Hayden Library - QH541.5.C7 G74 2019

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Alan Dalton uses this, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, to look back at where we’ve come from, to evaluate where we are, and to look forward to what’s coming next in the future of accessibility guidelines.

Happy United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities! The United Nations have chosen “Promoting the participation of persons with disabilities and their leadership: taking action on the 2030 Development Agenda” for this year’s observance. Let’s see how the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines of accessibility past, present, and yet-to-come can help us to follow that goal, and make sure that the websites—and everything else!—that we create can include as many potential users as possible.

Guidelines of Accessibility Past

The W3C published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 on 5th May 1999, when most of us were playing Snake on our Nokia 3210s’ 1.5” monochrome screens…a very long time ago in technology terms. From the start, those guidelines proved enlightening for designers and developers who wanted to avoid excluding users from their websites. For example, we learned how to provide alternatives to audio and images, how to structure information, and how to help users to find the information they needed. However, those guidelines were specific to the web technologies of the time, resulting in limitations such as requiring developers to “use W3C technologies when they are available […]”. Also, those guidelines became outdated; I doubt that you, gentle reader, consult their technical documentation about “directly accessible applets” or “Writing for browsers that do not support FRAME” in your day-to-day work.

Guidelines of Accessibility Present

The W3C published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 on 11th December 2008, when most of us were admiring the iPhone 3G’s innovative “iPhone OS 2.0” software…a long time ago in technology terms. Unlike WCAG 1, these guidelines also applied to non-W3C technologies, such as PDF and Flash. These guidelines used legalese and future-proofed language, with terms such as “time-based media” and “programmatically determined”, and testable success criteria. This made these guidelines more difficult for designers and developers to grasp, but also enabled the guidelines to make their way into international standards (see EN 301 549 — Accessibility requirements suitable for public procurement of ICT products and services in Europe and ISO/IEC 40500:2012 Information technology — W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0) and even international law (see EU Directive 2016/2102 … on the accessibility of the websites and mobile applications of public sector bodies).

More importantly, these guidelines enabled designers and developers to create inclusive websites, at scale. For example, in the past 18 months:

• Intercom made their web Messenger accessible, achieving Level-AA conformance;
• Vimeo made accessibility updates to their video player to achieve Level-AA conformance;
• Stripe designed a new accessible colour system to conform with success criterion 1.4.3 (“Contrast (Minimum)”).

The updated Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 arrived on 5th June last year—almost a 10-year wait for a “.1” update!—and added 17 new success criteria to help bring the guidelines up to date. Those new criteria focused on people using mobile devices and touchscreens, people with low vision, and people with cognitive and learning disabilities.

(If you need to get up to speed with these guidelines, take 36 minutes to read “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—for People Who Haven’t Read Them” and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1—for People Who Haven’t Read the Update.)

Guidelines of Accessibility Yet to Come

So, what’s next? Well, the W3C hope to release another minor update (WCAG 2.2) in November 2020. However, they also have a Task Force working on produce major new guidelines with wider scope (more people, more technologies) and fewer limitations (easier to understand, easier to use) in November 2022. These next guidelines will have a different name, because they will cover more than “Web” and “Content”. Andrew Kirkpatrick (Adobe’s Head of Accessibility) named the Task Force “Silver” (because the initials of “Accessibility Guidelines” form the symbol of the silver element).

The Silver Task Force want the next major accessibility guidelines to:

• take account of more disabilities;
• apply to more technologies than just the web, including virtual reality, augmented reality, voice assistants, and more;
• consider all the technologies that people use, including authoring tools, browsers, media players, assistive technologies (including screen readers and screen magnifiers), application software, and operating systems.

That’s quite a challenge, and so the more people who can help, the better. The Silver Task Force wanted an alternative to W3C’s Working Groups, which are made up of employees of organisations who are members of the W3C, and invited experts. So, they created a Silver Community Group to allow everyone to contribute towards this crucial work. If you want to join right now, for free, just create a W3C account.

Like all good designers, the Silver Task Force and Silver Community Group began by researching. They examined the problems that people have had when using, conforming to, and maintaining the existing accessibility guidelines, and then summarised that research. From there, the Silver Community Group drafted ambitious design principles and requirements. You can read about what the Silver Community Group are currently working on, and decide whether you would like to get involved now, or at a later stage.

