#Analog Clock using HTML CSS and Javascript | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

megacircuit9universe · 5 years ago

Text

What Will the 2020s Be Like?

DEC 13 2019

I focus a lot in this blog on technology, because it’s something I understand, and also because it does very much transform society and civilization. The cotton gin made slavery sustainable, and the Civil War, therefore, inevitable.

Tech made WW1 the deadliest war ever, and many believe that the advances of tech in the 1920s (radio, telephone, automobiles, etc) was so disruptive, it made the Great Depression inevitable.

WW2 wasn’t so much brought on by advances in technology, but more than any other event before it (or arguably since) it catapulted technology forward. From the first rockets and computers, to the first atomic bombs.

I grew up in the 1970s, which was the peak of the analog world... the world of newspapers, and three-network broadcast TV. There was an antenna on every roof... a pay phone and a mail box on every street corner. Cameras used film, recorders used tape, and electric typewriters had ribbons.

Your watch and your clock were analog, as was your record player. Your electric guitar had pick ups that fed an analog signal to an amplifier with a tube inside it. And your car... well all the gauges on your dashboard had needles. Any feedback systems it had, such as the automatic transmission, power steering, or the carburetor, relied on fluid dynamics or vacuum pressure.

Tech-wise, the 1970s wasn’t much different from the 1960s or the 1950s, other than doing all these things more cleverly... as one would expect after several decades of honing techniques.

Politically, however, the 1970s was a lot different from the 1950s, because of all the upheaval and transformation that happened through the 1960s. Civil rights were finally being taken seriously. The Draft had disappeared in favor of an all volunteer military. Social conformity was out the window forever. Secularism was on the rise, abortion was legal, and divorce was becoming more common and more acceptable.

Conservatives have never gotten over these political changes, which is why they have, in every succeeding decade, fought dirtier and more desperately to regain control of society... still dreaming to this day of overturning Roe V Wade, for example, but also longing to bring back racism, the subjugation of women, the persecution of gays, and state sanctioned Christianity to the exclusion of all other religions... and of science.

Not that I want this entry to be a screed about conservatism... so let’s just acknowledge that they’ve always been out there, through the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and teens... struggling like hell to claw us all back to the 1950s any way they can... and move on...

Having grown up in the 1970s, I became of teenager of the 1980s. So I can recall clearly that what made the 1980s different from the previous three decades was the advent of, “electronics.”

I put that word, “electronics,” in quotes to emphasize that this was still a world that did not have computers as we know them now, and nobody thought of their electronic devices as being, “digital”.

Yes, home computers existed in the 1980s... for hobbyists. I even had a very crude home computer, the Timex/Sinclair 2000 in the early 80s, but there wasn’t much you could do with it, and after it flopped, all support for it vanished.

This was the story for a lot of home computers in the 1980s. If they were useful for anything, it was teaching you how to program in BASIC, and learn the fundamentals about how these analytical engines worked, but many people saw them as kind of a fad.

Only super hardcore computer geeks really stuck with them through the 1980s. The rest of us just kind of lived our lives, knowing they were out there, but not really thinking they would ever matter much.

Electronics, on the other hand, was seen as a different kind of tech that really did revolutionize our everyday lives in this decade before the World Wide Web came into its own.

The term, “electronic,” was for any device from the analog days, that now had a circuit board inside it... with transistors on it... maybe a chip? People didn’t talk a lot about chips in the 80s, even if they did exist inside our devices.

A Telephone, for example, was an analog thing in the house, with big curly cords. In the early 70s, they still all had analog dials on them. By the late 70s, they all had all become, “touch tone,” with a keypad that sounded, “electronic,” tones to do the “dialing.” But the first truly electronic phones, were the magical cordless phones... with the stubby antenna on the handset that you could amazingly take all the way out to the front stoop!

This same kind of transformation happened to everything... from digital clocks, to electronic tape decks, cameras, speedometers, and even typewriters with little LCD screens on them, that could save what you were writing to little discs... which they called, “word processors.” :O

There were a million hand held devices... I remember owning an electronic dictionary and thesaurus, about the size of a small tablet today, and twice as thick, with a tiny LCD screen. It allowed you to play a few shitty word based games like hangman. It seemed like a modern marvel.

Video arcade games, of course, had a massive impact on our lives in the 1980s, as well as the first home game consoles, for those who could afford them... usually the upper middle class families that also could afford cable TV.

And after video games, the other huge tech that really transformed our lives was the video recorder. Again, you had to have some money to own one back then, but those giant, klunky camcorders of the day were a massive improvement over the old Super8 film cameras that only recorded video, with no sound.

With a camcorder, you not only could capture both video and sound, but on magnetic tape, rather than film... which meant you could watch it immediately. No need to have it developed... or rent a projector!

I could go on, but the point here is that the 1980s was a time when the analog world of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, was being magically transformed by electronics, and we really felt like electronics were going to allow us to do anything... and yet nobody imagined home computers, networked together, would be a part of that.

The original Ghost Busters movie from 1984 is a wonderful example of this, because it’s set in the real world... which is beset by the supernatural problem of ghosts, spirits, vengeful gods that range from nuisances, to existential threats, but heretofore have never been tangible, touchable, or provable.

