In the nineties, Clippy lived inside the Microsoft Office suite. It was an avatar of an actual paperclip that would interrupt your writing with tips. Did it provide lots of value? I can't remember. I recall there were good easter eggs. But I don't think it really fixed our productivity in some groundbreaking way. A cute relic of the past, in a time where a lot less people were using computers daily.

Fast forward to this week. I used the current version of Microsoft Word, on the web, to write a thing for work. I wrote a headline. Let's say it was “Marketing 2024”. You won't believe what happened next. A blue circle appeared next to the headline. When I hovered over it, it asked me if I wanted it to insert an image. “An image?”, I thought, somewhat surprised. Was this what the future looked like? Did Clippy return? It certainly got in the way of my writing. When I obliged, it put in a random image that felt very marketing-plan-y. It also showed me a gallery of other images for me to pick instead.

It left me with lots of feelings, the main one being how unnecessary all of this was. All that computing power!

The “AI” feature I described assists with images, but Microsoft are rolling out Copilot across many of their products. It can also write new text, or improve existing text in ways you specify, the kinds of features we've seen large language models provide. Copilot is a clever name, and a clever framing of what these chatbots can do: they're not the main driver, that's you as a user, but they can be there alongside you.

And yet, I'm not convinced these features are helpful. They interrupt a flow, the actual content production. And they're actively pushed onto users, from in-software notifications to promotional webinars. If that push is successful, everyone in the world will have to put up with the fruits of these features. It's to be seen what those fruits are: content that is better, content that is more superfluous or a bit of both?

User need?

Do these features empower users? They appear to, from the onset. Of course, a lot of the world's marketing plans look very similar, people probably already copy pasted them from one another or used boilerplates. This just makes recycling old ideas available through a different interface. It makes it easier to make something to that seems ok.

But ultimately, is it the right kind of support? Personally, I want software to push me not towards reusing what exists, but away from that (and that's harder). Whether I'm producing a plan or hefty biography, push me towards thinking critically about the work, rather than offering a quick way out.

To be fair, Word has some features today that help you improve content, but mostly to correct style, grammar and punctuation (nice!). Well, and, I'm not making this up, to help remove “sensitive geopolitical references”.

I did ok on formality and sensitive political references

Writing as trying to discover something new

When I write or (publicly) talk, I hope to write or say something that is relatively unique. Obviously, I don't have the illusion I actually do, unique things are rare, everyone's always iterating upon the work of others. But to at least try to find a new perspective is the point of most writing (if it's meant for reading or convincing). That's what we're all trying to do, right?

Whether it's marketing copy, a techy blog post, a stage play or a philosophical treaty, would anyone set out to produce something similar to what already exists? Would the stage play sell tickets if it sounded like the same old? Would your product sell if you use the same copy as your competitor? (Ok, that last one happens all the time)

Discovering new ways is central to creativity. When Miles Davis recorded his groundbreaking album Kind of blue, he gave musicians scales and melody lines, and asked them to improvise. They hardly practiced and did not know the music inside out before they started. Herbie Hancock explains this made the whole album a lot more spontaneous:

Miles' idea was that… he wanted to capture the spirit of discovery in the music. (…) He wants to capture discovering the music on the record.

(in: The making of Kind of Blue, 6:22)

I recommend that video, it's full of people who understand music and this music in particular. They try and explain some of the creativity of this particular piece.

Of course, most writing doesn't have to yield a creative masterpiece. But it's probably that sense of discovery where, like making music, writing gets most interesting. For writers and for readers. More than recycling old and making grammatical and stylistic improvements (quite useful), writing assistants could drive us in the direction of discovery more.

Unnecessary “AI”

It's not just for fun that I'm calling “unnecessary” on this feature (and who am I to judge, or, frankly, who do I think I am?). This is feature that people probably worked on hard and that some users may find very useful. But still, it's worth considering the need. Large language models, that most “AI” features are based on, cost a lot of computing power, both training them and running them. The training also involves a lot of (underpaid) labour of people, who classify content to make the magic work. And then there's all the knock-on effects on society of having harms perpetuated and being stuck with lots of content that nobody thought was worth writing in the first place.

We've got to think about whether or not the features we build with this are actually useful, actually unnecessary or somewhere in between. We don't have to add “AI” to every product, even in an industry where we see investors push for that, we can choose to do otherwise. (</man-yelling-at-cloud>). One company stood out thinking about this especially carefully in the last while: iA wrote Writing with AI.

Originally posted as Clippy returned (as an unnecessary “AI”) on Hidde's blog.

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Wait, what, it's only a week until 2024? Time for what has become a yearly tradition… in this post, I'll review some of my 2023 in work, conferences, reading, writing, listening, music and learnings.

Note: like my posts about 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018 and 2017, this post is mostly ‘highlights’, lowlights left out intentionally.

Work

The work year was different than usual: my full time job (first in 10 years or so) ceased to exist and I switched back to freelancing.

