whitworth and Simon Pieters are working on improving several input types! You can let them know what features you’d like selects to have. But until that work pays off, let’s make our custom selects as accessible and robust as they can possibly be.


About the author

Julie Grundy is an accessibility expert who works for Intopia, a digital accessibility consultancy. She has over 15 years experience as a front-end web developer in the health and education sectors. She believes in the democratic web and aims to unlock digital worlds for as many people as possible. In her spare time, she knits very slowly and chases very quickly after her two whippets.

More articles by Julie




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Usability and Security; Better Together

Divya Sasidharan calls into question the trade-offs often made between security and usability. Does a secure interface by necessity need to be hard to use? Or is it the choice we make based on years of habit? Snow has fallen, snow on snow.


Security is often synonymous with poor usability. We assume that in order for something to be secure, it needs to by default appear impenetrable to disincentivize potential bad actors. While this premise is true in many instances like in the security of a bank, it relies on a fundamental assumption: that there is no room for choice.

With the option to choose, a user almost inevitably picks a more usable system or adapts how they interact with it regardless of how insecure it may be. In the context of the web, passwords are a prime example of such behavior. Though passwords were implemented as a way to drastically reduce the risk of attack, they proved to be marginally effective. In the name of convenience, complex, more secure passwords were shirked in favor of easy to remember ones, and passwords were liberally reused across accounts. This example clearly illustrates that usability and security are not mutually exclusive. Rather, security depends on usability, and it is imperative to get user buy-in in order to properly secure our applications.

Security and Usability; a tale of broken trust

At its core, security is about fostering trust. In addition to protecting user accounts from malicious attacks, security protocols provide users with the peace of mind that their accounts and personal information is safe. Ironically, that peace of mind is incumbent on users using the security protocols in the first place, which further relies on them accepting that security is needed. With the increased frequency of cyber security threats and data breaches over the last couple of years, users have grown to be less trusting of security experts and their measures. Security experts have equally become less trusting of users, and see them as the “the weakest link in the chain”. This has led to more cumbersome security practices such as mandatory 2FA and constant re-login flows which bottlenecks users from accomplishing essential tasks. Because of this break down in trust, there is a natural inclination to shortcut security altogether.

Build a culture of trust not fear

Building trust among users requires empowering them to believe that their individual actions have a larger impact on the security of the overall organization. If a user understands that their behavior can put critical resources of an organization at risk, they will more likely behave with security in mind. For this to work, nuance is key. Deeming that every resource needs a similarly high number of checks and balances diminishes how users perceive security and adds unnecessary bottlenecks to user workflows.

In order to lay the foundation for good security, it’s worth noting that risk analysis is the bedrock of security design. Instead of blindly implementing standard security measures recommended by the experts, a better approach is to tailor security protocols to meet specific use cases and adapt as much as possible to user workflows. Here are some examples of how to do just that:

Risk based authentication

Risk based authentication is a powerful way to perform a holistic assessment of the threats facing an organization. Risks occur at the intersection of vulnerability and threat. A high risk account is vulnerable and faces the very real threat of a potential breach. Generally, risk based authentication is about calculating a risk score associated with accounts and determining the proper approach to securing it. It takes into account a combination of the likelihood that that risk will materialize and the impact on the organization should the risk come to pass. With this system, an organization can easily adapt access to resources depending on how critical they are to the business; for instance, internal documentation may not warrant 2FA, while accessing business and financial records may.

Dynamically adaptive auth

Similar to risk based auth, dynamically adaptive auth adjusts to the current situation. Security can be strengthened and slackened as warranted, depending on how risky the access point is. A user accessing an account from a trusted device in a known location may be deemed low risk and therefore not in need of extra security layers. Likewise, a user exhibiting predictive patterns of use should be granted quick and easy access to resources. The ability to adapt authentication based on the most recent security profile of a user significantly improves the experience by reducing unnecessary friction.

Conclusion

Historically, security failed to take the user experience into account, putting the onus of securing accounts solely on users. Considering the fate of password security, we can neither rely on users nor stringent security mechanisms to keep our accounts safe. Instead, we should aim for security measures that give users the freedom to bypass them as needed while still protecting our accounts from attack. The fate of secure systems lies in the understanding that security is a process that must constantly adapt to face the shifting landscape of user behavior and potential threats.


About the author

Divya is a web developer who is passionate about open source and the web. She is currently a developer experience engineer at Netlify, and believes that there is a better workflow for building and deploying sites that doesn’t require a server—ask her about the JAMstack. You will most likely find her in the sunniest spot in the room with a cup of tea in hand.

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