But three, clever, modern men of the 1980s have developed an arsenal of electronic devices to deal with these ghosts. They can detect and analyze them, track them, attack them, trap them, and hold them in a containment grid... all with state of the art transistorized tech.

The movie really captured the feeling of the times, like no other... that we can use electronics, here on Earth (rather than in a galaxy far far away) to deal with problems in our everyday lives (rather than hacking into NORAD to teach an AI that nuclear war is pointless) and be heroes in our home town.

Young people did take that message to heart, embracing electronics to do what young people like to do... create stuff. In 21st century parlance we would say they were creating, “content,” but at the time, the big problem was in publishing said content.

Garage bands recorded songs and albums. Others recorded videos, both long, short, and very short form videos. People wrote poems and prose on their word processors... started, “zines,” which were published using photocopiers, in stapled booklets.

All this stuff we attempted to shop to big publishers, who’s gate keepers ignored it, so we tried to sell zines, and indie tapes in local record stores, or showcase local videos at get-togethers in coffee houses. We developed an, “underground,” of indie music, video, writing, comics, etc... which relied on a network of high school and college students disseminating copies of content from hand to hand, throughout the country, and across the pond.

Most of the greatest musicians and other artists of the 1980s... the ones who did get signed to indie studios to produce more professional material... were never acknowledged by the mainstream media... which by the 80s was under the control of 30-something baby-boomers whose only agenda was to celebrate their own youth, and crank out cheep garbage pop for commercial consumption.

So, when the 1990s arrived, and the World Wide Web came into being, with cheep, but reliable home computers that had dial up modems to get anybody with a paycheck online... that underground movement from the 80s took it over immediately.

Most of us had at least some prior experience with BASIC, as mentioned above, and knew the fundamentals about computing... even if we hadn’t used that knowledge much for several years.

Now, those skills were suddenly relevant, and most of us were still young enough (in our twenties now, rather than our teens) to take on the learning curves necessary to do everything from code HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but learn how to work on and upgrade our machines, how to master operating systems and all the big applications... the word and graphics processors, the animation tools, the video tools, the audio tools... how to get freeware... how to make freeware... you name it.

The teens of the 1980s, including those hard core computer hobbyists mentioned above, who helped build the primordial backbone that would become the WWW a decade later, built the internet. We pioneered it, formatted it’s culture... of memes, piracy, boundless creativity, and the free sharing of ideas and technology.

And we did it all in the late 1990s and early 2000s before the mainstream media had any real clue that this silly internet thing could be come kind of a threat to their carefully curated analog kingdom.

Flaming and trolling were things back then... conspiracy theories, fake news, and disinformation were problems back then... but they were manageable. Nothing like what they are now, at the end of the twenty-teens.

The problem there, is that in the twenty-teens, the old conservative farts finally left the safe confines of AOL and began to slowly populate places like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter... as did all the AM radio shock jocks they listened to.

At the same time, “Big Media,” began to take the internet seriously as a threat, with YouTube and Netflix stealing so many of their captive eyeballs and earlobes, and launched a hostile takeover of the internet that continues to play out to this day... with Disney buying up every franchise and attempting to shut down Netflix, and net neutrality itself having been destroyed by the Trump administration two years ago now, allowing ISPs to partner with big media outlets and throttle competitors content, as they all attempt to stamp out independent, original content altogether.

YouTube’s on life support, for independent creators. Tumblr is a zombie husk of what it was just two years ago. Twitter is a hellscape. Facebook is for lifeless mannequins. Vine is dead. Blogger and LiveJournal are forgotten to time. MySpace, Geocities and AngelFire... all ashes now. All destroyed by blind corporate greed and the same army of bigoted killjoys we’ve been trying to beat back since the dawn of civilization.

Still, technology continues to evolve, and the internet of 2019 is not the desktop computer based internet of 1999. Twenty years later, it’s become a wireless internet that’s expanded to include very powerful handheld devices which can do everything every, “electronic,” device of the 1980s did, and much more... all in a thing that fits in your shirt pocket.

This changes the game going into the 2020s, as smart phones settle into their final form factor... and slowly begin to assume their ultimate role as the, “mission brain,” for an individual’s life.

In the 2020s, my phone will not just bluetooth to my watch, and be the thing I bank and shop with, as it is today. It will talk to my car, if I still own a car. It will talk to my house, if I own a house. It will talk to my smart glasses, overlaying my view of the world with augmented reality. It will be even talk to me... and work with me to solve any problem I might have... from finding a dog walker, to complex legal and financial issues.

From a political perspective... it will represent me in polls... the way today’s smart phone and land line phones have never done. And it will register me to vote, remind me when to do it three weeks early, and clear my schedule, and get me a ride if necessary... meaning voter turnout will be far higher than ever before among the younger demographics... from 18 to 55... or GenZ up to GenX... with aging Boomers still sitting on Facebook at their desktops, paying their bills with paper checks unable to understand why even primaries and midterms are largely decided by the time they show up in their walkers to vote straight Republican down the ticket, like what’s worked in their favor for many decades.

The bigger picture here, if you zoom back... is that, with the form factor of smart phones having been worked out in the twenty-teens, the big advances in the 2020s will be in the AI those devices have.

And that coming level of AI, will allow individuals to continuously circumvent any roadblocks the corporate and political behemoths of old try to lay down for us... from bureaucratic red tape and voter suppression, to monopolization of media and markets, to censorship and the moderation of free speech.