Emphasise expertise over empathy

Remember that today’s theme is “Promoting the participation of persons with disabilities and their leadership: taking action on the 2030 Development Agenda”. (The United Nations’ 2030 Development Agenda is outside the scope of this article, but if you’re looking to be inspired, read Alessia Aquaro’s article on Public Digital’s blog about how digital government can contribute to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.) In line with this theme, if you don’t have a disability and you want to contribute to the Silver Community Group, resist the temptation to try to empathise with people with disabilities. Instead, take 21 minutes during this festive season to enjoy the brilliant Liz Jackson explaining how empathy reifies disability stigmas, and follow her advice.

Choose the right route

I think we can expect the next Accessibility Guidelines to make their way into international standards and international law, just like their predecessors. We can also expect successful companies to apply them at scale. If you contribute to developing those guidelines, you can help to make sure that as many people as possible will be able to access digital information and services, in an era when that access will be crucial to every aspect of people’s lives. As Cennydd Bowles explained in “Building Better Worlds”, “There is no such thing as the future. There are instead a near-infinity of potential futures. The road as-yet-untravelled stretches before us in abundant directions. We get to choose the route. There is no fate but what we make.”

About the author

Alan Dalton worked for Ireland’s National Disability Authority for 9½ years, mostly as Accessibility Development Advisor. That involved working closely with public sector bodies to make websites, services, and information more accessible to all users, including users with disabilities. Before that, he was a consultant and trainer for Software Paths Ltd. in Dublin. In his spare time, he maintains StrongPasswordGenerator.com to help people stay safe online, tweets, and takes photos.

More articles by Alan

Michelle Barker appears as one of a heavenly host, coming forth with scroll in hand to pronounce an end to janky scrolljacking! Unto us a new specification is born, in the city of TimBL, and its name shall be called Scroll Snap.

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One area where the web has traditionally lagged behind native platforms is the perceived “slickness” of the app experience. In part, this perception comes from the way the UI responds to user interactions – including the act of scrolling through content.

Faced with the limitations of the web platform, developers frequently reach for JavaScript libraries and frameworks to alter the experience of scrolling a web page – sometimes called “scroll-jacking” – not always a good thing if implemented without due consideration of the user experience. More libraries can also lead to page bloat, and drag down a site’s performance. But with the relatively new CSS Scroll Snap specification, we have the ability to control the scrolling behaviour of a web page (to a degree) using web standards – without resorting to heavy libraries. Let’s take a look at how.

Scroll Snap

A user can control the scroll position of a web page in a number of ways, such as using a mouse, touch gesture or arrow keys. In contrast to a linear scrolling experience, where the rate of scroll reflects the rate of the controller, the Scroll Snap specification enables a web page to snap to specific points as the user scrolls. For this, we need a fixed-height element to act as the scroll container, and the direct children of that element will determine the snap points. To demonstrate this, here is some example HTML, which consists of a <div> containing four <section> elements:

<div class="scroll-container">
  <section>
    <h2>Section 1</h2>
  </section>
  <section>
    <h2>Section 2</h2>
  </section>
  <section>
    <h2>Section 3</h2>
  </section>
  <section>
    <h2>Section 4</h2>
  </section>
</div>

Scroll snapping requires the presence of two main CSS properties: scroll-snap-type and scroll-snap-align. scroll-snap-type applies to the scroll container element, and takes two keyword values. It tells the browser:

• The direction to snap
• Whether snapping is mandatory

scroll-snap-align is applied to the child elements – in this case our <section>s.

We also need to set a fixed height on the scroll container, and set the relevant overflow property to scroll.

.scroll-container {
  height: 100vh;
  overflow-y: scroll;
  scroll-snap-type: y mandatory;
}

section {
  height: 100vh;
  scroll-snap-align: center;
}

In the above example, I’m setting the direction in the scroll-snap-type property to y to specify vertical snapping. The second value specifies that snapping is mandatory. This means that when the user stops scrolling their scroll position will always snap to the nearest snap point. The alternative value is proximity, which determines that the user’s scroll position will be snapped only if they stop scrolling in the proximity of a snap point. (It’s down to the browser to determine what it considers to be the proximity threshold.)

If you have content of indeterminate length, which might feasibly be larger than the height of the scroll container (in this case 100vh), then using a value of mandatory can cause some content to be hidden above or below the visible area, so is not recommended. But if you know that your content will always fit within the viewport, then mandatory can produce a more consistent user experience.

