Five Links #49

Absorbing

Five links for your inbox from this week.

1. We need accessibility action and we need it now

A quarter of a century and basic accessibility is not met by 96% of home pages. I find this fact embarrassing. Mostly as a web developer because fixing those six issues can be learned in a day.

But I also find it embarrassing for web accessibility. We should have better strategies to educate people about the issues, provide them with actionable feedback and make sure that issues are effectively addressed.

2. youtube-nocookie is misleading

As it turns out this is what is happening as you try to embed YouTube videos without cookies:

1. If you use the youtube-nocookie.com domain, there is no cookie set when the page with the YouTube embed loads.
2. Instead, YouTube utilizes something called Local Storage in your browser to store a unique device identifier. Note that this is done without anyone’s consent and GDPR is violated already in this step. GDPR is not only about cookies.
3. As soon as a user presses Play on the video, a cookie from YouTube is set. Whether or not consent has been given from the viewer. The second violation of informed consent in the same embed.

3. Common accessibility issues that you can fix today

A useful list of accessibility areas to check on your site right now.

4. Bento

“Link in bio, but rich and beautiful.”

5. Phosphor icons

“Phosphor is a flexible icon family for interfaces, diagrams, presentations — whatever, really.”

Projects + other things

• I’m now offering Power Hours, a simple, low-risk way to get an outside perspective on your website.

• I recently revoked my 1% For The Planet membership. I’m continuing to donate 1% of my business’ turnover, but this will now be split between projects that take action against climate change and organisations that fight muscular dystrophy.

• I’m currently booking projects from June onwards. Get in touch if there’s a project you would like to discuss.

• My Unoffice Hours are available every other Wednesday. Next slot: 17th May.

If you enjoy discovering the links in the emails, please tell other people about it: give it a share on social media or forward it to someone you think might like it. If you were forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.

If you come across a link/app you think might be of interest to other people on this list, hit reply and let me know.

Until next time,

Dave