Freelancing

In July I joined the NL Design System team (almost) full time. We support a community of web specialists from across the Dutch government to create open-source components and guidelines for all. I joined as an accessibility and developer relations specialist. Now I'm PR/communications lead, with still some time for accessibility (but none for devrel). The project is very much up my ally. I really like the colleagues. I also feel fortunate to bring my experience into this team. And, of course, just as fortunate to have made it once again into a team where I get to learn lots from the others (and all of the design system, government, accessibility and development experience between them).

Outside of NL Design System, I did some in-house workshops, talks about the web and web accessibility, and the occasional WCAG audit.

Volunteering

I continued in Open UI CG, mostly scribing, learning and then conveying some of the work to developer audiences in blog posts and talks. It's still one of my favourite meetings of the week.

Other volunteering didn't work so well. I joined the marketing team of my local solar energy community, made plans but found no time to properly work on them and left. I also joined the CSS WG as an Invited Expert, a long time dream come true. But so far, I only managed to join one meeting and only marginally kept up with emails and issues. Let's say between when I said yes and when it was official, a lot changed at work and I wanted to spend more time with family. I hope they don't revoke my status just yet and hope to start prioritising my WG involvement sometime in 2024.

Conferences

Last year, as the popover attribute started to make its way into browsers, I hoped I would do a talk about the nitty gritty of building popovers (repeating the phrasing I used last year). That happened. I wrote that talk and took it to a number of events. In addition, I made a new talk called “ARIA, The Good Parts” and did a 10 minute rant for the IAAP-EU called “Will tools save us?”.

At CSS Day, I met the hotel cat once again

All my talks in 2023:

• Shifting left: making accessibility easier, by doing it earlier at a11yTalks (online)
• “Dialog dilemmas and modal mischief: a deep dive into popovers and how to build them”, I like long names, what can I say? This popover talk happened at JSNation (Amsterdam) (7 minute edition, with transcript), CSS Day (Amsterdam), Front Conference (Zurich), HalfStack (Vienna), Covent of Wisdom (Eindhoven) and React Advanced (London)
• “ARIA: the good parts” at Paris Web (Paris, obvs), NDC (Porto) and WeAreDevelopers (online)
• “Will tools save us” - introduction to a panel for IAAP-EU's celebration of the 3rd anniversary of the Web Accessibility Directive (Brussels)

I also attended Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf and State of the Browser in London.

Reading

I read a bit less than in the last year, most of them while on holiday or travel (see: full reading list if you like book covers). These are some books I can recommend:

• Just Human by Arielle Silverman (auto biography), in which she shares her own experience being blind within the context of society, from the moment she was born to the age of 36. Learned a few things about the workings of ableism.
• Make me one dimensional by Sang Young Park (novel). Murder mystery, friendships and growing up.
• Doe zelf normaal by Maxim Februari (non-fiction), on the role of “datafication” in society. Original, clear, funny at times, witty.
• Le Perfezioni (De perfecties) by Vincenzo Latronico (novel). On gentrification, Berlin, millenials.
• Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (novel). The videogame industry, sudden success, weird relationships. Was told this is ‘a TikTok sensation’, but won't let that ruin my feelings about the book or my liking it. Consumed this as an audiobook on a few long drives.
• Binge by Douglas Coupland (short stories), 60 (!) stories, loved most of them, easy to read in between other tasks.

Music

Saw more live music than in the year before (yay, thanks to babysitters and being more ready for their help as a family). I got lucky that the artists I listened to also toured near me on the right dates, so I got to see:

• Little Simz, at North Sea Jazz. Was spectacular. Would have loved a full band, vocals etc, but even without that it was great. I was introduced to her No Thank You album, worked my way back through Sometimes I Might Be An Introvert and Grey Area, and now I'm all in Stillness in Wonderland, it was a fantastic musical rabbit hole.
• James Blake, at 070. I don't understand how he makes music (how do synthesisers work?), but the new album is great and sounded excellent live. Some fans knew it was birthday, so we all sang.
• Esperanza Spalding, also at North Sea Jazz. I'd not heard of the fairly sexist song ‘Girl Talk’, but the way she performed it with Fred Hersch was awesome (see Girl Talk on YouTube).

I also listened a lot to De Jeugd van Tegenwoordig, Sault, Sef, WIES, Massive Attack and Typhoon.

I made a live music log to track concerts publicly (inspired by Vasilis).

Writing

Including this one, I wrote 15 posts this year, some lengthier than others. Less than usual. There's a bunch of drafts that I'm looking forward to finish!
Of this year's posts, most shared were an FAQ on accessibility and one on ableism in the Vercel community.

Most sceptical were a few posts I wrote about ‘AI’, where I said that opt-out is rude, ‘AI’ content isn't user centered and LLMs are not artificial, nor intelligent.

Cities

I stayed in Taipei, Kaohsiung, Düsseldorf, Porto (2x), Berlin, Zurich, Vienna, Paris, Brussels, London (3x), Bristol and Porto.

I wanted and was able to do a lot of this year's conference travel by trains, twice by night train. The latter aren't cheap if you want some comfort (I went for beds), but very pleasant and lower in emissions than flights would have been.

Saw hot air balloons in Bristol

Learnings

Some random things I learned this year, in no particular order.