In this example I’m setting both the scroll container and each of the sections to a height of 100vh, which affects the scroll experience of the entire web page. But scroll snapping can also be implemented on smaller components too. Setting scroll snapping on the x-axis (or inline axis) can produce something like a carousel effect.

In this demo, you can scroll horizontally scroll through the sections:

The Intersection Observer API

By implementing the CSS above, our web page already has a more native-like feel to it. To improve upon this further we could add some scroll-based transitions and animations. We’ll need to employ a bit of Javascript for this, using the Intersection Observer API. This allows us to create an observer that watches for elements intersecting with the viewport, triggering a callback function when this occurs. It is more efficient than libraries that rely on continuously listening for scroll events.

We can create an observer that watches for each of our scroll sections coming in and out of view:

const sections = [...document.querySelectorAll('section')]

const options = {
  rootMargin: '0px',
  threshold: 0.25
}

const callback = (entries) => {
  entries.forEach((entry) => {
    if (entry.intersectionRatio >= 0.25) {
      target.classList.add("is-visible");
    } else {
      target.classList.remove("is-visible");
    }
  })
}

const observer = new IntersectionObserver(callback, options)

sections.forEach((section, index) => {
  observer.observe(section)
})

In this example, a callback function is triggered whenever one of our sections intersects the container by 25% (using the threshold option). The callback adds a class of is-visible to the section if it is at least 25% in view when the intersection occurs (which will take effect when the element is coming into view), and removes it otherwise (when the element is moving out of view). Then we can add some CSS to transition in the content for each of those sections:

section .content {
  opacity: 0:
}

section.is-visible .content {
  opacity: 1;
  transition: opacity 1000ms:
}

This demo shows it in action:

You could, of course, implement some much more fancy transition and animation effects in CSS or JS!

As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that, in practice, we shouldn’t be setting opacity: 0 as the default without considering the experience if JavaScript fails to load. In this case, the user would see no content at all! There are different ways to handle this: We could add a .no-js class to the body (which we remove on load with JS), and set default styles on it, or we could set the initial style (before transition) with JS instead of CSS.

Position: sticky

There’s one more CSS property that I think has the potential to aid the scroll experience, and that’s the position property. Unlike position: fixed, which locks the position of an element relative to the nearest relative ancestor and doesn’t change, position: sticky is more like a temporary lock. An element with a position value of sticky will become fixed only until it reaches the threshold of its parent, at which point it resumes relative positioning.

By “sticking” some elements within scroll sections we can give the impression of them being tied to the action of scrolling between sections. It’s pretty cool that we can instruct an element to respond to it’s position within a container with CSS alone!

Browser support and fallbacks

The scroll-snap-type and scroll-snap-align properties are fairly well-supported. The former requires a prefix for Edge and IE, and older versions of Safari do not support axis values. In newer versions of Safari it works quite well. Intersection Observer similarly has a good level of support, with the exception of IE.

By wrapping our scroll-related code in a feature query we can provide a regular scrolling experience as a fallback for users of older browsers, where accessing the content is most important. Browsers that do not support scroll-snap-type with an axis value would simply scroll as normal.

@supports (scroll-snap-type: y mandatory) {
  .scroll-container {
    height: 100vh;
    overflow-y: scroll;
    scroll-snap-type: y mandatory;
  }

  section {
    height: 100vh;
    scroll-snap-align: center;
  }
}

The above code would exclude MS Edge and IE, as they don’t support axis values. If you wanted to support them you could do so using a vendor prefix, and using @supports (scroll-snap-type: mandatory) instead.

Putting it all together

This demo combines all three of the effects discussed in this article.

Summary

Spending time on scroll-based styling might seem silly or frivolous to some. But I believe it’s an important part of positioning the web as a viable alternative to native applications, keeping it open and accessible. While these new CSS features don’t offer all of the control we might expect with a fully featured JS library, they have a major advantage: simplicity and reliability. By utilising web standards where possible, we can have the best of both worlds: Slick and eye-catching sites that satisfy clients’ expectations, with the added benefit of better performance for users.

About the author

Michelle is a Lead Front End Developer at Bristol web agency Atomic Smash, author of front-end blog CSS { In Real Life }, and a Mozilla Tech Speaker. She has written articles for CSS Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and Web Designer Magazine, to name a few. She enjoys experimenting with new CSS features and helping others learn about them.

