The removal of the footpaths will help increase the width of the carriageway at points where lanes on either side of the median will be barricaded

In Chennai, Bangalore, and Delhi that offer access to free transport, there is a visible change in the public space. The pink slip is not a cure-all for the deep-rooted patriarchy, but they are important steps towards reshaping urban spaces into more inclusive environments

The star also requested his fans, members of the film fraternity, media, party cadres and ‘fellow Indians’ to refer to him ‘simply as Kamal Haasan or Kamal or KH’

The NIA sleuths will interrogate them in custody till November 14, said a source privy to the investigation

The pond at Runway Nagar, Kottapattu, which was deepened a few months ago, is now filled with water after recent rain. Residents are worried that it may overflow and the stagnant water might become a haven for snakes and insects.

Major challenge in translating the book has been to find a way to avoid using past perfects en masse, says Leticia Ibanez

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

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.

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:

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:

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

Laura Kalbag discusses the gift of personal data we give to Big Tech when we share information on its platforms, and how reviving ye olde personal website can be one way to stay in control of the content we share and the data we leak. Christmas is a time for giving, but know what you’re giving to whom.

Is it just me or does nobody have their own website anymore? OK, some people do. But a lot of these sites are outdated, or just a list of links to profiles on big tech platforms. Despite being people who build websites, who love to share on the web, we don’t share much on our own sites.

Of course there are good reasons people don’t have their own websites. For one, having your own site is something of a privilege. Understanding hosting packages, hooking up a domain name, and writing a basic HTML page are not considered the most difficult challenges for a web designer or developer – but they often require intimidating choices, and the ability to wield that knowledge with confidence tends to come with repeated experience.

Buying a domain and renting web hosting doesn’t cost much, but it does cost money, and not everyone can afford that as an ongoing commitment. Building and maintaining a site also takes time. Usually time nobody else is going to pay you for doing the work. Time you could be be spending making the money you need to pay the bills, or time you could be spending with your family and friends.

A personal website also creates personal pressure. Pressure to have things worth sharing. Pressure to be cool and interesting enough for a personal site. Pressure to have a flashy design, or a witty design, or the cleverest and cleanest code. Pressure to keep the site updated, not look like you lost interest, or stopped existing after your site was last updated in 2016.

We are sharing

Most of us share loads of expressive and personal stuff with each other: status updates, photos, videos, code snippets, articles and tutorials. Some people only do these things in social contexts, like those who live on Instagram. Some only in workplace contexts, like the performative professionalism of LinkedIn. And plenty of people mix the two together, like those of us who mix dog photos and tech news on Twitter.

Many of us find sharing what we learn, and learning from each other, to be one of the few joys of working in the web community. One of the reasons web design and development as practices are accessible to people regardless of their background is because of those who believe sharing back is a fundamental element of community. A lot of us taught ourselves how to design and code because of those who shared before us. Our work often depends on free and open frameworks and packages. Our practices evolve at a rapid rate because we share what we’ve learned, our successes and our failures, to benefit others who are working towards the same goals.

But we’re sharing on other people’s platforms

Big Tech has given us a load of social platforms, and the content we’ve shared on those platforms has made them valuable. These platforms are designed to make it easy and convenient to share our thoughts and feelings. And they don’t cost us any money. The social nature of the platforms also make us feel validated. One button press for a like, a love, a star, a share, and we feel appreciated and connected. And it’s all for free. Except it isn’t.

It’s not news anymore that the vast majority of the web is funded by extracting and monetising people’s personal information. Shoshana Zuboff coined the term “surveillance capitalism” to describe this model. Aral Balkan calls it “people farming.” Essentially it means when we are not paying for mainstream tech with money, we are paying for it with our privacy. And sometimes we can pay for tech with money and still have our privacy eroded. (I call this the “have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too model” or the “Spotify model”.)

Many—usually cis, white, heterosexual—people in the tech industry believe that this “privacy tradeoff” is worthwhile. While they have a financial incentive in the continuation of this model, and are not necessarily the worst harmed when their privacy is weakened, their privilege has made them short-sighted. There are many people who are harmed by a model that reinforces stereotypes, discriminates against race, gender and disability, and shares vulnerable people’s information with exploitative corporations and authoritarian governments.

