li Madras High Court orders closure of all Tasmac liquor shops in Tamil Nadu By www.thehindu.com Published On :: Sat, 09 May 2020 00:15:36 +0530 The Madras High Court on Friday directed the State government to close all 3,850 liquor shops run by the Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (Tasma Full Article Tamil Nadu
li [ASAP] Describing Meta-Atoms Using the Exact Higher-Order Polarizability Tensors By dx.doi.org Published On :: Tue, 07 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.9b01776 Full Article
li [ASAP] White Light Emission from a Zero-Dimensional Lead Chloride Hybrid Material By dx.doi.org Published On :: Thu, 09 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.9b01817 Full Article
li [ASAP] Plasmon-Mediated Coherent Superposition of Discrete Excitons under Strong Exciton–Plasmon Coupling in Few-Layer MoS<sub>2</sub> at Room Temperature By dx.doi.org Published On :: Fri, 10 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00233 Full Article
li [ASAP] Size, Ligand, and Defect-Dependent Electron–Phonon Coupling in Chalcogenide and Perovskite Nanocrystals and Its Impact on Luminescence Line Widths By dx.doi.org Published On :: Mon, 13 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00034 Full Article
li [ASAP] Development of Lipid-Coated Semiconductor Nanosensors for Recording of Membrane Potential in Neurons By dx.doi.org Published On :: Mon, 13 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.9b01558 Full Article
li [ASAP] Quasinormal-Mode Non-Hermitian Modeling and Design in Nonlinear Nano-Optics By dx.doi.org Published On :: Wed, 15 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00014 Full Article
li [ASAP] Colloidal Quantum-Dots/Graphene/Silicon Dual-Channel Detection of Visible Light and Short-Wave Infrared By dx.doi.org Published On :: Fri, 17 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00247 Full Article
li [ASAP] Goodbye Juan José Sáenz (1960–2020): A Bright Scientific Mind, an Unusually Prolific Friend, and a Family Man By dx.doi.org Published On :: Wed, 22 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00526 Full Article
li [ASAP] Chip-Scale Reconfigurable Optical Full-Field Manipulation: Enabling a Compact Grooming Photonic Signal Processor By dx.doi.org Published On :: Tue, 28 Apr 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00103 Full Article
li [ASAP] Colored Radiative Cooling Coatings with Nanoparticles By dx.doi.org Published On :: Fri, 01 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00513 Full Article
li [ASAP] Strain-Correlated Localized Exciton Energy in Atomically Thin Semiconductors By dx.doi.org Published On :: Mon, 04 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00626 Full Article
li [ASAP] Probing the Radiative Electromagnetic Local Density of States in Nanostructures with a Scanning Tunneling Microscope By dx.doi.org Published On :: Wed, 06 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00264 Full Article
li [ASAP] Line-Scan Hyperspectral Imaging Microscopy with Linear Unmixing for Automated Two-Dimensional Crystals Identification By dx.doi.org Published On :: Wed, 06 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00050 Full Article
li [ASAP] Strong Optical Feedback Stabilized Quantum Cascade Laser By dx.doi.org Published On :: Fri, 08 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT ACS PhotonicsDOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.0c00189 Full Article
li Future Accessibility Guidelines—for People Who Can’t Wait to Read Them By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Tue, 03 Dec 2019 12:00:00 +0000 Alan Dalton uses this, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, to look back at where we’ve come from, to evaluate where we are, and to look forward to what’s coming next in the future of accessibility guidelines. Happy United Nations International Day of Persons with Disabilities! The United Nations have chosen “Promoting the participation of persons with disabilities and their leadership: taking action on the 2030 Development Agenda” for this year’s observance. Let’s see how the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) guidelines of accessibility past, present, and yet-to-come can help us to follow that goal, and make sure that the websites—and everything else!—that we create can include as many potential users as possible. Guidelines of Accessibility Past The W3C published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 1.0 on 5th May 1999, when most of us were playing Snake on our Nokia 3210s’ 1.5” monochrome screens…a very long time ago in technology terms. From the start, those guidelines proved enlightening for designers and developers who wanted to avoid excluding users from their websites. For example, we learned how to provide alternatives to audio and images, how to structure information, and how to help users to find the information they needed. However, those guidelines were specific to the web technologies of the time, resulting in limitations such as requiring developers to “use W3C technologies when they are available […]”. Also, those guidelines became outdated; I doubt that you, gentle reader, consult their technical documentation about “directly accessible applets” or “Writing for browsers that do not support FRAME” in your day-to-day work. Guidelines of Accessibility Present The W3C