I know all of that sounds idyllic and Utopian... and loudly echoes the original view of what the internet was gonna do for humanity, back in the 1990s... but much of what we have today would have seemed overly-futuristic and impossible just twenty years ago.

I’m sure there will still be a dark political backdrop to deal with, as today’s upsurge of racism and fascism around the world struggles to stay relevant.

And the effects of climate change through the 2020s will be another big source of darkness and drama like we are only beginning to see at the end of the teens... which will trigger major transformations in the way we all live.

Homes will get smaller and more efficient. Car ownership will dive to new lows. Families will get smaller, and suburban sprawl will ebb backward, creating, “ghost subdivisions,” haunted by the spirits of Karen and Craig.

They will follow the trend of today’s abandoned shopping malls, which will also only get worse.

Meanwhile, weed will come to be legalized nationally... as it is already doing state by state, leading to an eventual end to the War on Drugs, and much of the gang violence related to drug trafficking... as well as an influx of tax money, even before we’ve figured out how to tax the rich at a fair rate.

The 2020s will not be without their tumult and tribulations, but I believe that on the whole, compared to the twenty-teens, they will be a lot less crazy, and a lot more hopeful.

Time traveler traffic... also... won’t be nearly as heavy.... which will ease the craziness considerably.

As for aliens?... well... Trump might just get his Space Force so... they will probably be taking the brunt of the trolling from the aliens, rather than the Air Force... for whatever that’s worth.

Time for bed.

