October retro: Accessibility, Dev Events, Sustainability
• 311 words • ~2 min read ⏲
I've recently made a few accessibility improvements for the site. For one, I finally got around to add a skip-to-content link to the navigation, mostly following along an article from CSS Tricks, with very few tweaks. And I replaced the sorttable script for the tables of content with a custom-element I wrote, in order to make the table columns also sortable via keyboard navigation. On the same note: some time ago I wrote that small things matter for accessibility, which as a general principle is true, but I recently learned that the example which triggered the article is not correct anymore, because bold and italics actually aren't read by screen readers after all. That was a feature of the NVDA screen reader, but not a very popular one, therefore it got disabled by default. Generally there is no audible distinction between i/em or b/strong tags for screen reader users.
Also three weeks ago, I had the pleasure to participate in my first post-pandemic in-person developer event (which incidentally has been my last pre-pandemic conference as well...), the unKonf in Mannheim. The unKonf is basically a barcamp, but it is traditionally opened with a keynote, which this year was given by Uwe Friedrichsen on the topic of sustainability patterns for IT. One fact that suprised me was that the global IT landscape causes more greenhouse gas emissions than the traffic of the worldwide logistics industry. I can only recommend the slide deck, which is filled with tons of interesting and important pointers. One take-away was that measuring and visualizing resource and energy consumption of a system is a necessary first step to move towards a more sustainable IT. Apart from that, there were many other great sessions and the "hallway track" made me realize how much I actually have missed to talk shop (outside of my actual shop).