published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 on 11th December 2008, when most of us were admiring the iPhone 3G’s innovative “iPhone OS 2.0” software…a long time ago in technology terms. Unlike WCAG 1, these guidelines also applied to non-W3C technologies, such as PDF and Flash. These guidelines used legalese and future-proofed language, with terms such as “time-based media” and “programmatically determined”, and testable success criteria. This made these guidelines more difficult for designers and developers to grasp, but also enabled the guidelines to make their way into international standards (see EN 301 549 — Accessibility requirements suitable for public procurement of ICT products and services in Europe and ISO/IEC 40500:2012 Information technology — W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0) and even international law (see EU Directive 2016/2102 … on the accessibility of the websites and mobile applications of public sector bodies). More importantly, these guidelines enabled designers and developers to create inclusive websites, at scale. For example, in the past 18 months: Intercom made their web Messenger accessible, achieving Level-AA conformance; Vimeo made accessibility updates to their video player to achieve Level-AA conformance; Stripe designed a new accessible colour system to conform with success criterion 1.4.3 (“Contrast (Minimum)”). The updated Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 arrived on 5th June last year—almost a 10-year wait for a “.1” update!—and added 17 new success criteria to help bring the guidelines up to date. Those new criteria focused on people using mobile devices and touchscreens, people with low vision, and people with cognitive and learning disabilities. (If you need to get up to speed with these guidelines, take 36 minutes to read “Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—for People Who Haven’t Read Them” and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1—for People Who Haven’t Read the Update.) Guidelines of Accessibility Yet to Come So, what’s next? Well, the W3C hope to release another minor update (WCAG 2.2) in November 2020. However, they also have a Task Force working on produce major new guidelines with wider scope (more people, more technologies) and fewer limitations (easier to understand, easier to use) in November 2022. These next guidelines will have a different name, because they will cover more than “Web” and “Content”. Andrew Kirkpatrick (Adobe’s Head of Accessibility) named the Task Force “Silver” (because the initials of “Accessibility Guidelines” form the symbol of the silver element). The Silver Task Force want the next major accessibility guidelines to: take account of more disabilities; apply to more technologies than just the web, including virtual reality, augmented reality, voice assistants, and more; consider all the technologies that people use, including authoring tools, browsers, media players, assistive technologies (including screen readers and screen magnifiers), application software, and operating systems. That’s quite a challenge, and so the more people who can help, the better. The Silver Task Force wanted an alternative to W3C’s Working Groups, which are made up of employees of organisations who are members of the W3C, and invited experts. So, they created a Silver Community Group to allow everyone to contribute towards this crucial work. If you want to join right now, for free, just create a W3C account. Like all good designers, the Silver Task Force and Silver Community Group began by researching. They examined the problems that people have had when using, conforming to, and maintaining the existing accessibility guidelines, and then summarised that research. From there, the Silver Community Group drafted ambitious design principles and requirements. You can read about what the Silver Community Group are currently working on, and decide whether you would like to get involved now, or at a later stage. Emphasise expertise over empathy Remember that today’s theme is “Promoting the participation of persons with disabilities and their leadership: taking action on the 2030 Development Agenda”. (The United Nations’ 2030 Development Agenda is outside the scope of this article, but if you’re looking to be inspired, read Alessia Aquaro’s article on Public Digital’s blog about how digital government can contribute to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.) In line with this theme, if you don’t have a disability and you want to contribute to the Silver Community Group, resist the temptation to try to empathise with people with disabilities. Instead, take 21 minutes during this festive season to enjoy the brilliant Liz Jackson explaining how empathy reifies disability stigmas, and follow her advice. Choose the right route I think we can expect the next Accessibility Guidelines to make their way into international standards and international law, just like their predecessors. We can also expect successful companies to apply them at scale. If you contribute to developing those guidelines, you can help to make sure that as many people as possible will be able to access digital information and services, in an era when that access will be crucial to every aspect of people’s lives. As Cennydd Bowles explained in “Building Better Worlds”, “There is no such thing as the future. There are instead a near-infinity of potential futures. The road as-yet-untravelled stretches before us in abundant directions. We get to choose the route. There is no fate but what we make.” About the author Alan Dalton worked for Ireland’s National Disability Authority for 9½ years, mostly as Accessibility Development Advisor. That involved working closely with public sector bodies to make websites, services, and information more accessible to all users, including users with disabilities. Before that, he was a consultant and trainer for Software Paths Ltd. in Dublin. In his spare time, he maintains StrongPasswordGenerator.com to help people stay safe online, tweets, and takes photos. More articles by Alan Full Article Code accessibility
