- Accessibility and web browsers
Accessibility is an important concept to understand when designing and building websites. It is estimated that 10% of all internet users are imparied in some manner. Accessibility is important in that it is never noticed when done well but stands out like a sore thumb when something isn't accessible. Some key points to remember are:
- Having adequate contrast between background and foreground colour
- A line height of at least 1.5
- Font size should allow for easy reading
- Keyboard users should be able to easily navigate the webpage
- Screenreaders should be able to read the webpage and the user to be able to understand where they are on the page
Accessibility is a massive area of interest in web design and as such is important to understand. There are plenty of guidelines to help with this and auditing tools that can assess your webpage to identify any areas of improvement (such as lightbox).
I was unaware that different web browsers don't all accept the most cutting edge CSS. It was my assumption that all valid CSS would be accepted by all browsers. I've since learnt that browsers can't always keep up and so we have to use webkit and other CSS prefixes to allow for browsers to accept the CSS we are trying to use. There is a great resource caniuse.com. This helps to identify which CSS is valid for which browser. There are plenty of libraries and dependencies that can be added to assist with this task as well.
Next Steps
I feel like I have got an understanding of CSS to a reasonable level. I still have to practice it regularly to keep it fresh. I'm going to start moving into Javascript however as it is a key skill that I have to learn to achieve my goal of becoming a web developer.