Take advantage of the new element and new features of in your next responsive website.

As I write this, the world is sending its thoughts and prayers to our Muslim cousins. The Christchurch act of terrorism has once again reminded the world that white supremacy’s rise is very real, that its perpetrators are no longer on the fringes of society, but centered in our holiest places of worship. People are begging us to not share videos of the mass murder or the hateful manifesto that the white supremacist terrorist wrote. That’s what he wants: for his proverbial message of hate to be spread to the ends of the earth.

We live in a time where you can stream a mass murder and hate crime from the comfort of your home. Children can access these videos, too.

As I work through the pure pain, unsurprised, observing the toll on Muslim communities (as a non-Muslim, who matters least in this event), I think of the imperative role that our industry plays in this story.

At time of writing, YouTube has failed to ban and to remove this video. If you search for the video (which I strongly advise against), it still comes up with a mere content warning; the same content warning that appears for casually risqué content. You can bypass the warning and watch people get murdered. Even when the video gets flagged and taken down, new ones get uploaded.

Human moderators have to relive watching this trauma over and over again for unlivable wages. News outlets are embedding the video into their articles and publishing the hateful manifesto. Why? What does this accomplish?

I was taught in journalism class that media (photos, video, infographics, etc.) should be additive (a progressive enhancement, if you will) and provide something to the story for the reader that words cannot.

Is it necessary to show murder for our dear readers to understand the cruelty and finality of it? Do readers gain something more from watching fellow humans have their lives stolen from them? What psychological damage are we inflicting upon millions of people   and for what?

Who benefits?

The mass shooter(s) who had a message to accompany their mass murder. News outlets are thirsty for perverse clicks to garner more ad revenue. We, by way of our platforms, give agency and credence to these acts of violence, then pilfer profits from them. Tech is a money-making accomplice to these hate crimes.

Christchurch is just one example in an endless array where the tools and products we create are used as a vehicle for harm and for hate.

Facebook and the Cambridge Analytica scandal played a critical role in the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The concept of “race realism,” which is essentially a term that white supremacists use to codify their false racist pseudo-science, was actively tested on Facebook’s platform to see how the term would sit with people who are ignorantly sitting on the fringes of white supremacy. Full-blown white supremacists don’t need this soft language. This is how radicalization works.

The strategies articulated in the above article are not new. Racist propaganda predates social media platforms. What we have to be mindful with is that we’re building smarter tools with power we don’t yet fully understand: you can now have an AI-generated human face. Our technology is accelerating at a frightening rate, a rate faster than our reflective understanding of its impact.

Combine the time-tested methods of spreading white supremacy, the power to manipulate perception through technology, and the magnitude and reach that has become democratized and anonymized.

We’re staring at our own reflection in the Black Mirror.

The right to speak versus the right to survive

Tech has proven time and time again that it voraciously protects first amendment rights above all else. (I will also take this opportunity to remind you that the first amendment of the United States offers protection to the people from the government abolishing free speech, not from private money-making corporations).

Evelyn Beatrice Hall writes in The Friends of Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Fundamentally, Hall’s quote expresses that we must protect, possibly above all other freedoms, the freedom to say whatever we want to say. (Fun fact: The quote is often misattributed to Voltaire, but Hall actually wrote it to explain Voltaire’s ideologies.)

And the logical anchor here is sound: We must grant everyone else the same rights that we would like for ourselves. Former 99u editor Sean Blanda wrote a thoughtful piece on the “Other Side,” where he posits that we lack tolerance for people who don’t think like us, but that we must because we might one day be on the other side. I agree in theory.

But, what happens when a portion of the rights we grant to one group (let’s say, free speech to white supremacists) means the active oppression another group’s right (let’s say, every person of color’s right to live)?

James Baldwin expresses this idea with a clause, “We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

It would seem that we have a moral quandary where two sets of rights cannot coexist. Do we protect the privilege for all users to say what they want, or do we protect all users from hate? Because of this perceived moral quandary, tech has often opted out of this conversation altogether. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook, two of the biggest offenders, continue to allow hate speech to ensue with irregular to no regulation.

When explicitly asked about his platform as a free-speech platform and its consequence to privacy and safety, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said,

Dorsey and Twitter are most concerned about protecting expression and about not silencing people. In his mind, if he allows people to say whatever they want on his platform, he has succeeded. When asked about why he’s failed to implement AI to filter abuse like, say, Instagram had implemented, he said that he’s most concerned about being able to explain why the AI flagged something as abusive. Again, Dorsey protects the freedom of speech (and thus, the perpetrators of abuse) before the victims of abuse.

