Step Outside Your Comfort Zone in a Trusted Environment

An Improvised Story

If you’ll indulge me for a minute, I’d like to start with a personal story. I swear this is going somewhere :).

I’m visually impaired, and one thing I sometimes worry about is body language. This is because I usually don’t see people’s gestures, facial expressions and other signals sent by the way they stand or move sends. I’ve also been playing improv theater for a few years, and while I really enjoy it, I often feel hesitant to use body language, or mime certain actions. I also often feel unsure of how to interpret the body language of fellow improvisers, waiting for verbal cues to act upon.

Dear IOS developers, Please Ignore 3-Finger Taps

One of IOS’s many great accessibility features is zoom.

You can activate and deactivate it by double tapping with 3 fingers. Apps that seem to be built with Apple’s UIKit handle this well, but I often accidentally activate buttons or perform other unwanted actions in apps that use some other UI library. This is also the case in games, where I like to zoom in to read small text, or see game elements in more detail.

Is The Web Forcing Us to Split Applications the Wrong Way?

In November of last year, I attended a meetup in Utrecht for the global day of coderetreat. During the lunch break, there was a talk by Joost Baas from bol.com, a large Dutch eCommerce company.

In the talk, Joost discussed a change they were making to how order statuses work. They integrated with the delivery firms to provide the shipping status within the bol.com interface. They added some new possible states an order could be in. This change rippled through different teams; from the backend where the new state was introduced (possibly even multiple microservices within the backend), to the web and mobile frontend which had to handle the new state to display it in a user-friendly way. Each of these had to add a new check for these values.

Lay Out Your Code Like You'd Lay Out Your House

Imagine you wake up and get up to brush your teeth. You go to the “brooms and brushes” room to get your toothbrush. Then, you go to the “cleaning products” room to get toothpaste. You continue to the “containers” room to get a cup, and finally, you head into the “inputs and outputs” room, where you have a tap that lets water enter your house, and a sink with a drain through which fluids can leave your house. You now have everything to go brush your teeth.

Talk About Mental Health

The 10th of October is World Mental Health Day. Mental health is still a huge taboo, even in the programming community, where we believe we’re so open-minded. Let’s change that.

Programming by Wishful Thinking

You’ve probably heard the advice to break your work up into manageable chunks, or to break a complex problem down into simpler parts. This is a handy technique to use while programming as well

You write a function to solve a particular problem, and you write it as if any complex functionality you wish for, has already been written. Afterwards,, you go fill in these functions, and apply the same technique.

Why I Chose Hugo as the Generator for My Site

I’m in the process of overhauling my personal website. In the process, I switched static site generators. I moved from Jekyll to Hugo. Here’s why I chose it.

I’ve been learning and using Go for the past couple of months. Go is a great language, and Hugo is written in it. One of go’s strengths is cross-platform development. It’s extremely easy to compile binaries for almost any platform out there. What that means, is that there’s nothing to set up when using go programs like Hugo, just download the executable for your platform.

How to Make Your Website Accessible to People Who Use Screen Magnifiers

There’s a lot of content out there on how to make your website accessible. But I haven’t seen much on the subject of accessibility to users of screen magnifiers. I’m one of them, and I frequently run into annoying issues on the web.

In this article, I’ll give some tips on how you can make your website more accessible to users of screen magnifying software.

Disclaimers:

• This article is purely based on years of using the web with a screen magnifier. I have conducted no user research (I’d love to see the results of such studies though).
• I’m only going to discuss my experiences on the desktop, not mobile. While I do occasionally use the screen magnifier built into IOS, a mobile screen is so small that there’s so little content on the screen when magnified to the desired level for me, that I usually prefer to use VoiceOver.
• Whereas making websites more accessible to screen readers is always a win since it doesn’t alter the visual appearance of the site, making it accessible to users of magnifiers might be a balancing act. I’m not a designer, and so I might be arguing for things in this article that would improve the experience for the people using magnifiers, but would be worse for the 99% of your visitors who are fully-sighted. In such cases, please leave a comment, I’d love to know about these.

What’s a screen magnifier

A screen magnifier is a piece of software that magnifies the screen (how unexpected!) It displays a portion of what would be on the screen, enlarged, either on the full screen, or on a region of the screen, leaving the rest unmagnified.