0 notes

avemdesign-blog · 6 years ago

Text

How Browsers Provide Everything Users Need · An A List Apart Article

http://tinyurl.com/y3ss2956 How Browsers Provide Everything Users Need · An A List Apart Article - Kip Williams, professor of psychology sciences at Purdue University, conducted a fascinating experiment called “cyberball.” In his experiment, a test subject and two other participants played a computer game of catch. At a predetermined time, the test subject was excluded from the game, forcing them to only observe as the clock ran down. Article Continues Below Become a patron The experience showed increases in self-reported levels of anger and sadness, as well as lowering levels of the four needs. The digital version of the experiment created results that matched the results of the original physical one, meaning that these feelings occurred regardless of context. After the game was concluded, the test subject was told that the other participants were robots, not other human participants. Interestingly, the reveal of automated competitors did not lessen the negative feelings reported. In fact, it increased feelings of anger, while also decreasing participants’ sense of willpower and/or self-regulation. In other words: people who feel they are rejected by a digital system will feel hurt and have their sense of autonomy reduced, even when they believe there isn’t another human directly responsible. So, what does this have to with browsers? Every adjustment to the appearance and behavior of the features browsers let you manipulate is a roll of the dice, gambling on the delight of some at the expense of alienating others. When using a browser to navigate the web, there’s a lot of sameness, until there isn’t. Most of the time we’re hopping from page-to-page and site-to-site, clicking links, pressing buttons, watching videos, filling out forms, writing messages, etc. But every once in awhile we stumble across something new and novel that makes us pause to figure out what’s going on. Every website and web app is its own self-contained experience, with its own ideas of how things should look and behave. Some are closer to others, but each one requires learning how to operate the interface to a certain degree. Some browsers can also have parts of their functionality and appearance altered, meaning that as with websites, there can be unexpected discrepancies. We’ll unpack some of the nuance behind some of these features, and more importantly, why most of them are better off left alone. Scroll-to-top All the major desktop browsers allow you to hit the Home key on the keyboard to jump to the top of the page. Some scrollbar implementations allow you to click on the top of the scrollbar area to do the same. Some browsers allow you to type Command+Up (macOS) / Ctrl+Up (Windows), as well. People who use assistive technology like screen readers can use things like banner landmarks to navigate the same way (provided they are correctly declared in the site’s HTML). However, not every device has an easily discoverable way to invoke this functionality: many laptops don’t have a Home key on their keyboard. The tap-the-clock-to-jump-to-the-top functionality on iOS is difficult to discover, and can be surprising and frustrating if accidentally activated. You need specialized browser extensions to recreate screen reader landmark navigation techniques. One commonly implemented UI solution for longer pages is the scroll-to-top button. It’s often fixed to the bottom-right corner of the screen. Activating this control will take the user to the top of the page, regardless of how far down they’ve scrolled. If your site features a large amount of content per page, it may be worth investigating this UI pattern. Try looking at analytics and/or conducting user tests to see where and how often this feature is used. The caveat being if it’s used too often, it might be worth taking a long, hard look at your information architecture and content strategy. Three things I like about the scroll-to-top pattern are: Its functionality is pretty obvious (especially if properly labeled). Provided it is designed well, it can provide a decent-sized touch target in a thumb-friendly area. For motor control considerations, its touch target can be superior to narrow scroll or status bars, which can make for frustratingly small targets to hit. It does not alter or remove existing scroll behavior, augmenting it instead. If somebody is used to one way of scrolling to the top, you’re not overriding it or interrupting it. If you’re implementing this sort of functionality, I have four requests to help make the experience work for everyone (I find the Smooth Scroll library to be a helpful starting place): Honor user requests for reduced motion. The dramatic scrolling effect of whipping from the bottom of the page to the top may be a vestibular trigger, a situation where the system that controls your body’s sense of physical position and orientation in the world is disrupted, causing things like headaches, nausea, vertigo, migraines, and hearing loss. Ensure keyboard focus is moved to the top of the document, mirroring what occurs visually. Applying this practice will improve all users’ experiences. Otherwise, hitting Tab after scrolling to the top would send the user down to the first interactive element that follows where the focus had been before they activated the scroll button. Ensure the button does not make other content unusable by obscuring it. Be sure to account for when the browser is in a zoomed-in state, not just in its default state. Be mindful of other fixed-position elements. I’ve seen my fair share of websites that also have a chatbot or floating action button competing to live in the same space. Scrollbars If you’re old enough to remember, it was once considered fashionable to style your website scrollbars. Internet Explorer allowed this customization via a series of vendor-specific properties. At best, they looked great! If the designer and developer were both skilled and detail-oriented, you’d get something that looked like a natural extension of the rest of the website. However, the stakes for a quality design were pretty high: scrollbars are part of an application’s interface, not a website’s. In inclusive design, it’s part of what we call external consistency. External consistency is the idea that an object’s functionality is informed and reinforced by similar implementations elsewhere. It’s why you can flip a wall switch in most houses and be guaranteed the lights come on instead of flushing the toilet. While scrollbars have some minor visual differences between operating systems (and operating system versions), they’re consistent externally in function. Scrollbars are also consistent internally, in that every window and program on the OS that requires scrolling has the same scrollbar treatment. If you customize your website’s scrollbar colors, for less technologically literate people, yet another aspect of the interface has changed without warning or instruction on how to change it back. If the user is already confused about how things on the screen work, it’s one less familiar thing for them to cling to as stable and reliable. You might be rolling your eyes reading this, but I’d ask you to check out this incredible article by Jennifer Morrow instead. In it, she describes conducting a guerilla user test at a mall, only to have the session completely derailed when she discovers someone who has never used a computer before. What she discovers is as important as it is shocking. The gist of it is that some people (even those who have used a computer before) don’t understand the nuance of the various “layers” you navigate through to operate a computer: the hardware, the OS, the browser installed on the OS, the website the browser is displaying, the website’s modals and disclosure statements, etc. To them, the experience is flat. We should not expect these users to juggle this kind of cognitive overhead. These kinds of abstractions are crafted to be analogous to real-world objects, specifically so people can get what they want from a digital system without having to be programmers. Adding unnecessary complexity weakens these metaphors and gives users one less reference point to rely on. Remember the cyberball experiment. When a user is already in a distressed emotional state, our poorly-designed custom scrollbar might be the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts moment where they give up on trying to get what they want and reject the system entirely. While Morrow’s article was written in 2011, it’s just as relevant now as it was then. More and more people are using the internet globally, and more and more services integral to living daily life are getting digitized. It’s up to us as responsible designers and developers to be sure we make everyone, regardless of device, circumstance, or ability feel welcome. In addition to unnecessarily abandoning external consistency, there is the issue of custom scrollbar styling potentially not having sufficient color contrast. The too-light colors can create a situation where a person experiencing low-vision conditions won’t be able to perceive, and therefore operate, a website’s scrolling mechanism. This article won’t even begin to unpack the issues involved with custom implementations of scrollbars, where instead of theming the OS’s native scrollbars with CSS, one instead replaces them with a JavaScript solution. Trust me when I say I have yet to see one implemented in a way that could successfully and reliably recreate all features and functionality across all devices, OSes, browsers, and browsing modes. In my opinion? Don’t alter the default appearance of an OS’s scrollbars. Use that time to