Building the most inaccessible site possible with a perfect Lighthouse score

Google's built-in testing tool Lighthouse judges the accessibility of our websites with a score between 0 and 100. It’s laudable to try to get a high grading, but a score of 100 doesn’t mean that the site is perfectly accessible. To prove that I carried out a little experiment.

Daily Ethical Design

There's no shortage of content, manifestos, and opinions these days on how design can be evil. But if they've left you feeling more frustrated than empowered, wishing for practical, real-world ways to enact change in your work, we hear you. In this piece, Lennart Overkamp lays out a practice-based approach to daily ethical design. You might be surprised to find out how much you can already do.

A Model for WordPress Accessibility

I am going to propose a way to increase the overall accessibility of the WordPress ecosystem. It requires acknowledging some mistakes and using those as the base for building a better platform. Automattic can build a dedicated accessibility team. With that team, Automattic can honor Matt Mullenweg’s promise to set new accessibility best practices for the web overall.

While this is talking about WordPress and Automattic in particular, it's worth nothing that the approach is a good one for any large group to improve their a11y culture.

Reducing motion with the picture element

hm… I wonder if you could use picture + prefers-reduced-motion? I copied the code, dropped it into a post of mine, created a static image of an animated GIF, and turned on the “reduce motion” preference (System Preferences > Accessibility > Display). And then BOOM. Just worked. In real time!

Your first performance budget with Lighthouse

I asked on Twitter the other day how many people had created and enforced a performance budget for a website they were working on. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of people hadn't. This is why I was really excited when, at Google I/O this year, the Lighthouse team announced support for performance budgets that can be integrated with Lighthouse. We can now define a simple performance budget in a JSON file, which will be tested as part of the lighthouse audit!