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Anna Debenham harnesses up the huskies and puts them to work to figure out how teams distributed across multiple locations can work effectively to all pull in the same direction. With modern workforces distributed from north pole to south, can they all be kept running in step?

Four years ago, I started working at a small startup called Snyk that’s based in two locations – London and Tel Aviv. The founders made it clear they wanted to grow headcount in both locations at the same rate, and for the design and engineering skillsets between the two offices to be evenly spread. We’re now at over 200 people and we’re still staying true to that vision, but only by completely changing how we were used to working.

The trend for fully distributed teams is on the rise – companies like InVision and GitLab have entirely remote employees. Snyk is somewhere in between, with small hubs of global team members in homes and shared offices globally alongside our main London, Tel Aviv, Boston, Ottawa and Bay Area offices.

Our R&D teams are based entirely in London or Tel Aviv, with a few employees working around Europe. Rather than have Team A working in one office and Team B working in another, we’ve deliberately designed it so that no R&D team at Snyk has all its members in one location. We could design our teams to be all co-located so that everyone’s in the same room, but we don’t.

When I explain this setup to people, I’ll often get a response of bewilderment – why do it this way? It sounds like a pain! Increasingly though, the reaction is positive – usually from people who’ve worked in a distributed team before where departments are split neatly between locations. They’ve experienced an “us vs them” culture, with work being thrown over the fence to designers or engineers in different timezones. They’ve been at the mercy of the decision makers who are all in the head office. This is exactly what we wanted to avoid. We wanted the company to feel like one team, across many locations.

It’s not perfect – I do miss the things that working in the same location brings such as collaborating on a whiteboard, or having planning documents stuck on the wall for the team to refer to. Pre-distributed working, I used to sit next to a designer and we’d bounce ideas off each other. Now I have to make the extra effort to schedule something in. Managing people remotely is also tough – I can’t easily see that a team member is having a bad day and make them a cup of tea.

But on the whole, it works pretty well for us. The time difference between London and Tel Aviv is a comfy 2 hours, and in Tel Aviv, the week runs from Sunday to Thursday, meaning there’s just a single day in the week when all our teams aren’t working. This makes the week feel like the ebb and flow of a tide – my Mondays are very busy, but on Fridays, half the team is off so there are barely any meetings – ideal for deep focus time.

So how do we make this distributed-but-also-co-located hybrid thing work?

Level the playing field

Firstly, that “us vs them” mentality I mentioned is the key thing to avoid to maintain a positive distributed work culture. Avoid the term “remote team”, as that has a sense of otherness. Instead, refer to your team as “distributed”. It’s such a small change that has the effect of bringing everyone onto the same level.

Also, consider your video conferencing etiquette – if you’ve got a large part of your team in one location, with just one or two members who are dialling in, you could end up with a very one-sided conversation. The room with the most people in it has a habit of forgetting the person they can’t easily see. Even if you’re in the same room, dial in individually so that everyones faces are the same size, and you’re addressing all the participants rather than just those in the same room as you.

Invest in tools that help communication

Early on, we invested in tools that would help make communication between locations as seamless as possible. I’m not talking about those screens with wheels that follow co-workers around a room to recreate a manager breathing down their neck (although now I think of it…). I’m talking about the familiar ones like Slack, Zoom and Notion.

Use a single tool where possible to reduce friction between teams so there’s no confusion as to whether you’re having a call over Google Hangouts, Zoom, Skype or whatever else is fashionable to use this year. Same with meeting notes – keep them in one place rather than scattered across Dropbox, Email and Google Docs.

Remote pair programming has also got a lot easier. We used ScreenHero before it got acquired and lost its remote control functionality – but there are some great alternatives out there like USE Together. You might also have collaboration tools built into your code editor, like Visual Studio’s Live Share, and Atom’s Teletype.

If teams are complaining about bad audio, don’t skimp – invest in better microphones, speakers and sound-proofing. You won’t get the benefits of working as a distributed team if there’s a barrier between communication. Ensure the internet is stable in all locations. Also, it sounds basic but make sure teams have somewhere to take a call in the first place, particularly 1:1s which shouldn’t be done in the open. Previous places I’ve contracted at had people dialling into meetings in stairwells, shower rooms and even toilet cubicles. Take care not to make the experience of working in a distributed team end up harming the experience of working in an office.