work on something else instead, say, checking for and fixing color contrast problems. Scrolling The main concern about altering scrolling behavior is one of consent: it’s taking an externally consistent, system-wide behavior and suddenly altering it without permission. The term scrolljacking has been coined to describe this practice. It is not to be confused with scrollytelling, a more considerate treatment of scrolling behavior that honors the OS’s scrolling settings. Altering the scrolling behavior on your website or web app can fly in the face of someone’s specific, expressed preferences. For some people, it’s simply an annoyance. For people with motor control concerns, it could make moving through a site difficult. In some extreme cases, the unannounced discrepancy between the amount of scrolling and the distance traveled can also be vestibular triggers. Another consideration is if your modified scrolling behavior accidentally locks out people who don’t use mice, touch, or trackpads to scroll. All in all, I think Robin Rendle said it best: Scrolljacking, as I shall now refer to it both sarcastically and honestly, is a failure of the web designer’s first objective; it attacks a standardised pattern and greedily assumes control over the user’s input. Highlighting Another OS feature we’re permitted to style in the browser is highlighted text. Much like scrollbars, this is an interface element that is shared by all apps on the OS, not just the browser. Breaking the external consistency of the OS’s highlighting color has a lot of the same concerns as styled scrollbars, namely altering the expected behavior of something that functions reliably everywhere else. It’s potentially disorienting and alienating, and may deny someone’s expressed preferences. Some people highlight text as they read. If your custom highlight style has a low contrast ratio between the highlighted text color and the highlighted text’s background color, the person reading your website or web app may be unable to perceive the text they’re highlighting. The effect will cause the text to seemingly disappear as they try to read. Other people just may not care for your aesthetic sensibilities. Both macOS and Windows allow you to specify a custom highlight color. In a scenario where someone has deliberately set a preference other than the system default, a styled highlight color may override their stated specifications. For me, the potential risks far outweigh the vanity of a bespoke highlight style—better to just leave it be. Text resizing Lots of people change text size to suit their needs. And that’s a good thing. We want people to be able to read our content and act upon it, regardless of whatever circumstances they may be experiencing. For the problem of too-small text, some designers turn to text resizing widgets, a custom UI pattern that lets a person cycle through a number of preset CSS font-size values. Commonly found in places with heavy text content, text resizing widgets are often paired with complex, multicolumn designs. News sites are a common example. Before I dive into my concerns with text resizing widgets, I want to ask: if you find that your site needs a specialized widget to manage your text size, why not just take the simpler route and increase your base text size? Like many accessibility concerns, a request for a larger font size isn’t necessarily indicative of a permanent disability condition. It’s often circumstantial, such as a situation where you’re showing a website on your office’s crappy projector. Browsers allow users to change their preferred default font size, resizing text across websites accordingly. Browsers excel at handling this setting when you write CSS that takes advantage of unitless line-height values and relative font-size units. Some designers may feel that granting this liberty to users somehow detracts from their intended branding. Good designers understand that there’s more to branding than just how something looks. It’s about implementing the initial design in the browser, then working with the browser’s capabilities to best serve the person using it. Even if things like the font size are adjusted, a strong brand will still shine through with the ease of your user flows, quality of your typography and palette, strength of your copywriting, etc. Unfortunately, custom browser text resizing widgets lack a universal approach. If you rely on browser text settings, it just works—consistently, with the same controls, gestures, and keyboard shortcuts, for every page on every website, even in less-than-ideal conditions. You don’t have to write and maintain extra code, test for regressions, or write copy instructing the user on where to find your site’s text resizing widget and how to use it. Behavioral consistency is incredibly important. Browser text resizing is applied to all text on the page proportionately every time the setting is changed. These settings are also retained for the next time you visit. Not every custom text resizing widget does this, nor will it resize all content to the degree stipulated by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. High-contrast themes When I say high-contrast themes, I’m not talking about things like a dark mode. I’m talking about a response to people reporting that they need to change your website or web app’s colors to be more visually accessible to them. Much like text resizing controls, themes that are designed to provide higher contrast color values are perplexing: if you’re taking the time to make one, why not just fix the insufficient contrast values in your regular CSS? Effectively managing themes in CSS is a complicated, resource-intensive affair, even under ideal situations. Most site-provided high-contrast themes are static in that the designer or developer made decisions about which color values to use, which can be a problem. Too much contrast has been known to be a trigger for things like migraines, as well as potentially making it difficult to focus for users with some forms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The contrast conundrum leads us to a difficult thing to come to terms with when it comes to accessibility: what works for one person may actually inhibit another. Because of this, it’s important to make things open and interoperable. Leave ultimate control up to the end user so they may decide how to best interact with content. If you are going to follow through on providing this kind of feature, some advice: model it after the Windows High Contrast mode. It’s a specialized Windows feature that allows a person to force a high color palette onto all aspects of the OS’s UI, including anything the browser displays. It offers four themes out of the box but also allows a user to suit their individual needs by specifying their own colors. Your high contrast mode feature should do the same. Offer a range of themes with different palettes, and let the user pick colors that work best for them—it will guarantee that if your offerings fail, people still have the ability to self-select. Moving focus Keyboard focus is how people who rely on input such as keyboards, switch controls, voice inputs, eye tracking, and other forms of assistive technology navigate and operate digital interfaces. While you can do things like use the autofocus attribute to move keyboard focus to the first input on a page after it loads, it is not recommended. For people experiencing low- and no-vision conditions, it is equivalent to being abruptly and instantaneously moved to a new location. It’s a confusing and disorienting experience—there’s a reason why there’s a trope in sci-fi movies of people vomiting after being teleported for the first time. For people with motor control concerns, moving focus without their permission means they may be transported to a place where they didn’t intend to go. Digging themselves out of this location becomes annoying at best and effort-intensive at worst. Websites without heading elements or document landmarks to serve as navigational aids can worsen this effect. This is all about consent. Moving focus is fine so long as a person deliberately initiates an action that requires it (shifting focus to an opened modal, for example). I don’t come to your house and force you to click on things, so don’t move my keyboard focus unless I specifically ask you to. Let the browser handle keyboard focus. Provided you use semantic markup, browsers do this well. Some tips: The clipboard and browser history The clipboard is sacred space. Don’t prevent people from copying things to it, and don’t append extra content to what they copy. The same goes for browser history and back and forward buttons. Don’t mess around with time travel, and just let the browser do its job. Wrapping up In the game part of cyberball, the fun comes from being able to participate with others, passing the ball back and forth. With the web, fun comes from being able to navigate through it. In both situations, fun stops when people get locked out, forced to watch passively from the sidelines. Fortunately, the web doesn’t have to be one long cyberball experiment. While altering the powerful, assistive technology-friendly features of browsers can enhance the experience for some users, it carries a great risk of alienating others if changes are made with ignorance about exactly how much will be affected. Remember that this is all in the service of what ultimately matters: creating robust experiences that allow people to successfully use your website or web app regardless of their ability or circumstance. Sometimes the best strategy is to let things be. Get our latest articles in your inbox. Sign up for email alerts. Source link - Avem Design - #Article #Browsers #List #Provide #Users