li Beautiful Scrolling Experiences – Without Libraries By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Fri, 06 Dec 2019 12:00:00 +0000 Michelle Barker appears as one of a heavenly host, coming forth with scroll in hand to pronounce an end to janky scrolljacking! Unto us a new specification is born, in the city of TimBL, and its name shall be called Scroll Snap. Sponsor: Order any Standard paperback(s) and get a surprise gift card in the box for YOU. While supplies last, from your pals at A Book Apart! One area where the web has traditionally lagged behind native platforms is the perceived “slickness” of the app experience. In part, this perception comes from the way the UI responds to user interactions – including the act of scrolling through content. Faced with the limitations of the web platform, developers frequently reach for JavaScript libraries and frameworks to alter the experience of scrolling a web page – sometimes called “scroll-jacking” – not always a good thing if implemented without due consideration of the user experience. More libraries can also lead to page bloat, and drag down a site’s performance. But with the relatively new CSS Scroll Snap specification, we have the ability to control the scrolling behaviour of a web page (to a degree) using web standards – without resorting to heavy libraries. Let’s take a look at how. Scroll Snap A user can control the scroll position of a web page in a number of ways, such as using a mouse, touch gesture or arrow keys. In contrast to a linear scrolling experience, where the rate of scroll reflects the rate of the controller, the Scroll Snap specification enables a web page to snap to specific points as the user scrolls. For this, we need a fixed-height element to act as the scroll container, and the direct children of that element will determine the snap points. To demonstrate this, here is some example HTML, which consists of a <div> containing four <section> elements: <div class="scroll-container"> <section> <h2>Section 1</h2> </section> <section> <h2>Section 2</h2> </section> <section> <h2>Section 3</h2> </section> <section> <h2>Section 4</h2> </section> </div> Scroll snapping requires the presence of two main CSS properties: scroll-snap-type and scroll-snap-align. scroll-snap-type applies to the scroll container element, and takes two keyword values. It tells the browser: The direction to snap Whether snapping is mandatory scroll-snap-align is applied to the child elements – in this case our <section>s. We also need to set a fixed height on the scroll container, and set the relevant overflow property to scroll. .scroll-container { height: 100vh; overflow-y: scroll; scroll-snap-type: y mandatory; } section { height: 100vh; scroll-snap-align: center; } In the above example, I’m setting the direction in the scroll-snap-type property to y to specify vertical snapping. The second value specifies that snapping is mandatory. This means that when the user stops scrolling their scroll position will always snap to the nearest snap point. The alternative value is proximity, which determines that the user’s scroll position will be snapped only if they stop scrolling in the proximity of a snap point. (It’s down to the browser to determine what it considers to be the proximity threshold.) If you have content of indeterminate length, which might feasibly be larger than the height of the scroll container (in this case 100vh), then using a value of mandatory can cause some content to be hidden above or below the visible area, so is not recommended. But if you know that your content will always fit within the viewport, then mandatory can produce a more consistent user experience. See the Pen Simple scroll-snap example by Michelle Barker (@michellebarker) on CodePen. In this example I’m setting both the scroll container and each of the sections to a height of 100vh, which affects the scroll experience of the entire web page. But scroll snapping can also be implemented on smaller components too. Setting scroll snapping on the x-axis (or inline axis) can produce something like a carousel effect. In this demo, you can scroll horizontally scroll through the sections: See the Pen Carousel-style scroll-snap example by Michelle Barker (@michellebarker) on CodePen. The Intersection Observer API By implementing the CSS above, our web page already has a more native-like feel to it. To improve upon this further we could add some scroll-based transitions and animations. We’ll need to employ a bit of Javascript for this, using the Intersection Observer API. This allows us to create an observer that watches for elements