Open a window

For as long as we’ve had offices, we’ve had a fixed camera and TV screen setup between them that acts as a “window” between locations. The camera is on all the time, and we turn the microphone on once a day for standup (or whenever someone wants to say hi). When I turn on the TV in the morning, I can see the Tel Aviv office already working. At midday, our Boston office comes online, followed shortly after by our Ottawa office. It’s incredible what a difference this has made to make us feel more like one office.

Distributed meetings

With the time differences and weekday shift, there’s a condensed timeframe in which we can collaborate. It’s not as bad as it could be (I pity my fellow Londoners who work for companies based in California), but the hours between 9am and 4pm Monday to Thursday for us are at a premium. This means the meetings we have need to be a good use of everyone’s time. When we can’t find a time that works for everyone, we record the meeting. But even if everyone can make it, we still take notes.

The notebook brand Field Notes have a slogan “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.”. This is a reminder that it’s not always the notes themselves that are useful, but the act of taking them. Where they’re really powerful is when you share them in real time. In Kevin Hoffman’s book ‘Meeting Design’, he recommends the notetaker shares their screen while taking notes so that everyone can participate in making sure those notes are accurate. Having the notes on the screen also helps focus the conversation – particularly if you have an agenda template to start with. It means you’ve got a source of truth for someone who mis-remembers a conversation, and you’ve got something to look back on in the next meeting so you don’t repeat yourselves.

Another tip we’ve taken from Kevin’s book is to have a kanban board for standing meetings, where everyone can add a topic. That way, you always have a backlog of topics to discuss in the meeting. If there aren’t any, you can cancel the meeting!

Don’t get into bad habits when you’re lucky enough to be sharing a single space – keep documenting conversations and decisions in the same way you would with a distributed team, so that future you can remember, and future team members can gather that context.

Team bonding

I always think the best way to bonding with people is over a meal – isn’t that what Christmas dinner is great for? As a distributed team, we can’t do that. We could try and recreate it (even just for the comedy value), but it’s really not the same. We have to try something different.

Enter Eurovision. For those of you outside Europe, imagine a cheesy pop song contest where each country performs their own song and everyone votes for the winner. This year, it was held in Tel Aviv, so dozens of us sat down to watch the live stream. We set up a Eurovision Slack channel and shared our horror in real time.

But Eurovision only happens ones a year, so we’ve extended shared experiences into multiple “hobby” Slack channels: we have one for food fans (#fun-foodies), football fans (#fun-footies), and even sourdough fans (#fun-sourdough). There’s also a weekly “drink and sync” where office-less team members join a video call and chat over a beer, coffee, or juice depending on the time of day for those that dial in. One team runs a movie club where they choose a video that’s relevant to their team’s work (such as a conference talk) and watch it together at the same time.

Onboarding new team members can feel quite impersonal if their manager isn’t in the same office. Starting your first day in an office full of strangers, where the only interaction with your manager is over a video call can feel daunting. And as a manager, I get anxious about my new hire’s first day – was there someone there to greet them and show them where they sit? Was everything set up for them? Did they have someone to eat lunch with? So we’ve been rolling out an “onboarding buddy” scheme. This is someone local who can help the new hire settle in to their new surroundings. It’s someone to chat to, share a coffee with, and generally look out for them.

We also use a Slack app called Donut which pairs employees up for informal chats to get to know each other. You get paired with someone random in the company and it helps you schedule a call with them. This is to encourage cross-pollination across teams and locations.

What distributed teamwork has taught us

There’s a lot that we’ve learnt about working well as a distributed team. We try and recreate the good things about sharing a physical space, and make them feel just as natural in the digital space, while also compensating for the lack of intimacy from being thousands of miles apart.

Mel Choyce’s 24 ways article Surviving—and Thriving—as a Remote Worker stresses the value of remote working, and the long term benefits it has had.

Working remotely has made me a better communicator largely because I’ve gotten into the habit of making written updates.

I think in a lot of ways, the distance has brought us closer. We make more of an effort to check in on how each other is doing. We document as much as we can, which really helps new hires get up to speed quickly.

By identifying what we find valuable about working in the same room, and translating that to work across locations, we find collaboration easier because we’re no longer strangers to each other. We might not be able to have those water-cooler moments in the physical realm, but we’ve done a good job of replicating that online.

About the author

Anna Debenham lives in London and is a Product Manager at Snyk.

She’s the author of Front-end Style Guides, and when she’s not playing on them, she’s testing as many game console browsers as she can get her hands on.

More articles by Anna

Cambridge, Mass. : National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020

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