0 notes

cssscriptcom · 7 years ago

Photo

Analog Clock With JavaScript And SCSS A simple, lightweight analog clock built with JavaScript and CSS/SCSS. How to use it: Create the HTML for the analog clock.

0 notes

cssscriptcom · 8 years ago

Text

Create Customizable Analog Clocks Using Pure JS - analogClockJs

Create Customizable Analog Clocks Using Pure JS – analogClockJs

analogClockJs is a standalone JavaScript library to generate customizable, easy-to-style Analog Clocks using plain JavaScript & CSS. How to use it: To use the analogClockJs, you have to load the main JavaScript file analogClock.js in the html file. http://analogClock.js Create a clock container with a unique ID ‘clock’. Generate a default Analog Clock inside the container element.…

View On WordPress

0 notes

suzanneshannon · 6 years ago

Text

Paint the Picture, Not the Frame: How Browsers Provide Everything Users Need

Kip Williams, professor of psychology sciences at Purdue University, conducted a fascinating experiment called “cyberball.” In his experiment, a test subject and two other participants played a computer game of catch. At a predetermined time, the test subject was excluded from the game, forcing them to only observe as the clock ran down.

The experience showed increases in self-reported levels of anger and sadness, as well as lowering levels of the four needs. The digital version of the experiment created results that matched the results of the original physical one, meaning that these feelings occurred regardless of context.

After the game was concluded, the test subject was told that the other participants were robots, not other human participants. Interestingly, the reveal of automated competitors did not lessen the negative feelings reported. In fact, it increased feelings of anger, while also decreasing participants’ sense of willpower and/or self-regulation.

In other words: people who feel they are rejected by a digital system will feel hurt and have their sense of autonomy reduced, even when they believe there isn’t another human directly responsible.

So, what does this have to with browsers?

Every adjustment to the appearance and behavior of the features browsers let you manipulate is a roll of the dice, gambling on the delight of some at the expense of alienating others.

When using a browser to navigate the web, there’s a lot of sameness, until there isn’t. Most of the time we’re hopping from page-to-page and site-to-site, clicking links, pressing buttons, watching videos, filling out forms, writing messages, etc. But every once in awhile we stumble across something new and novel that makes us pause to figure out what’s going on.

Every website and web app is its own self-contained experience, with its own ideas of how things should look and behave. Some are closer to others, but each one requires learning how to operate the interface to a certain degree.

Some browsers can also have parts of their functionality and appearance altered, meaning that as with websites, there can be unexpected discrepancies. We’ll unpack some of the nuance behind some of these features, and more importantly, why most of them are better off left alone.

Scroll-to-top

All the major desktop browsers allow you to hit the Home key on the keyboard to jump to the top of the page. Some scrollbar implementations allow you to click on the top of the scrollbar area to do the same. Some browsers allow you to type Command+Up (macOS) / Ctrl+Up (Windows), as well. People who use assistive technology like screen readers can use things like banner landmarks to navigate the same way (provided they are correctly declared in the site’s HTML).

However, not every device has an easily discoverable way to invoke this functionality: many laptops don’t have a Home key on their keyboard. The tap-the-clock-to-jump-to-the-top functionality on iOS is difficult to discover, and can be surprising and frustrating if accidentally activated. You need specialized browser extensions to recreate screen reader landmark navigation techniques.

One commonly implemented UI solution for longer pages is the scroll-to-top button. It’s often fixed to the bottom-right corner of the screen. Activating this control will take the user to the top of the page, regardless of how far down they’ve scrolled.

If your site features a large amount of content per page, it may be worth investigating this UI pattern. Try looking at analytics and/or conducting user tests to see where and how often this feature is used. The caveat being if it’s used too often, it might be worth taking a long, hard look at your information architecture and content strategy.

Three things I like about the scroll-to-top pattern are:

Its functionality is pretty obvious (especially if properly labeled).

Provided it is designed well, it can provide a decent-sized touch target in a thumb-friendly area. For motor control considerations, its touch target can be superior to narrow scroll or status bars, which can make for frustratingly small targets to hit.

It does not alter or remove existing scroll behavior, augmenting it instead. If somebody is used to one way of scrolling to the top, you’re not overriding it or interrupting it.

If you’re implementing this sort of functionality, I have four requests to help make the experience work for everyone (I find the Smooth Scroll library to be a helpful starting place):

Honor user requests for reduced motion. The dramatic scrolling effect of whipping from the bottom of the page to the top may be a vestibular trigger, a situation where the system that controls your body’s sense of physical position and orientation in the world is disrupted, causing things like headaches, nausea, vertigo, migraines, and hearing loss.

Ensure keyboard focus is moved to the top of the document, mirroring what occurs visually. Applying this practice will improve all users’ experiences. Otherwise, hitting Tab after scrolling to the top would send the user down to the first interactive element that follows where the focus had been before they activated the scroll button.

Ensure the button does not make other content unusable by obscuring it. Be sure to account for when the browser is in a zoomed-in state, not just in its default state.

Be mindful of other fixed-position elements. I’ve seen my fair share of websites that also have a chatbot or floating action button competing to live in the same space.