intersecting with the viewport, triggering a callback function when this occurs. It is more efficient than libraries that rely on continuously listening for scroll events. We can create an observer that watches for each of our scroll sections coming in and out of view: const sections = [...document.querySelectorAll('section')] const options = { rootMargin: '0px', threshold: 0.25 } const callback = (entries) => { entries.forEach((entry) => { if (entry.intersectionRatio >= 0.25) { target.classList.add("is-visible"); } else { target.classList.remove("is-visible"); } }) } const observer = new IntersectionObserver(callback, options) sections.forEach((section, index) => { observer.observe(section) }) In this example, a callback function is triggered whenever one of our sections intersects the container by 25% (using the threshold option). The callback adds a class of is-visible to the section if it is at least 25% in view when the intersection occurs (which will take effect when the element is coming into view), and removes it otherwise (when the element is moving out of view). Then we can add some CSS to transition in the content for each of those sections: section .content { opacity: 0: } section.is-visible .content { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 1000ms: } This demo shows it in action: See the Pen Scrolling with Intersection Observer by Michelle Barker (@michellebarker) on CodePen. You could, of course, implement some much more fancy transition and animation effects in CSS or JS! As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that, in practice, we shouldn’t be setting opacity: 0 as the default without considering the experience if JavaScript fails to load. In this case, the user would see no content at all! There are different ways to handle this: We could add a .no-js class to the body (which we remove on load with JS), and set default styles on it, or we could set the initial style (before transition) with JS instead of CSS. Position: sticky There’s one more CSS property that I think has the potential to aid the scroll experience, and that’s the position property. Unlike position: fixed, which locks the position of an element relative to the nearest relative ancestor and doesn’t change, position: sticky is more like a temporary lock. An element with a position value of sticky will become fixed only until it reaches the threshold of its parent, at which point it resumes relative positioning. By “sticking” some elements within scroll sections we can give the impression of them being tied to the action of scrolling between sections. It’s pretty cool that we can instruct an element to respond to it’s position within a container with CSS alone! Browser support and fallbacks The scroll-snap-type and scroll-snap-align properties are fairly well-supported. The former requires a prefix for Edge and IE, and older versions of Safari do not support axis values. In newer versions of Safari it works quite well. Intersection Observer similarly has a good level of support, with the exception of IE. By wrapping our scroll-related code in a feature query we can provide a regular scrolling experience as a fallback for users of older browsers, where accessing the content is most important. Browsers that do not support scroll-snap-type with an axis value would simply scroll as normal. @supports (scroll-snap-type: y mandatory) { .scroll-container { height: 100vh; overflow-y: scroll; scroll-snap-type: y mandatory; } section { height: 100vh; scroll-snap-align: center; } } The above code would exclude MS Edge and IE, as they don’t support axis values. If you wanted to support them you could do so using a vendor prefix, and using @supports (scroll-snap-type: mandatory) instead. Putting it all together This demo combines all three of the effects discussed in this article. Summary Spending time on scroll-based styling might seem silly or frivolous to some. But I believe it’s an important part of positioning the web as a viable alternative to native applications, keeping it open and accessible. While these new CSS features don’t offer all of the control we might expect with a fully featured JS library, they have a major advantage: simplicity and reliability. By utilising web standards where possible, we can have the best of both worlds: Slick and eye-catching sites that satisfy clients’ expectations, with the added benefit of better performance for users. About the author Michelle is a Lead Front End Developer at Bristol web agency Atomic Smash, author of front-end blog CSS { In Real Life }, and a Mozilla Tech Speaker. She has written articles for CSS Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and Web Designer Magazine, to name a few. She enjoys experimenting with new CSS features and helping others learn about them. More articles by Michelle Full Article UX css