But he’s inconsistent about it. In a study by George Washington University comparing white nationalists and ISIS social media usage, Twitter’s freedom of speech was not granted to ISIS. Twitter suspended 1,100 accounts related to ISIS whereas it suspended only seven accounts related to Nazis, white nationalism, and white supremacy, despite the accounts having more than seven times the followers, and tweeting 25 times more than the ISIS accounts. Twitter here made a moral judgment that the fewer, less active, and less influential ISIS accounts were somehow not welcome on their platform, whereas the prolific and burgeoning Nazi and white supremacy accounts were.

So, Twitter has shown that it won’t protect free speech at all costs or for all users. We can only conclude that Twitter is either intentionally protecting white supremacy or simply doesn’t think it’s very dangerous. Regardless of which it is (I think I know), the outcome does not change the fact that white supremacy is running rampant on its platforms and many others.

Let’s brainwash ourselves for a moment and pretend like Twitter does want to support freedom of speech equitably and stays neutral and fair to complete this logical exercise: Going back to the dichotomy of rights example I provided earlier, where either the right to free speech or the right to safety and survival prevail, the rights and the power will fall into the hands of the dominant group or ideologue.

In case you are somehow unaware, the dominating ideologue, whether you’re a flagrant white supremacist or not, is white supremacy. White supremacy was baked into founding principles of the United States, the country where the majority of these platforms were founded and exist. (I am not suggesting that white supremacy doesn’t exist globally, as it does, evidenced most recently by the terrorist attack in Christchurch. I’m centering the conversation intentionally around the United States as it is my lived experience and where most of these companies operate.)

Facebook attempted to educate its team on white supremacy in order to address how to regulate free speech. A laugh-cry excerpt:

White nationalism is a softened synonym for white supremacy so that racists-lite can feel more comfortable with their transition into hate. White nationalism (a.k.a. white supremacy) by definition explicitly seeks to eradicate all people of color. So, Facebook should see white nationalist speech as exclusionary, and therefore a violation of their policies.

Regardless of what tech leaders like Dorsey or Facebook CEO Zuckerberg say or what mediocre and uninspired condolences they might offer, inaction is an action.

Companies that use terms and conditions or acceptable use policies to defend their inaction around hate speech are enabling and perpetuating white supremacy. Policies are written by humans to protect that group of human’s ideals. The message they use might be that they are protecting free speech, but hate speech is a form of free speech. So effectively, they are protecting hate speech. Well, as long as it’s for white supremacy and not the Islamic State.

Whether the motivation is fear (losing loyal Nazi customers and their sympathizers) or hate (because their CEO is a white supremacist), it does not change the impact: Hate speech is tolerated, enabled, and amplified by way of their platforms.

“That wasn’t our intent”

Product creators might be thinking, Hey, look, I don’t intentionally create a platform for hate. The way these features were used was never our intent.

Intent does not erase impact.

We cannot absolve ourselves of culpability merely because we failed to conceive such evil use cases when we built it. While we very well might not have created these platforms with the explicit intent to help Nazis or imagined it would be used to spread their hate, the reality is that our platforms are being used in this way.

As product creators, it is our responsibility to protect the safety of our users by stopping those that intend to or already cause them harm. Better yet, we ought to think of this before we build the platforms to prevent this in the first place.

The question to answer isn’t, “Have I made a place where people have the freedom to express themselves?” Instead we have to ask, “Have I made a place where everyone has the safety to exist?” If you have created a place where a dominant group can embroil and embolden hate against another group, you have failed to create a safe place. The foundations of hateful speech (beyond the psychological trauma of it) lead to events like Christchurch.

We must protect safety over speech.

The Domino Effect

This week, Slack banned 28 hate groups. What is most notable, to me, is that the groups did not break any parts of their Acceptable Use Policy. Slack issued a statement:

That’s it.

It is not illegal for tech companies like Slack to ban groups from using their proprietary software because it is a private company that can regulate users if they do not align with their vision as a company. Think of it as the “no shoes, no socks, no service” model, but for tech.

Slack simply decided that supporting the workplace collaboration of Nazis around efficient ways to evangelize white supremacy was probably not in line with their company directives around inclusion. I imagine Slack also considered how their employees of color most ill-affected by white supremacy would feel working for a company that supported it, actively or not.

What makes the Slack example so notable is that they acted swiftly and on their own accord. Slack chose the safety of all their users over the speech of some.

When caught with their enablement of white supremacy, some companies will only budge under pressure from activist groups, users, and employees.

PayPal finally banned hate groups after Charlottesville and after Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) explicitly called them out for enabling hate. SPLC had identified this fact for three years prior. PayPal had ignored them for all three years.

Unfortunately, taking these “stances” against something as clearly and viscerally wrong as white supremacy is rare for companies to do. The tech industry tolerates this inaction through unspoken agreements.

