Latest Event News

Kicking off the first of our "Meet the Speakers" series by welcoming Cyd Stumpel to FFConf to speak on "Prefers Enhanced Motion".

Cyd's origin story:

I got so obsessed with proving I actually knew what I was doing that I accidentally became a conference speaker and a university teacher.

We asked: If you could ban one "enhancement" from every website overnight, what's going first? (ours would be scroll jacking!)

(AI) Chatbots are the first answer that comes to mind, no one wants to talk to a robot. But, from a frontend point of view, I would ban scroll-driven text animations immediately if I had the power. Text animations should nearly always be scroll-triggered, and they should trigger before you reach the part of the page, so you're never left with a half empty page on scrolling.

Read Cyd's full interview and meet Cyd and all our speakers on 13th November!

From Our Archive

In 2024, we welcomed Léonie Watson back on stage, this time to talk about AI and Accessibility: the Good, the Bad, and the Bollocks

She talked about the benefits of using AI as a blind person including the incredible level of detail her screen reader provides in describing images and videos when using AI.

Her conclusion:

Use these tools, but knowing that you can't trust what they say and knowing how, where and when to verify is probably the most important thing of all especially around accessibility because when we build websites or apps, people need to be able to use them, they need to get the job done and if we take shortcuts without verifying what we are being told, that is on us.

Community News

Léonie spoke over 18 months ago but over on her blog this week, she posted Accessibility is resistance! It talks about the tangible benefits of AI to a blind person, and closes with:

If you want to resist AI, make accessibility part of everything you do, every decision you make, every product you design and build. Remove the need for people to use AI to compensate, and remember, accessibility is resistance.

Over in standards-land, Lea Verou posted a thoughtful and thorough article talking through the impact of polyfills and making the case In Defence of Polyfills against a few murmurs from standards people that polyfills could be bad.

Polyfills make the Web faster, inclusive, and more robust.

Speaking of polyfills, Bramus Van Damme posited thoughts on polyfilling CSS, a known minefield, with the use of CSS Parser Extensions. To be clear: this is just an idea at this stage, but we think it's one with a lot of potential.