The Curious Engineer

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Eric Bailey

ericwbailey.website

Accessibility advocate, writer, developer, and speaker

Frontend / CSS / browsersWeb developmentEssays / personal

’15’16’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
191 from 30 Oct 2015 to 20 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (13 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://ericwbailey.website/feed/feed.xml

2026 12

  1. The Accessibility Compat Data project has a homepage now, and you should support the project
  2. GitHub repository landing pages now show an accessibility tab, if provided
  3. CSS-Tricks could be a co-op
  4. A proposal for new Netflix content rating icons
  5. Here’s yet another metaphor about tech debt
  6. The case for an accessibility designer vibe coding when all his coworkers are also vibe coding
  7. Announcing What Can’t I Press?
  8. Evolved antennas, LLM-generated code, and a potential antifuture
  9. A compelling title that is cryptic enough to get you to take action on it
  10. Here’s how to instruct a LLM to reference the ARIA Authoring Practices Guide
  11. You probably shouldn’t be annotating focus order
  12. How an accessibility designer adds keyboard shortcuts to a web app

2025 11

  1. Evaluating Fable’s pay-per-project offering
  2. On inclusive personas and inclusive user research
  3. Newsletters that regularly hit my inbox these days
  4. You MUST listen to RFC 2119
  5. Quality is a trap
  6. Organizing a design system via folksonomy
  7. Article pitch for your consideration
  8. Tag, you’re it
  9. Harm reduction principles for digital accessibility practitioners
  10. Evaluating overlay-adjacent accessibility products
  11. Stanislav Petrov

2024 20

  1. GitHub’s updated Commits page and the interactive list component
  2. Don’t forget to localize your icons
  3. Heading elements have been added to Project board views to improve screen reader page navigation
  4. Accessibility preference settings, information architecture, and internalized ableism
  5. a11y-syntax-highlighting has been updated
  6. Basic keyboard shortcut support for focused links
  7. These three links spell out a big uh oh for where things are headed when placed in context with each other
  8. Dungeons & Dragons taught me how to write alt text
  9. Short note: Disavowing Snake People 3.0: Slither with a Hiss
  10. Free idea: design token ugly mode
  11. Consent, LLM scrapers, and poisoning the well
  12. Workplace discrimination: another terrible thing Windows Recall might enable
  13. Multipage Version Zine, Issue 1
  14. <code>contrast-color()</code> is a good thing, but also solving the problem at the wrong layer
  15. I love my slightly smart tiny TV
  16. Invisible success
  17. A perceived contradiction to internalize when working on design systems
  18. Thoughts on embedding alternative text metadata into images
  19. On Jakob Nielsen, AI hype, and accessibility
  20. Oh shit banners

2023 19

  1. I restyled my Mastodon instance
  2. Accessibility annotation kits only annotate
  3. Websites, politics, and preferences
  4. Zombie Slack channels
  5. Websites are like bridges
  6. GitHub now has a setting to underline links
  7. Equivalent experience can cut both ways
  8. Use of the design system should factor into promotion packets
  9. Formative posts
  10. My jeans’ metadata may outlive the company that sold them
  11. The five types of people who produce inaccessible code
  12. <code>display: contents</code> considered harmful
  13. Global Accessibility Anger Day
  14. Don’t use custom CSS scrollbars
  15. Sandcastles
  16. Sabbath mode and assistive technology features
  17. I doubled-down on RSS
  18. My Mastodon strategy
  19. Modern Health, frameworks, performance, and harm

2022 20

  1. Centerless
  2. Swearing and automatic captions
  3. <code>aria-label</code> is a code smell
  4. Yes, accessibility is also a backend concern
  5. Visit for a surprise
  6. Re: Selling your extension
  7. Dot website
  8. Saying thank you
  9. The case for null in design systems
  10. Where do you start measuring distance from when the origin is the bottom of a block of text?
  11. The optics of pair programming
  12. All the user-facing states
  13. #WorstWorkWednesday
  14. It needs to map back to a role
  15. The case for adding validation state to your design tokens
  16. Comic Sans is a good typeface, actually
  17. Tribble
  18. Maralinga bomb test
  19. “Evergreen” Does Not Mean Immediately Available
  20. I’ve had enough! When access friction becomes an access barrier