If Facebook doesn’t do anything about racist political propaganda, YouTube doesn’t do anything about PewDiePie, and Twitter doesn’t do anything about disproportionate abuse against Black women, it says to the smaller players in the industry that they don’t have to either.

The tech industry reacts to its peers. When there is disruption, as was the case with Airbnb, who screened and rejected any guests who they believed to be partaking in the Unite the Right Charlottesville rally, companies follow suit. GoDaddy cancelled Daily Stormer’s domain registration and Google did the same when they attempted migration.

If one company, like Slack or Airbnb, decides to do something about the role it’s going to play, it creates a perverse kind of FOMO for the rest: Fear of missing out of doing the right thing and standing on the right side of history.

Don’t have FOMO, do something

The type of activism at those companies all started with one individual. If you want to be part of the solution, I’ve gathered some places to start. The list is not exhaustive, and, as with all things, I recommend researching beyond this abridged summary.

1. Understand how white supremacy impacts you as an individual.
   Now, if you are a person of color, queer, disabled, or trans, it’s likely that you know this very intimately.

    

   If you are not any of those things, then you, as a majority person, need to understand how white supremacy protects you and works in your favor. It’s not easy work, it is uncomfortable and unfamiliar, but you have the most powerful tools to fix tech. The resources are aplenty, but my favorite abridged list:

   1. Seeing White podcast
   2. Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race
   3. Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race (Very key read for UK folks)
   4. Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility
2. See where your company stands: Read your company’s policies like accepted use and privacy policies and find your CEO’s stance on safety and free speech.
   While these policies are baseline (and in the Slack example, sort of irrelevant), it’s important to known your company's track record. As an employee, your actions and decisions either uphold the ideologies behind the company or they don’t. Ask yourself if the company’s ideologies are worth upholding and whether they align with your own. Education will help you to flag if something contradicts those policies, or if the policies themselves allow for unethical activity.
3. Examine everything you do critically on an ongoing basis.
   You may feel your role is small or that your company is immune—maybe you are responsible for the maintenance of one small algorithm. But consider how that algorithm or similar ones can be exploited. Some key questions I ask myself:
   1. Who benefits from this? Who is harmed?
   2. How could this be used for harm?
   3. Who does this exclude? Who is missing?
   4. What does this protect? For whom? Does it do so equitably?
4. See something? Say something.
   If you believe that your company is creating something that is or can be used for harm, it is your responsibility to say something. Now, I’m not naïve to the fact that there is inherent risk in this. You might fear ostracization or termination. You need to protect yourself first. But you also need to do something.
   1. Find someone who you trust who might be at less risk. Maybe if you’re a nonbinary person of color, find a white cis man who is willing to speak up. Maybe if you’re a white man who is new to the company, find a white man who has more seniority or tenure. But also, consider how you have so much more relative privilege compared to most other people and that you might be the safest option.
   2. Unionize. Find peers who might feel the same way and write a collective statement.
   3. Get someone influential outside of the company (if knowledge is public) to say something.
5. Listen to concerns, no matter how small, particularly if they’re coming from the most endangered groups.
   If your user or peer feels unsafe, you need to understand why. People often feel like small things can be overlooked, as their initial impact might be less, but it is in the smallest cracks that hate can grow. Allowing one insensitive comment about race is still allowing hate speech. If someone, particularly someone in a marginalized group, brings up a concern, you need to do your due diligence to listen to it and to understand its impact.

I cannot emphasize this last point enough.

What I say today is not new. Versions of this article have been written before. Women of color like me have voiced similar concerns not only in writing, but in design reviews, in closed door meetings to key stakeholders, in Slack DMs. We’ve blown our whistles.

But here is the power of white supremacy.

White supremacy is so ingrained in every single aspect of how this nation was built, how our corporations function, and who is in control. If you are not convinced of this, you are not paying attention or intentionally ignoring the truth.

Queer, Muslim, disabled, trans women and nonbinary folks of color — the marginalized groups most impacted by this — are the ones who are voicing these concerns most voraciously. Speaking up requires us to enter the spotlight and outside of safety—we take a risk and are not heard.

The silencing of our voices is one of many effective tools of white supremacy. Our silencing lives within every microaggression, each time we’re talked over, or not invited to partake in key decisions.

In tech, I feel I am a canary in a coal mine. I have sung my song to warn the miners of the toxicity. My sensitivity to it is heightened, because of my existence.

But the miners look at me and tell me that my lived experience is false. It does not align with their narrative as humans. They don’t understand why I sing.

If the people at the highest echelons of the tech industry—the white, male CEOs in power—fail to listen to its most marginalized people—the queer, disabled, trans, people of color—the fate of the canaries will too become the fate of the miners.

Accessibility can be tricky. There are plenty of conditions to take into consideration, and many technical limitations and weird exceptions that make it quite hard to master for most designers and developers.

