LessFuss Design

Spring clean for Chequers Playgroup

Chequers Playgroup was one of the first sites I did when I started freelancing in 2007. At the time I was one of the Committee members, so I took care of the site content and kept everything up to date. Recently the Committee members asked me to update the site so they could look after it themselves now I’m no longer a member. And because I can’t help myself sometimes, I also tinkered with the design… Continue reading ‘Spring clean for Chequers Playgroup’ »

Review of freelancing year #3

On the freelancing side of things, 2009 will be filed under ‘Frustrating’. It’s been a year of interest but not commitment from potential clients, and the work I have taken on has been, at times, painfully slow to progress. Continue reading ‘Review of freelancing year #3’ »

HTML housework: get proper closure

This might seem obvious to anyone who regularly writes HTML, but it’s really helpful if you comment your source code to explain which elements you’re closing. If you’re debugging someone else’s source code (or your own code you wrote some time ago), there’s nothing worse than coming across this:

By commenting which element you’re closing as you write it, it’ll be far easier to work out later on exactly what’s being closed off – and therefore easier to work out which is the offending element for any problem you’ve got. By closing and commenting everything as you write it, there’s also less chance you’ll miss closing something off, and the world of pain that brings with it.

So, commented, the above would look like this:

There you have it. Next time you’re in the zone and dropping divs in like there’s no tomorrow, spare a second to comment them as you close them off. Quick and simple, and you could save some poor dude a lot of hassle when he/she comes to look at your code in a few years.

Of course, the tag soup above is to illustrate a point. I’d never write such bloated HTML. *Cough*.

Web form help text & accessibility

In the last piece I did on accessible web forms, I mentioned that in Forms Mode the JAWS screen reader won’t announce any content in a form that isn’t marked up in a form HTML tag. 90% of the time you can make forms more accessible by using labels for each field, but sometimes you want to provide more information than can fit nicely into the label (e.g. some extra help text) without making a meal of the layout and styling. Here’s a way of styling content in an HTML label tag so it looks like it’s separate from the label, but will still get read out by screen readers. Continue reading ‘Web form help text & accessibility’ »

BBC Glow

When Alan Partridge asks Tony Hayers what he thinks of regional detective dramas Shoestring, Taggart, Spender, Bergerac and Morse, and Tony Hayers says “There’s too many of them”, Alan replies “That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is, ‘People like them, let’s make some more of them’”. The BBC has a similar attitude when it comes to javascript libraries, it seems. A few weeks ago they released Glow under the Apache license, giving us all a chance to spread some of the magic dust that goes into the BBC site over our own creations. But far from being another framework for wow-effects, Glow has the edge in two important areas: cross-browser support and accessibility. Continue reading ‘BBC Glow’ »