2021 41

  1. Chinese rooms, wasps, slime molds, and the problem of other minds
  2. Where do you put spacing on design system components?
  3. Test Your Product on a Crappy Laptop
  4. Your CSS is an interface
  5. The endless search for “here” in the unhelpful “click here” button
  6. Spear phishing with Slackbot for fun and profit
  7. Insulin dump
  8. Published
  9. thoughtbot.com, dark mode, and other user preferences
  10. What they don’t tell you when you translate your app
  11. Forbidden noodles
  12. accessiBe and the false David vs. Goliath narrative
  13. A bad accessibility trend I’ve noticed
  14. Ham biscuit on
  15. Organize your CSS declarations alphabetically
  16. The lawnmower button
  17. Modifications we’ve made to the Design Sprint
  18. Don’t use custom CSS mouse cursors
  19. How I grew The A11Y Project to 10k followers on Twitter
  20. How I grew The A11Y Project to 10k followers on Twitter
  21. Listing posts in Eleventy when you publish offsite
  22. To subset or not subset fonts
  23. CSS is a Strongly Typed Language
  24. Mobile Accessibility: How to Build Apps that Work for All Users
  25. How to make an ineffective 404 page
  26. Myth: Alternate text and automation
  27. Minor version bump
  28. A conversation can be an output
  29. Should I use an accessibility overlay
  30. Give me a definition for the word dashboard
  31. An Introduction to macOS Voice Control
  32. Implicit cultural norms and accessible social media
  33. How 3 hours of conversation saved a company hundreds of thousands of dollars
  34. My typical day
  35. Accessibility auditing and ego
  36. Blogroll
  37. Presentation panic
  38. How-to: Use the tabindex attribute
  39. An introduction to macOS Head Pointer
  40. Open UI and implicit parent/child relationships in HTML
  41. Undercover Founder

2020 21

  1. A website is like a puppy
  2. In defense of Mega Man boss lairs
  3. Representation Matters
  4. So you wanna create an eco-friendly website
  5. Using a folder other than <code>posts/</code> with Eleventy
  6. Tailwind versus BEM
  7. Focus Management and Inert
  8. Saying no to Diez (for now)
  9. Consider the Tomato
  10. The Radium Craze
  11. a11y is web accessibility
  12. The world does not revolve around your product
  13. Mug handles
  14. Improving the usability and accessibility of a healthcare website by being mindful of reading level
  15. I don’t want your job
  16. A Complete Guide to CSS Functions
  17. Myth: ARIA Has Perfect Support
  18. SVG, Favicons, and All the Fun Things We Can Do With Them
  19. How to not make a résumé in React
  20. Using personas in the Product Design Sprint
  21. Operating System and Browser Accessibility Display Modes

2019 14

  1. What the Web Still Is
  2. Tech metaphors
  3. Truths about digital accessibility
  4. Attempting to corral colors with a Sass function
  5. ARIA is Spackle, Not Rebar
  6. Universal Design: 11 Practical Tips to Make Your Sites and Apps More Accessible
  7. Lighthouse
  8. Fighting uphill
  9. Revisiting prefers-reduced-motion, the reduced motion media query
  10. An Introduction to the Reduced Motion Media Query
  11. slashbot
  12. Paint the Picture, Not the Frame: How Browsers Provide Everything Users Need
  13. Little Library
  14. Reader Mode: The Button to Beat

2018 10

  1. Web components still need to be accessible
  2. Be the Villain
  3. Quick test: Large touch targets
  4. A designer developing for Android
  5. Quick Tip: Use the “lang” Attribute for Better Accessibility
  6. The Importance of Heading Levels for Assistive Technology
  7. The possibilities of the color-adjust property
  8. How to Lead Better User Interviews
  9. Focusing on Focus Styles
  10. Building a Good Download… Button?

2017 9

  1. How to build a cloud-hosted accessibility testing Windows computer using Amazon WorkSpaces
  2. How accessible is your website for the disabled? Consider doing an audit to find out
  3. Consistently Inconsistent: The Pitfalls of Abandoning External Consistency
  4. Keeping track of letter-spacing, some guidelines
  5. Equifax Data Breach, Credit Freezes, and Beholden Design
  6. Make technology work for you, not the other way around
  7. Let’s Talk About Speech CSS
  8. Crafting a chatbot people will use: Part 2
  9. Crafting a chatbot people will use: Part 1

2016 7

  1. Improving the User Experience of IoT Firmware Updates
  2. Building a better button in CSS
  3. Accessible SVGs in High Contrast Mode
  4. Instituting a culture of accessibility in your organization: Part 2
  5. Organizational buy-in on Responsive Design
  6. Instituting a culture of accessibility in your organization: Part 1
  7. Battery Status API: We need to talk

2015 1

  1. I’ll Make an Exception Just for You: Using the Exception Comment to Help Maintain Mature, Large-scale Sass Projects

Undated 6

  1. I love my not-smart TV
  2. Published
  3. speaker
  4. maintain some projects
  5. Mastodon
  6. Virtual Coffee