I never considered myself an accessibility expert, but I took great pride in making my projects Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliant…ish. They would pass most automated tests, show perfectly in the accessibility tree, and work quite well with keyboard navigation. I would even try (and fail) to use a screen reader every now and then.

But life would give me a lesson I would probably never learn otherwise: last October, my abled life took a drastic change—I started to feel extremely dizzy, with a constant sensation of falling or spinning to the right. I was suffering from a bad case of vertigo caused by labyrinthitis that made it impossible to get anything done.

Vertigo can have a wide range of causes, the most common being a viral infection or tiny calcium crystal free floating in the inner ear, which is pretty much our body’s accelerometer. Any disruption in there sends the brain confusing signals about the body’s position, which causes really heavy nausea, dizziness, and headaches. If you’ve ever felt seasick, it’s quite a similar vibe. If not, think about that feeling when you just get off a rollercoaster…it’s like that, only all day long.

For most people, vertigo is something they’ll suffer just once in a lifetime, and it normally goes away in a week or two. Incidence is really high, with some estimates claiming that up to 40% of the population suffers vertigo at least once in their lifetime. Some people live all their lives with it (or with similar symptoms caused by a range of diseases and syndromes grouped under the umbrella term of vestibular disorders), with 4% of US adults reporting chronic problems with balance, and an additional 1.1% reporting chronic dizziness, according to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

In my case, it was a little over a month. Here’s what I learned while going through it.

Slants can trigger vestibular symptoms

It all started as I was out for my daily jog. I felt slightly dizzy, then suddenly my vision got totally distorted. Everything appeared further away, like looking at a fun house’s distortion mirror. I stumbled back home and rested; at that moment I believed I might have over-exercised, and that hydration, food, and rest were all I needed. Time would prove me wrong.

What I later learned was that experiencing vertigo is a constant war between one of your inner ears telling the brain “everything is fine, we’re level and still” and the other ear shouting “oh my God, we’re falling, we’re falling!!!” Visual stimuli can act as an intermediary, supporting one ear’s message or the other’s. Vertigo can also work in the opposite way, with the dizziness interfering with your vision.

I quickly found that when symptoms peaked, staring at a distant object would ease the falling sensation somewhat.

In the same fashion, some visual stimuli would worsen it.

Vertical slants were a big offender in that sense. For instance, looking at a subtle vertical slant (the kind that you’d have to look at twice to make sure it’s not perfectly vertical) on a webpage would instantly trigger symptoms for me. Whether it was a page-long slant used to create some interest beside text or a tiny decoration to mark active tabs, looking at anything with slight slants would instantly send me into the rollercoaster.

Horizontal slants (whatever the degree) and harder vertical slants wouldn’t cause these issues.

My best guess is that slight vertical slants can look like forced perspective and therefore reinforce the falling-from-height sensation, so I would recommend avoiding vertical slants if you can, or make them super obvious. A slight slant looks like perspective, a harder one looks like a triangle.

Target size matters (even on mouse-assisted devices)

After a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan, some tests to discard neurological conditions, and other treatments that proved ineffective, I was prescribed Cinnarizine.

Cinnarizine is a calcium channel blocker—to put it simply, it prevents the malfunctioning inner ear “accelerometer” from sending incorrect info to the brain. 
And it worked wonders. After ten days of being barely able to get out of bed, I was finally getting something closer to my normal life. I would still feel dizzy all the time, with some peaks throughout the day, but for the most part, it was much easier.

At this point, I was finally able to use the computer (but still unable to produce any code at all). To make the best of it, I set on a mission to self-experiment on accessibility for vestibular disorders. In testing, I found that one of the first things that struck me was that I would always miss targets (links and buttons).

I’m from the generation that grew up with desktop computers, so using a mouse is second nature. The pointer is pretty much an extension of my mind, as it is for many who use it regularly. But while Cinnarizine helped with the dizziness, it has a common side effect of negatively impacting coordination and fine motor skills (it is recommended not to drive or operate machinery while under treatment). It was not a surprise when I realized it would be much harder to get the pointer to do what I intended.

The common behavior would be: moving the pointer past the link I intended to click, clicking before reaching it at all, or having to try multiple times to click on smaller targets.

Success Criterion 2.5.5 Target Size (Level AAA) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s WCAG recommends bigger target sizes so users can activate them easily. The obvious reason for this is that it’s harder to pinpoint targets on smaller screens with coarser inputs (i.e., touchscreens of mobile devices). A fairly common practice for developers is to set bigger target sizes for smaller viewport widths (assuming that control challenges are only touch-related), while neglecting the issue on big screens expected to be used with mouse input. I know I’m guilty of that myself.