li Usability and Security; Better Together By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Sun, 22 Dec 2019 12:00:00 +0000 Divya Sasidharan calls into question the trade-offs often made between security and usability. Does a secure interface by necessity need to be hard to use? Or is it the choice we make based on years of habit? Snow has fallen, snow on snow. Security is often synonymous with poor usability. We assume that in order for something to be secure, it needs to by default appear impenetrable to disincentivize potential bad actors. While this premise is true in many instances like in the security of a bank, it relies on a fundamental assumption: that there is no room for choice. With the option to choose, a user almost inevitably picks a more usable system or adapts how they interact with it regardless of how insecure it may be. In the context of the web, passwords are a prime example of such behavior. Though passwords were implemented as a way to drastically reduce the risk of attack, they proved to be marginally effective. In the name of convenience, complex, more secure passwords were shirked in favor of easy to remember ones, and passwords were liberally reused across accounts. This example clearly illustrates that usability and security are not mutually exclusive. Rather, security depends on usability, and it is imperative to get user buy-in in order to properly secure our applications. Security and Usability; a tale of broken trust At its core, security is about fostering trust. In addition to protecting user accounts from malicious attacks, security protocols provide users with the peace of mind that their accounts and personal information is safe. Ironically, that peace of mind is incumbent on users using the security protocols in the first place, which further relies on them accepting that security is needed. With the increased frequency of cyber security threats and data breaches over the last couple of years, users have grown to be less trusting of security experts and their measures. Security experts have equally become less trusting of users, and see them as the “the weakest link in the chain”. This has led to more cumbersome security practices such as mandatory 2FA and constant re-login flows which bottlenecks users from accomplishing essential tasks. Because of this break down in trust, there is a natural inclination to shortcut security altogether. Build a culture of trust not fear Building trust among users requires empowering them to believe that their individual actions have a larger impact on the security of the overall organization. If a user understands that their behavior can put critical resources of an organization at risk, they will more likely behave with security in mind. For this to work, nuance is key. Deeming that every resource needs a similarly high number of checks and balances diminishes how users perceive security and adds unnecessary bottlenecks to user workflows. In order to lay the foundation for good security, it’s worth noting that risk analysis is the bedrock of security design. Instead of blindly implementing standard security measures recommended by the experts, a better approach is to tailor security protocols to meet specific use cases and adapt as much as possible to user workflows. Here are some examples of how to do just that: Risk based authentication Risk based authentication is a powerful way to perform a holistic assessment of the threats facing an organization. Risks occur at the intersection of vulnerability and threat. A high risk account is vulnerable and faces the very real threat of a potential breach. Generally, risk based authentication is about calculating a risk score associated with accounts and determining the proper approach to securing it. It takes into account a combination of the likelihood that that risk will materialize and the impact on the organization should the risk come to pass. With this system, an organization can easily adapt access to resources depending on how critical they are to the business; for instance, internal documentation may not warrant 2FA, while accessing business and financial records may. Dynamically adaptive auth Similar to risk based auth, dynamically adaptive auth adjusts to the current situation. Security can be strengthened and slackened as warranted, depending on how risky the access point is. A user accessing an account from a trusted device in a known location may be deemed low risk and therefore not in need of extra security layers. Likewise, a user exhibiting predictive patterns of use should be granted quick and easy access to resources. The ability to adapt authentication based on the most recent security profile of a user significantly improves the experience by reducing unnecessary friction. Conclusion Historically, security failed to take the user experience into account, putting the onus of securing accounts solely on users. Considering the fate of password security, we can neither rely on users nor stringent security mechanisms to keep our accounts safe. Instead, we should aim for security measures that give users the freedom to bypass them as needed while still protecting our accounts from attack. The fate of secure systems lies in the understanding that security is a process that must constantly adapt to face the shifting landscape of user behavior and potential threats. About the author Divya is a web developer who is passionate about open source and the web. She is currently a developer experience engineer at Netlify, and believes that there is a better workflow for building and deploying sites that doesn’t require a server—ask her about the JAMstack. You will most likely find her in the sunniest spot in the room with a cup of tea in hand. More articles by Divya Full Article UX security