We’re not just making decisions about our own privacy, either. By using a script that sends site visitor information back to somebody else’s server, we’re making our visitors vulnerable. By using an email provider that extracts personal information from our emails, we’re making our contacts vulnerable. By uploading photos of our friends and families to platforms that create facial recognition databases, we’re making our loved ones vulnerable.

Making technology that respects the rights of the people using it isn’t a fun responsibility to take on. It’s also a challenging exercise to weigh our convenience and privilege against exposing other people to harm when life feels difficult already. But we can’t sit back and expect other people/overseers/charities/ombudsmen/deities to fix our communities or industries for us. We’ve got to do some of the work, pay some of the costs, and take responsibility for ourselves. Especially if we are people who can afford it or have the time. We can’t keep prioritising our conveniences over the safety of other people.

One small way to get our independence and agency back from exploitative platforms is to build personal websites to share on instead. Of course, it’s a tiny tiny step. But it’s a step to taking back control, and building a web that neither relies upon, nor feeds, the harms of Big Tech.

Personal websites give us independence and agency

Personal doesn’t have to mean individualistic. Your website might be your own blog, portfolio or hobby project, but it could also be for your community, local team or cause. It could be all about a person, or anonymous. You could use it to showcase other people’s work that you appreciate, such as links to articles you’ve found valuable.

A website doesn’t have to be a fancy work of art that’ll be written up in a hundred publications, a website is just an HTML page. You can even add some CSS if you want to show off.

A home (or an office)

When people ask where to find you on the web, what do you tell them? Your personal website can be your home on the web. Or, if you don’t like to share your personal life in public, it can be more like your office. As with your home or your office, you can make it work for your own needs. Do you need a place that’s great for socialising, or somewhere to present your work? Without the constraints of somebody else’s platform, you get to choose what works for you.

Your priorities

For a long time, I’ve been giving talks about being conscious of the impacts of our work. But when I talk about the principles of small technology or the ethical design manifesto, people often tell me how impossible it is take a stand against harmful practices at their job.

Personal sites give you the freedom to practice the design and development you care about, without the constraints of your boss’s bad business model or your manager’s questionable priorities. We can create accessible and inclusive sites that don’t exploit our visitors. We can experiment and play to work out what really matters to us. If we don’t like our personal site, we can start again from scratch, iterate, change, keep working to make it better.

Your choice of design

Your own personal website means you choose the design. Rather than sharing on a blogging platform like Medium, we can make our design reflect our content and our principles. We don’t need to have ads, paywalls or article limits imposed on us.

No tracking

It does rather defeat the point of having a personal website, if you then hook it up to all the tracking mechanisms of Big Tech. Google Analytics? No thanks. Twitter follow button? I’d rather not. Facebook Like button? You must be joking. One of the benefits of having your own personal site is that you can make your personal site a tracking-free haven for your site’s visitors. All the personal websites I’ve shared here are tracking-free. Trust me, it’s not easy to find websites that value their visitors like this!

Staying connected

A personal website doesn’t mean an antisocial website. Charlie Owen’s site comprises a feed of her notes, checkins, likes, replies, reposts and quotes, along with her longer-form posts and talks.

If you want to go hardcore, you can even run your own social platform instance. I have my own Mastodon instance, where I can post and socialise with other people in the “fediverse,” all from the comfort and control of my own domain.

Freedom from the popularity contest (and much of the harassment)

There’s value to being sociable, but one of the perks of having your own personal site is freedom from follower counts, likes, claps, and other popularity contests that reduce your self-expressions into impressions. It’s nice to know when people like your work, or find it valuable, but the competition created from chasing impressive numbers results in unequal power structures, clickbait, and marginalised people having their work appropriated without credit. A personal site means your work can still be shared but is also more likely to stay in that location, at the same URL, for much longer. You also get the final say over who can comment on your work in your own space. Wave goodbye to the trolls, they can go mutter to themselves under their own bridges.

Your choice of code

As I mentioned earlier, your website doesn’t have to be anything more than an HTML page. (Just think how fast that would load!) With your own personal site, you get to choose what code you want to write (or not write) and which frameworks you want to use (or not use).

As an individual or a small group, you don’t need to worry about scale, or accommodating as many users as possible. You can choose what works for you, even what you find fun. So I thought I’d share with you the whats and whys of my own personal site setup.