Instead of targeting this behavior for just smaller screen sizes, there are plenty of reasons to create larger target sizes on all devices: it will benefit users with limited vision (when text is scaled up accordingly and colors are of sufficient contrast), users with mobility impairments such as hand tremors, and of course, users with difficulty with fine motor skills.

Font size and spacing

Even while “enjoying” the ease of symptoms provided by the treatment, reading anything still proved to be a challenge for the following three weeks.

I was completely unable to use mobile devices while suffering vertigo due to the smaller font sizes and spacing, so I was forced to use my desktop computer for everything.

I can say I was experiencing something similar to users with mild forms of dyslexia or attention disorders: whenever I got to a website that didn’t follow good font styling, I would find myself reading the same line over and over again.

This proves once again that accessibility is intersectional: when we improve things for a particular purpose it usually benefits users with other challenges as well. I used to believe recommendations on font styles were mostly intended for the nearsighted and those who have dyslexia. Turns out they are also critical for those with vertigo, and even for those with some cognitive differences. At the end of the day, everybody benefits from better readability.

Some actions you can take to improve readability are:

• Keep line height to at least 1.5 times the font size (i.e., line-height: 1.5).
• Set the spacing between paragraphs to at least 2.0 times the font size. We can do this by adjusting the margins using relative units such as em.
• Letter spacing should be at least 0.12 times the font size. We can adjust this by using the letter-spacing CSS property, perhaps setting it in a relative unit.
• Make sure to have good contrast between text and its background.
• Keep font-weight at a reasonable level for the given font-family. Some fonts have thin strokes that make them harder to read. When using thinner fonts, try to improve contrast and font size accordingly, even more than what WCAG would suggest.
• Choose fonts that are easy to read. There has been a large and still inconclusive debate on which font styles are better for users, but one thing I can say for sure is that popular fonts (as in fonts that the user might be already familiar with) are generally the least challenging for users with reading issues.

WCAG recommendations on text are fairly clear and fortunately are the most commonly implemented of recommendations, but even they can still fall short sometimes. So, better to follow specific guides on accessible text and your best judgement. Passing automated tests does not guarantee actual accessibility.

Another issue on which my experience with vertigo proved to be similar to that of people with dyslexia and attention disorders was how hard it was for me to keep my attention in just one place. In that sense…

Animations are bad (and parallax is pure evil)

Val Head has already covered visually-triggered vestibular disorders in an outstanding article, so I would recommend giving it a good read if you haven’t already.

To summarize, animations can trigger nausea, dizziness, and headaches in some users, so we should use them purposely and responsibly.

While most animations did not trigger my symptoms, parallax scrolling did. I’d never been a fan of parallax to begin with, as I found it confusing. And when you’re experiencing vertigo, the issues introduced by parallax scrolling compound.

Really, there are no words to describe just how bad a simple parallax effect, scrolljacking, or even background-attachment: fixed would make me feel. I would rather jump on one of those 20-G centrifuges astronauts use than look at a website with parallax scrolling.

Every time I encountered it, I would put the bucket beside me to good use and be forced to lie in bed for hours as I felt the room spinning around me, and no meds could get me out of it. It was THAT bad.

Though normal animations did not trigger a reaction as severe, they still posed a big problem. The extreme, conscious, focused effort it took to read would make it such that anything moving on the screen would instantly break my focus, and force me to start the paragraph all over. And I mean anything.

I would constantly find myself reading a website only to have the typical collapsing navigation bar on scroll distract me just enough that I’d totally lose count of where I was at. Autoplaying carousels were so annoying I would delete them using dev tools as soon as they showed up. Background videos would make me get out of the website desperately.

Over time I started using mouse selection as a pointer; a visual indication of what I’d already read so I could get back to it whenever something distracted me. Then I tried custom stylesheets to disable transforms and animations whenever possible, but that also meant many websites having critical elements not appear at all, as they were implemented to start off-screen or otherwise invisible, and show up on scroll.

Of course, deleting stuff via dev tools or using custom stylesheets is not something we can expect 99.99% of our users to even know about.

So if anything, consider reducing animations to a minimum. Provide users with controls to turn off non-essential animations (WCAG 2.2.3 Animation from Interactions) and to pause, stop, or hide them (WCAG 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide). Implement animations and transitions in such a way that if the user disables them, critical elements still display.

And be extra careful with parallax: my recommendation is to, at the very least, try limiting its use to the header (“hero”) only, and be mindful of getting a smooth, realistic parallax experience. My vertigo self would have said, “just don’t freaking use parallax. Never. EVER.” But I guess that might be a hard idea to sell to stakeholders and designers.