li Four Ways Design Systems Can Promote Accessibility – and What They Can’t Do By feedproxy.google.com Published On :: Mon, 23 Dec 2019 12:00:00 +0000 Amy Hupe prepares a four bird roast of tasty treats so we can learn how the needs of many different types of users can be served through careful implementation of components within a design system. Design systems help us to make our products consistent, and to make sure we’re creating them in the most efficient way possible. They also help us to ensure our products are designed and built to a high quality; that they’re not only consistent in appearance, and efficiently-built, but that they are good. And good design means accessible design. 1 in 5 people in the UK have a long term illness, impairment or disability – and many more have a temporary disability. Designing accessible services is incredibly important from an ethical, reputational and commercial standpoint. For EU government websites and apps, accessibility is also a legal requirement. With that in mind, I’ll explain the four main ways I think we can use design systems to promote accessible design within an organisation, and what design systems can’t do. 1. Bake it in Design systems typically provide guidance and examples to aid the design process, showing what best practice looks like. Many design systems also encompass code that teams can use to take these elements into production. This gives us an opportunity to build good design into the foundations of our products, not just in terms of how they look, but also how they work. For everyone. Let me give an example. The GOV.UK Design System contains a component called the Summary list. It’s used in a few different contexts on GOV.UK, to summarise information. It’s often used at the end of a long or complex form, to let users check their answers before they send them, like this: Users can review the information and, if they’ve entered something incorrectly, they can go back and edit their answer by clicking the “Change” link on the right-hand side. This works well if you can see the change link, because you can see which information it corresponds to. In the top row, for example, I can see that the link is giving me the option to change the name I’ve entered because I can see the name label, and the name I put in is next to it. However, if you’re using a screen reader, this link – and all the others – will just say “change”, and it becomes harder to tell what you’re selecting. So to help with this, the GOV.UK Design System team added some visually-hidden text to the code in the example, to make the link more descriptive. Sighted users won’t see this text, but when a screen reader reads out the link, it’ll say “change name”. This makes the component more accessible, and helps it to satisfy a Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1) success criterion for links which says we must “provide link text that identifies the purpose of the link without needing additional context”. By building our components with inclusion in mind, we can make it easier to make products accessible, before anyone’s even had to think about it. And that’s a great starting point. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have to think about it – we definitely do. And a design system can help with that too. 2. Explain it Having worked as the GOV.UK Design System’s content designer for the best part of 3 years, I’m somewhat biased about this, but I think that the most valuable aspect of a design system is its documentation. (Here’s a shameless plug for my patterns Day talk on design system documentation earlier this year, if you want to know more about that.) When it comes to accessibility, written documentation lets us guide good practice in a way that code and examples alone can’t. By carefully documenting implementation rules for each component, we have an opportunity to distribute accessible design principles throughout a design system. This means design system users encounter them not just once, but repeatedly and frequently, in various contexts, which helps to build awareness over time. For instance, WCAG 2.1 warns against using colour as “the only visual means of conveying information, calling an action, prompting a response or distinguishing a visual element”. This is a general principle to follow, but design system documentation lets us explain how this relates to specific components. Take the GOV.UK Design System’s warning buttons. These are used for actions with serious, often destructive consequences that can’t easily be undone – like permanently deleting an account. The example doesn’t tell you this, but the guidance explains that you shouldn’t rely on the red colour of warning buttons to communicate that the button performs a serious action, since not all users will be able to see the colour or understand what it signifies. Instead, it says, “make sure the context and button text makes clear what will happen if the user selects it”. In this way, the colour is used as an enhancement for people who can interpret it, but it’s not necessary in order to understand it. Making the code in our examples and component packages as accessible as possible by default is really important, but written documentation like this lets us be much more explicit about how to design accessible services. 