Your choice of setup

I use iwantmyname to buy domain names and Greenhost for web hosting. (Greenhost kindly provides Small Technology Foundation with free hosting, as part of their Eclipsis hosting for “Internet freedom, liberation technology developers, administrators and digital rights activists.” You don’t get many benefits in this line of work, so I treasure Greenhost’s/Open Technology Fund’s kindness.)

My blog has ten years’ worth of posts, so I rely on a content management system (CMS) to keep me organised, and help me write new posts with as little fuss as possible. Two years ago, I moved from WordPress to Hugo, a static site generator. Hugo is fine. I wrote my own theme for Hugo because I can, and also because I value accessible HTML and CSS. The setup works well for a personal site.

Now my website is just a self-hosted static site, it’s noticeably faster. Importantly, I feel I have more ownership and control over my own site. The only third-party service my site needs is my web host. As it’s “serverless”, my site also doesn’t have the security risks associated with a server-side CMS/database.

Nowadays, static sites and JAMstack (JavaScript, APIs, Markup -stack) are ultra trendy. While static sites have the aforementioned benefits, I worry about the APIs bit in the JAMstack. With static site generators, we (can, if we want) take out a number of the privacy, security and performance concerns of serverside development, only to plug them all back in with APIs. Every time we use a third-party API for critical functionality, we become dependent on it. We add weakness in the deployment process because we rely on their uptime and performance, but we also become reliant on the organisations behind the API. Are they a big tech platform? What are we paying for their service? What do they get out of it? Does it compromise the privacy and security of our site’s visitors? Are we lending our loyalty to an organisation that causes harm, or provides infrastructure to entities that cause harm?

For all we speak of interoperability and standards, we know we’re unlikely to move away from a shady service, because it’s too deeply embedded in our organisational processes and/or developer conveniences. What if we don’t create that dependent relationship in the first place?

It’s why I use Site.js. Site.js is a small tech, free and open, alternative to web frameworks and tools of Big Tech. I use Site.js to run my own secure (Site.js provides automatic trusted TLS for localhost) development and production servers, and rapidly sync my site between them. It has no dependence on third-parties, no tracking, and comes as a single lightweight binary. It only took one line in the terminal to install it locally, and the same line to install it on my production server. I didn’t need to buy, bolt on or configure an SSL certificate. Site.js took care of it all.

In development, I use Site.js with Hugo to run my site on localhost. To test across devices, I run it on my hostname with ngrok (a tunnelling app) to expose my development machine.

Site.js also provides me with ephemeral statistics, not analytics. I know what’s popular, what’s 404ing, and the referrer, but my site’s visitors are not tracked. The stats themselves are accessible from a cryptographically secure URL (no login required) so I could share this URL with whoever I wanted.

For those who want the dynamic functionality often afforded by third-party APIs, Site.js enables you to layer your own dynamic functionality on top of static functionality. We did this for Small Technology Foundation’s fund page. We wanted our patrons to be able to fund us without us relying on a big tech crowdfunding platform (and all the tracking that comes along with it). Aral integrated Stripe’s custom checkout functionality on top of our static site so we could have security for our patrons without relinquishing all our control over to a third party. You can even build a little chat app with Site.js.

Every decision has an impact

As designers and developers, it’s easy to accept the status quo. The big tech platforms already exist and are easy to use. There are so many decisions to be made as part of our work, we tend to just go with what’s popular and convenient. But those little decisions can have a big impact, especially on the people using what we build.

But all is not yet lost. We can still build alternatives and work towards technology that values human welfare over corporate profit. We’ve got to take control back bit by bit, and building our own personal websites is a start.

So go on, get going! Have you already got your own website already? Fabulous! Is there anything you can do to make it easier for those who don’t have their own sites yet? Could you help a person move their site away from a big platform? Could you write a tutorial or script that provides guidance and reassurance? Could you gift a person a domain name or hosting for a year?

Your own personal site might be a personal thing, but a community and culture of personal sites could make a significant difference.

About the author

Laura Kalbag is a British designer living in Ireland, and author of Accessibility For Everyone from A Book Apart. She’s one third of Small Technology Foundation, a tiny two-person-and-one-husky not-for-profit organisation. At Small Technology Foundation, Laura works on a web privacy tool called Better Blocker, and initiatives to advocate for and build small technology to protect personhood and democracy in the digital network age.

More articles by Laura

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