Also consider learning how to use the prefers-reduced-motion feature query. This is a newer addition to the specs (it’s part of the Media Queries Level 5 module , which is at an early Editor’s Draft stage) that allows authors to apply selective styling depending on whether the user has requested the system to minimize the use of animations. OS and browser support for it is still quite limited, but the day will come when we will set any moving thing inside a query for when the user has no-preference, blocking animations from those who choose reduce.

After about a week of wrestling websites to provide a static experience, I remembered something that would prove to be my biggest ally while the vertigo lasted:

Reader mode

Some browsers include a “reader mode” that strips the content from any styling choices, isolates it from any distraction, and provides a perfect WCAG compliant layout for the text to maximize readability.

It is extremely helpful to provide a clear and consistent reading experience throughout multiple websites, especially for users with any kind of reading impairment.

I have to confess: before experiencing my vestibular disorder, I had never used Reader Mode (the formal name varies in browsers) or even checked if my projects were compatible with it. I didn’t even think it was such a useful feature, as a quick search for “reader mode” actually returned quite a few threads by users asking how to disable it or how to take the button for it out of Firefox’s address bar. (It seems some people are unwittingly activating it…perhaps the icon is not clear enough.)

Displaying the button to access Reader Mode is toggled by browser heuristics, which are based on the use (or not) of semantic tags in a page’s HTML. Unfortunately this meant not all websites provided such a “luxury.”

I really wish I wouldn’t have to say this in 2019…but please, please use semantic tags. Correct conversational semantics allow your website to be displayed in Reader Mode, and provide a better experience for users of screen readers. Again, accessibility is intersectional.

Reader Mode proved to be extremely useful while my vertigo lasted. But there was something even better:

Dark color schemes

By the fourth week, I started feeling mostly fine. I opened Visual Studio Code to try to get back to work. In doing so, it served me well to find one more revelation: a light-text-on-dark-background scheme was SO much easier for me to read. (Though I still was not able to return to work at this time.)

I was quite surprised, as I had always preferred light mode with dark-text-on-light-background for reading, and dark mode, with light-text-on-dark for coding. I didn’t know at the time that I was suffering from photophobia (which is a sensitivity to light), which was one of the reasons I found it hard to read on my desktop and to use my mobile device at all.

As far as I know, photophobia is not a common symptom of vestibular disorders, but there are many conditions that will trigger it, so it’s worth looking into for our projects’ accessibility.

CSS is also planning a media query to switch color schemes. Known as prefers-color-scheme, it allows applying styles based on the user’s stated preference for dark or light theming. It’s also part of the Media Queries Level 5 spec, and at the time of writing this article it’s only available in Safari Technology Preview, with Mozilla planning to ship it in the upcoming Firefox 67. Luckily there’s a PostCSS plugin that allows us to use it in most modern browsers by turning prefers-color-schemequeries into color-index queries, which have much better support.

If PostCSS is not your cup of tea, or for whatever reason you cannot use that approach to automate switching color schemes to a user’s preference, try at least to provide a theming option in your app’s configuration. Theming has become extremely simple since the release of CSS Custom Properties, so implementing this sort of switch is relatively easy and will greatly benefit anyone experiencing photophobia.

Moving on

After a month and some days, the vertigo disappeared completely, and I was able to return to work without needing any meds or further treatment. It should stay that way, as for most people it’s a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence.

I went back to my abled life, but the experience changed my mindset for good.

As I said before, I always cared for making my projects compatible for people using keyboard navigation and screen readers. But I learned the hard way that there are plenty of “invisible conditions” that are just as important to take into consideration: vestibular disorders, cognitive differences, dyslexia, and color blindness, just to name a few. I was totally neglecting those most of the time, barely addressing the issues in order to pass automated tests, which means I was unintentionally annoying some users by making websites inaccessible to them.

After my experience with vertigo, I’ve turned to an accessibility-first approach to design and development. Now I ask myself, “am I leaving anyone behind with this decision?,” before dropping a single line of code. Accessibility should never be an afterthought.

Making sure my projects work from the start for those with difficulties also improves the experience for everyone else. Think about how improving text styles for users with dyslexia, vertigo, or visual problems improves readability for all users, or how being able to control animations or choose a color scheme can be critical for users with attention disorders and photophobia, respectively, while also a nice feature for everybody.

It also turned my workflow into a much smoother development experience, as addressing accessibility issues from the beginning can mean a slower start, but it’s also much easier and faster than trying to fix broken accessibility afterwards.

I hope that by sharing my personal experience with vertigo, I’ve illustrated how we can all design and develop a better web for everybody. Remember, we’re all just temporarily abled.

Just as we need to understand our content before we can recategorize it, we need to understand the system before we try to rebuild it.

Enter the structural audit: a review of the site focused solely on its menus, links, flows, and hierarchies. I know you thought we were done with audits back in Chapter 2, but hear me out! Structural audits have an important and singular purpose: to help us build a new sitemap.

