We’re at the end of September, and the countdown to the new year has already begun. Can you believe we’re only a 100 days away from 2022?! Also, do you believe in coincidences? We just realised that our last September edition too was curated by Eevis. On that note, dig in.
Eevis is a front-end developer and accessibility specialist who has a mission to make the web more inclusive for all. She loves semantic HTML, pure CSS, and TypeScript and loves to share what she has learned. When she is not writing or speaking about code, she plays ultimate frisbee and explores the world with a kayak.
There are many factors to take into account when creating accessible data visualizations. Not every user can see, and not every user uses a mouse, but they need to be able to obtain the data from graphs too. Sarah Fossheim explains in their article how to create Apple Health's graphs with D3.js, and looks into the accessibility aspects as well.
Live regions are a way to communicate dynamically updated content to assistive technology users. However, using them is not always that simple, and yes, there can be too much information. Sarah Higley talks about different situations and types of live regions, when to - and not to - use them. And maybe the most important thing about the video: There are cats!
13 letters is an accessibility podcast. It discusses different aspects of accessibility, from universal design and inclusivity to digital accessibility. I tried to pick one episode to highlight in this newsletter, but they're all too interesting. I highly recommend listening to them all!
I had the honor of being one of the guests with Lainey Feingold in React Finland's accessibility-themed session. Lainey Feingold is a disability rights lawyer, and she has been in business since 1995. In her talk, she explains that accessibility is a human right and how we, as developers, can enable people to live their lives to the fullest. At the time of writing, captions are only auto-generated, but organizers promised that the video would have actual captions at some point.
Many programming languages have collected a variety of features or idioms over the years. For example, Python has List comprehensions. JavaScript and Kotlin have Optional chaining. Both JavaScript and Rust have async/await. In GO, it is normal to check if err != nil among others.
But if you take a step back and see, the fact is that all those features are the same thing! This is the power of fundamental abstractions.
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