3. Lead by example In our design systems’ documentation, we’re telling people what good design looks like, so it’s really important that we practice what we preach. Design systems are usually for members of staff, rather than members of the public. But if we want to build an inclusive workplace, we need to hold them to the same standards and ensure they’re accessible to everyone who might need to use them – today and in the future. One of the ways we did this in my team, was by making sure the GOV.UK Design System supports users who need to customise the colours they use to browse the web. There are a range of different user needs for changing colours on the web. People who are sensitive to light, for instance, might find a white background too bright. And some users with dyslexia find certain colours easier to read than others. My colleague, Nick Colley, wrote about the work we did to ensure GOV.UK Design System’s components will work when users change colours on GOV.UK. To ensure we weren’t introducing barriers to our colleagues, we also made it possible to customise colours in the GOV.UK Design System website itself. Building this flexibility into our design system helps to support our colleagues who need it, but it also shows others that we’re committed to inclusion and removing barriers. 4. Teach it The examples I’ve drawn on here have mostly focused on design system documentation and tooling, but design systems are much bigger than that. In the fortuitously-timed “There is No Design System”, Jina reminds us that tooling is just one of the ways we systematise design: …it’s a lot of people-focused work: Reviewing. Advising. Organizing. Coordinating. Triaging. Educating. Supporting.” To make a design system successful, we can’t just build a set of components and hope they work. We have to actively help people find it, use it and contribute to it. That means we have to go out and talk about it. We have to support people in learning to use it and help new teams adopt it. These engagement activities and collaborative processes that sit around it can help to promote awareness of the why, not just the what. At GDS, we ran workshops on accessibility in the design system, getting people to browse various web pages using visual impairment simulation glasses to understand how visually impaired users might experience our content. By working closely with our systems’ users and contributors like this, we have an opportunity to bring them along on the journey of making something accessible. We can help them to test out their code and content and understand how they’ll work on different platforms, and how they might need to be adjusted to make sure they’re accessible. We can teach them what accessibility means in practice. These kinds of activities are invaluable in helping to promote accessible design thinking. And these kinds of lessons – when taught well – are disseminated as colleagues share knowledge with their teams, departments and the wider industry. What design systems can’t do Our industry’s excitement about design systems shows no signs of abating, and I’m excited about the opportunities it affords us to make accessible design the default, not an edge case. But I want to finish on a word about their limitations. While a design system can help to promote awareness of the need to be accessible, and how to design products and services that are, a design system can’t make an organisation fundamentally care about accessibility. Even with the help of a thoughtfully created design system, it’s still possible to make really inaccessible products if you’re not actively working to remove barriers. I feel lucky to have worked somewhere that prioritises accessibility. Thanks to the work of some really brilliant people, it’s just part of the fabric at GDS. (For more on that work and those brilliant people, I can’t think of a better place to start than my colleague Ollie Byford’s talk on inclusive forms.) I’m far from being an accessibility expert, but I can write about this because I’ve worked in an organisation where it’s always a central consideration. This shouldn’t be something to feel lucky about. It should be the default, but sadly we’re not there yet. Not even close. Earlier this year, Domino’s pizza was successfully sued by a blind customer after he was unable to order food on their website or mobile app, despite using screen-reading software. And in a recent study carried out by disability equality charity, Scope, 50% of respondents said that they had given up on buying a product because the website, app or in-store machine had accessibility issues. Legally, reputationally and most importantly, morally, we all have a duty to do better. To make sure our products and services are accessible to everyone. We can use design systems to help us on that journey, but they’re just one part of our toolkit. In the end, it’s about committing to the cause – doing the work to make things accessible. Because accessible design is good design. About the author Amy is a content specialist and design systems advocate who’s spent the last 3 years working as a Senior Content Designer at the Government Digital Service. In that time, she’s led the content strategy for the GOV.UK Design System, including a straightforward and inclusive approach to documentation. In January, Amy will continue her work in this space, in her new role as Product Manager for Babylon Health’s design system, DNA. More articles by Amy Full Article Process style-guides
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