This isn’t about recreating the intended sitemap—no, this is about experiencing the site the way users experience it. This audit is meant to track and record the structure of the site as it really works.

Setting up the template

First, we’re gonna need another spreadsheet. (Look, it is not my fault that spreadsheets are the perfect system for recording audit data. I don’t make the rules.)

Because this involves building a spreadsheet from scratch, I keep a “template” at the top of my audit files—rows that I can copy and paste into each new audit (Fig 4.1). It’s a color-coded outline key that helps me track my page hierarchy and my place in the auditing process. When auditing thousands of pages, it’s easy to get dizzyingly lost, particularly when coming back into the sheet after a break; the key helps me stay oriented, no matter how deep the rabbit hole.

Color-coding

Color is the easiest, quickest way to convey page depth at a glance. The repetition of black text, white cells, and gray lines can have a numbing effect—too many rows of sameness, and your eyes glaze over. My coloring may result in a spreadsheet that looks like a twee box of macarons, but at least I know, instantly, where I am.

The exact colors don’t really matter, but I find that the familiar mental model of a rainbow helps with recognition—the cooler the row color, the deeper into the site I know I must be.

The nested rainbow of pages is great when you’re auditing neatly nested pages—but most websites color outside the lines (pun extremely intended) with their structure. I leave my orderly rainbow behind to capture duplicate pages, circular links, external navigation, and other inconsistencies like:

• On-page navigation. A bright text color denotes pages that are accessible via links within page content—not through the navigation. These pages are critical to site structure but are easily overlooked. Not every page needs to be displayed in the navigation menus, of course—news articles are a perfect example—but sometimes this indicates publishing errors.
• External links. These are navigation links that go to pages outside the domain. They might be social media pages, or even sites held by the same company—but if the domain isn’t the one I’m auditing, I don’t need to follow it. I do need to note its existence in my spreadsheet, so I color the text as the red flag that it is. (As a general rule, I steer clients away from placing external links in navigation, in order to maintain a consistent experience. If there’s a need to send users offsite, I’ll suggest using a contextual, on-page link.)
• Files. This mostly refers to PDFs, but can include Word files, slide decks, or anything else that requires downloading. As with external links, I want to capture anything that might disrupt the in-site browsing experience. (My audits usually filter out PDFs, but for organizations that overuse them, I’ll audit them separately to show how much “website” content is locked inside.)
• Unknown hierarchy. Every once in a while, there’s a page that doesn’t seem to belong anywhere—maybe it’s missing from the menu, while its URL suggests it belongs in one section and its navigation scheme suggests another. These pages need to be discussed with their owners to determine whether the content needs to be considered in the new site.
• Crosslinks. These are navigation links for pages that canonically live in a different section of the site—in other words, they’re duplicates. This often happens in footer navigation, which may repeat the main navigation or surface links to deeper-but-important pages (like a Contact page or a privacy policy). I don’t want to record the same information about the page twice, but I do need to know where the crosslink is, so I can track different paths to the content. I color these cells gray so they don’t draw my attention.

Note that coloring every row (and indenting, as you’ll see in a moment) can be a tedious process—unless you rely on Excel’s formatting brush. That tool applies all the right styles in just two quick clicks.

Outlines and page IDs

Color-coding is half of my template; the other half is the outline, which is how I keep track of the structure itself. (No big deal, just the entire point of the spreadsheet.)

Every page in the site gets assigned an ID. You are assigning this number; it doesn’t correspond to anything but your own perception of the navigation. This number does three things for you:

1. It associates pages with their place in the site hierarchy. Decimals indicate levels, so the page ID can be decoded as the page’s place in the system.
2. It gives each page a unique identifier, so you can easily refer to a particular page—saying “2.4.1” is much clearer than “you know that one page in the fourth product category?”
3. You can keep using the ID in other contexts, like your sitemap. Then, later, when your team decides to wireframe pages 1.1.1 and 7.0, you’ll all be working from the same understanding.

Let me be completely honest: things might get goofy sometimes with the decimal outline. There will come a day when you’ll find yourself casually typing out “1.2.1.2.1.1.1,” and at that moment, a fellow auditor somewhere in the universe will ring a tiny gong for you.

In addition to the IDs, I indent each level, which reinforces both the numbers and the colors. Each level down—each digit in the ID, each change in color—gets one indentation.

I identify top-level pages with a single number: 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, etc. The next page level in the first section would be 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, and so on. I mark the homepage as 0.0, which is mildly controversial—the homepage is technically a level above—but, look: I’ve got a lot of numbers to write, and I don’t need those numbers to tell me they’re under the homepage, so this is my system. Feel free to use the numbering system that work best for you.

