This is the story of a little switch toggle, a custom HTML control we’ve recently implemented here at Yoast for our projects. Native HTML controls are always preferable, but we try to experiment and have a good balance between accessibility and good design. Wondering what custom controls are? Curious to see how modern design and …
Read: "The a11y Monthly: Story of a toggle"
People call me an accessibility expert, but I don't see myself as an expert. I do know quite a few things about HTML5, WAI-ARIA, browsers, and screen readers. I live in a small country, which is well known for its arts, food, and fashion. However, it is not famous for its information technology industry. So …
Read: "The a11y Monthly: Contributing to WordPress to spread accessibility culture"
While the original intended use of HTML tables was tabular data, tables are also used as aids for page layout. This was especially true some years ago when browsers hardly supported CSS. Tables were necessary to overcome limitations in visual presentation. Today, there is much more flexibility in controlling page layout using CSS. Does it …
Read: "The a11y Monthly: Get rid of your tables (or fix them)"
I think it is important to keep learning new things. To encourage myself to keep doing that, I have two different ways to learn new things. On the one hand, I follow people that consistently produce quality content which I can learn from. On the other hand, I explore other interests to meet new people …
Read: "12 months, 12 technologies"
In the last couple years, we’ve seen an increased adoption of JavaScript libraries and frameworks to build web applications. At Yoast, some important parts of our applications, such as our Yoast SEO plugin, have already moved to JavaScript. In the future, we'll build most of our interfaces using React components. This shift to JavaScript is …
Read: "The a11y Monthly: Accessibility and JavaScript"
Today, we are releasing a new Premium feature for doing internal linking suggestions. Last week, I wrote a post on the SEO blog explaining how we can do this fast and without using up a lot of resources on the server side. Building this would not have been possible without much of the work we …
Read: "The road to internal linking suggestions in Yoast SEO 4.0"
On Friday, Irene and I visited the Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop to learn more about information retrieval and to meet the Dutch/Belgian Information Retrieval community. Before going to this conference, I didn't know what Information Retrieval was. Now I know what it comprises and how it relates to software development at Yoast. In our recently released …
Read: "Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop 2016"
According to the World Health Organization, 246 million people have low vision worldwide. Approximately 1 in 12 men (8%) and 1 in 200 women in the world have some form of altered perception of colors. At Yoast, we’ve decided to review the colors used in all our projects to improve text contrast and readability. Better …
Read: "The a11y Monthly: Keep your colors under control"
Universal access to content is an essential aspect of the web. Helping people finding content is one of the first steps. For that reason, it is the responsibility of every developer to make sure content is accessible for everyone. At Yoast, accessibility matters a great deal. We’re all focused in an ongoing effort to improve the …
Read: "The a11y Monthly: Web content accessibility at Yoast"
One of the goals of the development team whilst building the JavaScript onboarding wizard in Yoast SEO 3.6 was to make it generic. We love the open source community, so we made the wizard freely available for everyone. That means you can use our wizard component for your own needs! I’ll give a short explanation …
Read: "Build your own JavaScript onboarding wizard"