Scrollbars

If you’re old enough to remember, it was once considered fashionable to style your website scrollbars. Internet Explorer allowed this customization via a series of vendor-specific properties. At best, they looked great! If the designer and developer were both skilled and detail-oriented, you’d get something that looked like a natural extension of the rest of the website.

However, the stakes for a quality design were pretty high: scrollbars are part of an application’s interface, not a website’s. In inclusive design, it’s part of what we call external consistency. External consistency is the idea that an object’s functionality is informed and reinforced by similar implementations elsewhere. It’s why you can flip a wall switch in most houses and be guaranteed the lights come on instead of flushing the toilet.

While scrollbars have some minor visual differences between operating systems (and operating system versions), they’re consistent externally in function. Scrollbars are also consistent internally, in that every window and program on the OS that requires scrolling has the same scrollbar treatment.

If you customize your website’s scrollbar colors, for less technologically literate people, yet another aspect of the interface has changed without warning or instruction on how to change it back. If the user is already confused about how things on the screen work, it’s one less familiar thing for them to cling to as stable and reliable.

You might be rolling your eyes reading this, but I’d ask you to check out this incredible article by Jennifer Morrow instead. In it, she describes conducting a guerilla user test at a mall, only to have the session completely derailed when she discovers someone who has never used a computer before.

What she discovers is as important as it is shocking. The gist of it is that some people (even those who have used a computer before) don’t understand the nuance of the various “layers” you navigate through to operate a computer: the hardware, the OS, the browser installed on the OS, the website the browser is displaying, the website’s modals and disclosure statements, etc. To them, the experience is flat.

We should not expect these users to juggle this kind of cognitive overhead. These kinds of abstractions are crafted to be analogous to real-world objects, specifically so people can get what they want from a digital system without having to be programmers. Adding unnecessary complexity weakens these metaphors and gives users one less reference point to rely on.

Remember the cyberball experiment. When a user is already in a distressed emotional state, our poorly-designed custom scrollbar might be the death-by-a-thousand-paper-cuts moment where they give up on trying to get what they want and reject the system entirely.

While Morrow’s article was written in 2011, it’s just as relevant now as it was then. More and more people are using the internet globally, and more and more services integral to living daily life are getting digitized. It’s up to us as responsible designers and developers to be sure we make everyone, regardless of device, circumstance, or ability feel welcome.

In addition to unnecessarily abandoning external consistency, there is the issue of custom scrollbar styling potentially not having sufficient color contrast. The too-light colors can create a situation where a person experiencing low-vision conditions won’t be able to perceive, and therefore operate, a website’s scrolling mechanism.

This article won’t even begin to unpack the issues involved with custom implementations of scrollbars, where instead of theming the OS’s native scrollbars with CSS, one instead replaces them with a JavaScript solution. Trust me when I say I have yet to see one implemented in a way that could successfully and reliably recreate all features and functionality across all devices, OSes, browsers, and browsing modes.

In my opinion? Don’t alter the default appearance of an OS’s scrollbars. Use that time to work on something else instead, say, checking for and fixing color contrast problems.

Scrolling

The main concern about altering scrolling behavior is one of consent: it’s taking an externally consistent, system-wide behavior and suddenly altering it without permission. The term scrolljacking has been coined to describe this practice. It is not to be confused with scrollytelling, a more considerate treatment of scrolling behavior that honors the OS’s scrolling settings.

Altering the scrolling behavior on your website or web app can fly in the face of someone’s specific, expressed preferences. For some people, it’s simply an annoyance. For people with motor control concerns, it could make moving through a site difficult. In some extreme cases, the unannounced discrepancy between the amount of scrolling and the distance traveled can also be vestibular triggers. Another consideration is if your modified scrolling behavior accidentally locks out people who don’t use mice, touch, or trackpads to scroll.

All in all, I think Robin Rendle said it best:

Scrolljacking, as I shall now refer to it both sarcastically and honestly, is a failure of the web designer’s first objective; it attacks a standardised pattern and greedily assumes control over the user’s input.

Highlighting

Another OS feature we’re permitted to style in the browser is highlighted text. Much like scrollbars, this is an interface element that is shared by all apps on the OS, not just the browser.

Breaking the external consistency of the OS’s highlighting color has a lot of the same concerns as styled scrollbars, namely altering the expected behavior of something that functions reliably everywhere else. It’s potentially disorienting and alienating, and may deny someone’s expressed preferences.

Some people highlight text as they read. If your custom highlight style has a low contrast ratio between the highlighted text color and the highlighted text’s background color, the person reading your website or web app may be unable to perceive the text they’re highlighting. The effect will cause the text to seemingly disappear as they try to read.

Other people just may not care for your aesthetic sensibilities. Both macOS and Windows allow you to specify a custom highlight color. In a scenario where someone has deliberately set a preference other than the system default, a styled highlight color may override their stated specifications.

For me, the potential risks far outweigh the vanity of a bespoke highlight style—better to just leave it be.

Text resizing

Lots of people change text size to suit their needs. And that’s a good thing. We want people to be able to read our content and act upon it, regardless of whatever circumstances they may be experiencing.

For the problem of too-small text, some designers turn to text resizing widgets, a custom UI pattern that lets a person cycle through a number of preset CSS font-size values. Commonly found in places with heavy text content, text resizing widgets are often paired with complex, multicolumn designs. News sites are a common example.

