Accessibility
Barriers from Links with ARIA
Three key takeaways here:
- Don’t use
aria-labelon links; - Don’t use
aria-hiddenwithin links; - Don’t split the letters of a word across elements.
Accessibility | 2025 | The Web Almanac by HTTP Archive
The 2025 Accessibility report reviews how accessible the web is for people with disabilities and tracks progress compared with 2024. It uses automated Lighthouse/aXe tests across millions of sites to measure technical accessibility metrics, though it notes that automated tools only cover part of the picture.
Key themes include: readability, semantic structure, form accessibility, ARIA use, media accessibility, user preferences, and accessibility of dynamic content.
The report also examines trends across countries, CMS platforms, and JavaScript frameworks, highlighting that while technical metrics have improved slightly (e.g., accessible ARIA names, heading structure), persistent issues remain—color contrast, alt text, heading hierarchy, and link naming continue to be major barriers.
It stresses that true accessibility requires thoughtful design, semantic HTML, human testing, and not just tool-driven fixes, and includes discussion of how AI is impacting accessibility work.
How an accessibility designer adds keyboard shortcuts to a web app
Keyboard shortcuts occupy a strange area for web design. The piece explains how to thoughtfully add keyboard shortcuts in web applications from an accessibility-focused design perspective. Because many layers of keyboard behavior exist (OS, browser, assistive tech), designers must carefully choose combinations that don’t conflict with existing shortcuts or user expectations.
CSS
Understanding the fundamentals of CSS Layout
When developers say that CSS is hard, they're usually talking about CSS layout. What often gets omitted though is that developers are assumed to understand and effectively use CSS without being taught how it works in the first place.
CSS in 2026: The new features reshaping frontend development
Jemima Abu, a senior product engineer and award-winning developer educator, shows how she replaced 150+ lines of JavaScript with just a few new CSS features.
Smashing Animations Part 8: Theming Animations Using CSS Relative Colour
CSS relative colour values are now widely supported. In this article, pioneering author and web designer Andy Clarke shares practical techniques for using them to theme and animate SVG graphics.
Anchor Interpolated Morph (AIM)
Anchor Interpolated Morph (AIM) is a CSS-only technique for creating smooth, spatially contextual transitions between elements without JavaScript. It uses new CSS features like anchor(), anchor-size(), @starting-style, and interpolate-size to animate an element from the position and size of another (the “anchor”) to its natural layout. This approach is inspired by the FLIP animation pattern but shifts the measurement and interpolation work from JavaScript into CSS.
Responsive Pyramidal Grid of Hexagon Shapes
Following the previous post, here is another type of responsive grid: a pyramidal grid of hexagon shapes. Another fancy layout powered by modern CSS, math functions, and without media queries.
Introducing ReliCSS: A Tool for Front-End Archaeology
Introducing ReliCSS: a tool that helps you identify browser hacks and CSS artifacts in legacy codebases. Understand the 'why' behind old code and prioritise refactoring efforts.
Unstacking CSS Stacking Contexts
In CSS, we can create “stacking contexts” where elements are visually placed one on top of the next in a three-dimensional sense that creates the perception of depth. Stacking contexts are incredibly useful, but they’re also widely misunderstood and often mistakenly created, leading to a slew of layout issues that can be tricky to solve.
HTML
How to Favicon in 2026: Three files that fit most needs
Prefer SVG over PNG, trust browsers to downscale, drop obscure formats—the ultimate, exhaustive guide to favicons for modern web. Includes steps for static HTML and Webpack.
Try text scaling support in Chrome Canary
Chrome Canary (the experimental version of Chrome) is testing support for a new text-scaling feature.
This introduces a new <meta name="text-scale"> tag that lets a website opt in to respecting system-level text size settings (similar to how <meta name="viewport"> helps with responsive layouts).
With this tag, if a user increases their OS text size (for accessibility or readability), the browser will scale the website’s text accordingly.
JavaScript
three-quake
A WIP port of Quake (1996) to Three.js.
Demo here (click to play). Note: WIP = work in progress.
SPAs Are a Performance Dead End
Single Page Applications, once a solution for slow browsers, are now a performance bottleneck due to multiple HTTP round-trips.
Beyond the Mouse: Animating with Mobile Accelerometers
How to enhance interactive 3D animations on mobile devices by using built-in motion sensors (like accelerometers and gyroscopes) instead of relying solely on mouse input, which doesn’t exist on touch devices. It covers how to detect whether a device supports motion and touch, request the necessary browser permissions for accessing sensor data, and then use that data to drive CSS animations, mapping rotation and acceleration to visual transforms for more immersive interactions.
UX
Why So Many Info Tips Are Bad (and How to Make Them Better)
Information tips — those helpful little messages triggered by tapping or hovering over a question mark (?) or info (i) icon — can help users make faster decisions and increase the understandability of UI elements. But in practice, they’re often overused, misapplied, or bloated with unnecessary content. When info tips hide essential instructions or bury users in redundant explanations, they create confusion rather than clarity.
Vertical vs. Horizontal Cards: The UX Tradeoffs That Shape Modern Interfaces
Every interface you use is built on a quiet but crucial choice: vertical or horizontal cards. This hidden decision shapes how we see, scroll, and interact with content every day.
Miscellaneous
How to Nail Big Tech Behavioral Interviews as a Senior Software Engineer
Behavioral interviews play a significant part in the interview process. And in my opinion, the importance of behavioral interviews is just going to keep increasing as time goes on.
The reason?
The reason is that we are in the age of AI, where focus is a lot more on your soft skills, overall communication, and problem-solving. A lot less on your pure coding abilities.