Applying human ergonomics and design principles to syntax highlighting
Addressing Accessibility Barriers in Programming for People with Visual Impairments: A Literature Review
Accessibility issues with programming languages and programming environments pose a major barrier for students with visual impairments to participate in computing related courses as well as threatens the productivity of professional programmers with visual impairments. To remedy this, the past two decades have witnessed an increase in accessibility research designed to investigate and address the challenges faced by people with visual impairments while programming or learning how to program. We conducted a literature review of accessibility research in this domain. The aim was to identify, aggregate, and highlight known accessibility barriers to programming faced by professional programmers and students with visual impairments learning how to code as well as to identify all solutions that have been proposed to address these barriers. We selected and analyzed 70 papers reporting on accessibility of programming and programming environments for people with visual impairments. Numerous barriers to programming by people with visual impairments have been identified in the literature. Some of these barriers are understudied and present opportunities for future work. A lot of studies have also proposed tools and new accessible programming languages to address the accessibility issues of current programming languages and programming environments.
Our CSS isn't opinionated enough
Why styling on semantics and roles could make accessibility harder to skip
Lexicon Embeds Overview
There’s an excellent discussion and thread about syntax highlighting of code blocks happening today: I think most notably there’s some alignment around using a lexicon to represent code blocks (say Tangled’s strings) and embedding those, rather than just doing syntax highlighting w/in the constraints of a bsky post. This seems like a good place to hammer a bunch of things out.
Font with Built-In Syntax Highlighting
An experiment in javascript-free syntax highlighting, made possible by opentype contextual alternates and COLR table
Syntax - Web Development Podcast
Full Stack Web Developers Wes Bos and Scott Tolinski dive deep into web development, CSS, JavaScript, Frameworks, Typescript, Servers and more. Listen in 2 times a week!
#10: "Bad at CSS" by Keith Cirkel
Accessibility of low-code approaches: A systematic literature review
Context: Model-driven approaches are increasingly used in different domains, such as education, finance and app development, in order to involve non-developers in the software development process. Such tools are hugely dependent on visual elements and thus might not be accessible for users with specific challenges, e.g., visual impairments. Objectives: To locate and analyse existing literature on the accessibility of low-code approaches, their strengths and weaknesses and key directions for future research. Methods: We carried out a systematic literature review and searched through five leading databases for primary studies. We used both quantitative and qualitative methods for data synthesis. Results: After reviewing and filtering 918 located studies, and conducting both backward and forward snowballing, we identified 38 primary studies that were included in our analysis. We found most papers focusing on accessibility of visual languages and block-based programming. Conclusion: Limited work has been done on improving low code programming environment accessibility. The findings of this systematic literature review will assist researchers and developers in understanding the accessibility issues in low-code approaches and what has been done so far to develop accessible approaches.
Designing for Colour-Blindness
As always, I’ve been tinkering with the site over the last few weeks. One of the adjustments I made was to remove the underlines from links, which I felt mad...
Keeping type consistent in changing conditions
Grade is a subtle typographic adjustment that preserves visual balance across shifting contexts
Welcome | Yale Grammatical Diversity Project: English in North America
This Project explores syntactic diversity found in varieties of English spoken in North America. By documenting the subtle, but systematic, differences in the syntax of English varieties, it provides a crucial source of data for the development of theories of human linguistic knowledge.
Sound & Vision
Explore the future of type with the Re:Vision 2025 typographic playground—an interactive showcase of emerging type trends. Dive in and shape the next wave of visual language.
Quint (@quint-lang.org)
New podcast with @bugarela.com on @ColorsofWeb3pod talking spec-driven development and how we benefit from precision and executability of specs, especially in the AI era. Why specs can't just be English and markdown↓
How to Choose Colors for Your CLI Applications · Luna’s Blog
Let’s say you’re creating a CLI tool which has to display syntax highlighted source code. You begin by choosing some colors which look nice with your chosen terminal theme:
Too Much Color
I spent too much time looking at too many colo(u)rs to try and optimise them for csskit. Here are some interesting findings.
Textile Markup Language Documentation
The official documentation for Textile Markup Language - A humane web text generator.
To elaborate, assistive technology tend to necessitate rich and open representations to capture authorial intent that can be interacted with in multimodal ways. HTML is the canonical example. For example, every application having to manually script with a screen reader doesn't scale.
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The intersection between accessibility technology and malleable software seems under explored.