Before I dive into my concerns with text resizing widgets, I want to ask: if you find that your site needs a specialized widget to manage your text size, why not just take the simpler route and increase your base text size?

Like many accessibility concerns, a request for a larger font size isn’t necessarily indicative of a permanent disability condition. It’s often circumstantial, such as a situation where you’re showing a website on your office’s crappy projector.

Browsers allow users to change their preferred default font size, resizing text across websites accordingly. Browsers excel at handling this setting when you write CSS that takes advantage of unitless line-height values and relative font-size units.

Some designers may feel that granting this liberty to users somehow detracts from their intended branding. Good designers understand that there’s more to branding than just how something looks. It’s about implementing the initial design in the browser, then working with the browser’s capabilities to best serve the person using it. Even if things like the font size are adjusted, a strong brand will still shine through with the ease of your user flows, quality of your typography and palette, strength of your copywriting, etc.

Unfortunately, custom browser text resizing widgets lack a universal approach. If you rely on browser text settings, it just works—consistently, with the same controls, gestures, and keyboard shortcuts, for every page on every website, even in less-than-ideal conditions. You don’t have to write and maintain extra code, test for regressions, or write copy instructing the user on where to find your site’s text resizing widget and how to use it.

Behavioral consistency is incredibly important. Browser text resizing is applied to all text on the page proportionately every time the setting is changed. These settings are also retained for the next time you visit. Not every custom text resizing widget does this, nor will it resize all content to the degree stipulated by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

High-contrast themes

When I say high-contrast themes, I’m not talking about things like a dark mode. I’m talking about a response to people reporting that they need to change your website or web app’s colors to be more visually accessible to them.

Much like text resizing controls, themes that are designed to provide higher contrast color values are perplexing: if you’re taking the time to make one, why not just fix the insufficient contrast values in your regular CSS? Effectively managing themes in CSS is a complicated, resource-intensive affair, even under ideal situations.

Most site-provided high-contrast themes are static in that the designer or developer made decisions about which color values to use, which can be a problem. Too much contrast has been known to be a trigger for things like migraines, as well as potentially making it difficult to focus for users with some forms of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The contrast conundrum leads us to a difficult thing to come to terms with when it comes to accessibility: what works for one person may actually inhibit another. Because of this, it’s important to make things open and interoperable. Leave ultimate control up to the end user so they may decide how to best interact with content.

If you are going to follow through on providing this kind of feature, some advice: model it after the Windows High Contrast mode. It’s a specialized Windows feature that allows a person to force a high color palette onto all aspects of the OS’s UI, including anything the browser displays. It offers four themes out of the box but also allows a user to suit their individual needs by specifying their own colors.

Your high contrast mode feature should do the same. Offer a range of themes with different palettes, and let the user pick colors that work best for them—it will guarantee that if your offerings fail, people still have the ability to self-select.

Moving focus

Keyboard focus is how people who rely on input such as keyboards, switch controls, voice inputs, eye tracking, and other forms of assistive technology navigate and operate digital interfaces. While you can do things like use the autofocus attribute to move keyboard focus to the first input on a page after it loads, it is not recommended.

For people experiencing low- and no-vision conditions, it is equivalent to being abruptly and instantaneously moved to a new location. It’s a confusing and disorienting experience—there’s a reason why there’s a trope in sci-fi movies of people vomiting after being teleported for the first time.

For people with motor control concerns, moving focus without their permission means they may be transported to a place where they didn’t intend to go. Digging themselves out of this location becomes annoying at best and effort-intensive at worst. Websites without heading elements or document landmarks to serve as navigational aids can worsen this effect.

This is all about consent. Moving focus is fine so long as a person deliberately initiates an action that requires it (shifting focus to an opened modal, for example). I don’t come to your house and force you to click on things, so don’t move my keyboard focus unless I specifically ask you to.

Let the browser handle keyboard focus. Provided you use semantic markup, browsers do this well. Some tips:

Use the tabindex attribute with care and discretion.

Don’t declare tabindex on interactive elements (a, button, input, select, summary, and textarea).

Don’t use a manually curated tabindex order that runs parallel to what you’d expect a user to click on. Instead, author your HTML in such a way that the resulting DOM matches the visual order of the page. Taking a responsive, mobile first approach helps out a lot here.

The clipboard and browser history

The clipboard is sacred space. Don’t prevent people from copying things to it, and don’t append extra content to what they copy. The same goes for browser history and back and forward buttons. Don’t mess around with time travel, and just let the browser do its job.

Wrapping up

In the game part of cyberball, the fun comes from being able to participate with others, passing the ball back and forth. With the web, fun comes from being able to navigate through it. In both situations, fun stops when people get locked out, forced to watch passively from the sidelines.

Fortunately, the web doesn’t have to be one long cyberball experiment. While altering the powerful, assistive technology-friendly features of browsers can enhance the experience for some users, it carries a great risk of alienating others if changes are made with ignorance about exactly how much will be affected.

Remember that this is all in the service of what ultimately matters: creating robust experiences that allow people to successfully use your website or web app regardless of their ability or circumstance. Sometimes the best strategy is to let things be.

Paint the Picture, Not the Frame: How Browsers Provide Everything Users Need published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/

0 notes