Criteria and columns

So we’ve got some secret codes for tracking hierarchy and depth, but what about other structural criteria? What are our spreadsheet columns (Fig 4.2)? In addition to a column for Page ID, here’s what I cover:

• URL. I don’t consistently fill out this column, because I already collected this data back in my automated audit. I include it every twenty entries or so (and on crosslinks or pages with unknown hierarchy) as another way of tracking progress, and as a direct link into the site itself.
• Menu label/link. I include this column only if I notice a lot of mismatches between links, labels, and page names. Perfect agreement isn’t required; but frequent, significant differences between the language that leads to a page and the language on the page itself may indicate inconsistencies in editorial approach or backend structures.
• Name/headline. Think of this as “what does the page owner call it?” It may be the H1, or an H2; it may match the link that brought you here, or the page title in the browser, or it may not.
• Page title. This is for the name of the page in the metadata. Again, I don’t use this in every audit—particularly if the site uses the same long, branded metadata title for every single page—but frequent mismatches can be useful to track.
• Section. While the template can indicate your level, it can’t tell you which area of the site you’re in—unless you write it down. (This may differ from the section data you applied to your automated audit, taken from the URL structure; here, you’re noting the section where the page appears.)
• Notes. Finally, I keep a column to note specific challenges, and to track patterns I’m seeing across multiple pages—things like “Different template, missing subnav” or “Only visible from previous page.” My only caution here is that if you’re planning to share this audit with another person, make sure your notes are—ahem—professional. Unless you enjoy anxiously combing through hundreds of entries to revise comments like “Wow haha nope” (not that I would know anything about that).

Depending on your project needs, there may be other columns, too. If, in addition to using this spreadsheet for your new sitemap, you want to use it in migration planning or template mapping, you may want columns for new URLs, or template types. 

You can get your own copy of my template as a downloadable Excel file. Feel free to tweak it to suit your style and needs; I know I always do. As long as your spreadsheet helps you understand the hierarchy and structure of your website, you’re good to go.

Gathering data

Setting up the template is one thing—actually filling it out is, admittedly, another. So how do we go from a shiny, new, naive spreadsheet to a complete, jaded, seen-some-stuff spreadsheet? I always liked Erin Kissane’s description of the process, from The Elements of Content Strategy:

Big inventories involve a lot of black coffee, a few late nights, and a playlist of questionable but cheering music prominently featuring the soundtrack of object-collecting video game Katamari Damacy. It takes quite a while to exhaustively inventory a large site, but it’s the only way to really understand what you have to work with.

We’re not talking about the same kind of exhaustive inventory she was describing (though I am recommending Katamari music). But even our less intensive approach is going to require your butt in a seat, your eyes on a screen, and a certain amount of patience and focus. You’re about to walk, with your fingers, through most of a website.

Start on the homepage. (We know that not all users start there, but we’ve got to have some kind of order to this process or we’ll never get through it.) Explore the main navigation before moving on to secondary navigation structures. Move left to right, top to bottom (assuming that is your language direction) over each page, looking for the links. You want to record every page you can reasonably access on the site, noting navigational and structural considerations as you go.

My advice as you work:

• Use two monitors. I struggle immensely without two screens in this process, which involves constantly switching between spreadsheet and browser in rapid, tennis-match-like succession. If you don’t have access to multiple monitors, find whatever way is easiest for you to quickly flip between applications.
• Record what you see. I generally note all visible menu links at the same level, then exhaust one section at a time. Sometimes this means I have to adjust what I initially observed, or backtrack to pages I missed earlier. You might prefer to record all data across a level before going deeper, and that would work, too. Just be consistent to minimize missed links.
• Be alert to inconsistencies. On-page links, external links, and crosslinks can tell you a lot about the structure of the site, but they’re easy to overlook. Missed on-page links mean missed content; missed crosslinks mean duplicate work. (Note: the further you get into the site, the more you’ll start seeing crosslinks, given all the pages you’ve already recorded.)
• Stick to what’s structurally relevant. A single file that’s not part of a larger pattern of file use is not going to change your understanding of the structure. Neither is recording every single blog post, quarterly newsletter, or news story in the archive. For content that’s dynamic, repeatable, and plentiful, I use an x in the page ID to denote more of the same. For example, a news archive with a page ID of 2.8 might show just one entry beneath it as 2.8.x; I don’t need to record every page up to 2.8.791 to understand that there are 791 articles on the site (assuming I noted that fact in an earlier content review).
• Save. Save frequently. I cannot even begin to speak of the unfathomable heartbreak that is Microsoft Excel burning an unsaved audit to the ground.  

Knowing which links to follow, which to record, and how best to untangle structural confusion—that improves with time and experience. Performing structural audits will not only teach you about your current site, but will help you develop fluency in systems thinking—a boon when it comes time to document the new site.

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