• Social media doesn't need algorithms for that real community feel. I still like it on Mastodon and still mostly left Twitter and Bluesky. I still use Instagram (to follow artists) and LinkedIn (to follow a random mix of people that never came to Mastodon).
• A lot about electric cars (and probably still too little). Quite the rabbit hole, but I bought one, so that I can stop buying petrol. I didn't want to buy one without researching some ins and outs.
• In git: to fix commits further back than the very last one, by doing fixup commits and autosquashing them. I hope I won't forget.
• Lots of words in Mandarin (~1000). I had some formal courses, but midway this year I started Duolingo (add me!). It uses simplified Chinese characters (not traditional) and Taiwanese friends and family scold me for that. But honestly, the upsides outweigh the downsides for me.
• Fresh YouTube accounts (I set one up for work) recommend even more extreme-right content than my many-years-old one does. I wish I could turn recommendations off altogether.
• Conference speakers are actually just humans.
• Lots of things about government departments and how they work together and the meanings of very specific acronyms.

Wrapping up

Thanks for reading, hope there's useful recommendations in this post. If you're still reading let me end with my best wishes to you for the new year, see you in the next!

Originally posted as 2023 in review on Hidde's blog.

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Inspired by Chris Coyier' Answers to common (web) design questions, which was inspired by Dan Mall's earlier post, here's list of common accessibility questions.

Should I use links or buttons?

Yes.

Links if it takes the user somewhere, buttons if it performs an action. Also buttons if the action is submitting a form (even if the user is then taken somewhere). Trying to avoid nuance in this post, but here's some nuance around buttons and links.

Do we have users with disabilities?

Yes.

It's unlikely you know every single one of your users and exactly how they use the web. It's even more unlikely that the the group and the people within it stays exactly the same forever.

What's an accessibility conformance audit?

Someone will find out for every of the 56 Success Criteria in WCAG whether your site meets it or not (counting version 2.2, Level A + AA). Ideally, they also explain what the issues are and how to fix them (so that you can do it). This is also called a conformance evaluation.

Who should “do” accessibility in our team?

Everyone. Content folks, developers, designers and product managers all have accessibility tasks to do.

What are some quick tests I can do?

Use your UI with Tab / Shift Tab on a keyboard (check settings if on a Mac), can you reach everything without a mouse? Does the order make sense?

Click on labels for form fields, they should focus the field they are a label of.

Check if your videos and audio (podcasts?) have captions / transcripts.

Is accessibility ever done?

No. It's a continuous process, even if your audit says you meet all Success Criteria today, it's common to stop meeting it. Websites change. You'll want to continuously monitor accessibility, just like with security and privacy.

Do we have legal obligations to make our products accessible?

Very likely. Also if you're not government (for instance, see European Accessibility Act).

There are policies and laws all around the world.

Is it all my website's fault?

No, some problems can be solved by browsers, assistive technologies and/or authoring tools.

WCAG 3.0 will be released soon, right?

Not likely. The goals are good and I've long supported them (still do), but it will be many years for this to be a real thing, WCAG 3.0 is still in a very early phase. The colour algorithm that's being considered for it is interesting to already try and meet as it better meets user needs than current WCAG algo.

Will “AI” improve accessibility?

Machine learning can be a great tool for automating part of the captioning process in lots of languages, and various other things.

But it's unlikely LLMs, often called “AI”, will output accessible code. To train such an LLM, an enormous set of very accessible code would need to exist (it doesn't). Component-building and accessibility semantics also require intentionality, which these systems specifically aren't good at.

Is the Axe / Page Insights score all that matters? Or the WCAG audit result?

No. Any system that scores your site and returns some number (including WCAG audits) does not fully describe your accessibility situation. Accessibility is, ultimately, about people and whether they can use your site. It's about recognising, then removing barriers. Metrics can help in various ways, but they are not the end goal. And the most easily measureable is not necessarily the most impactful.

More detailed accessibility posts can be found elsewhere on this blog.

Originally posted as Answers to common (web) accessibility questions on Hidde's blog.

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This week, a product launched and claimed to generate “production ready” code. But it also generates code with accessibility problems, which contradicts “production ready”. When someone called this out publicly, a community showed itself from its worst side. What can we learn?

I'll state again, I wrote this to share learnings around community respondes to a concern about accessibility issues. Because these kinds of replies are common and it's useful to have context. I don't want to add fuel to the issue, which is why I left out links to individual tweets and people.

I do want to call out Vercel, a business with a large voice in the developer community, which I do at the end of the post.

The “production ready” claim

I’ll start by elaborating on my first point. “Has accessibility issues” contradicts “production ready”, for three reasons:

1. equal access to information is a human right
2. most organisations have legal requirements to make accessible products
3. it can cost companies money if people can’t use their products (you wouldn’t stop every fifth customer from entering your shop).

I will note it was an “alpha” launch, but the words “production ready” were used and not nuanced (not in marketing and not in the actual tool; a warning banner could go a long way). Fair enough, maybe they want to look at accessibility later (a personal pet peeve though: I recommend shifting left instead, doing accessibility earlier is easier).

The company could have made different choices. If it is known that accessibility is problematic, maybe the product could have come with a checklist that helps people avoid some of the most common issues? Or some kind of warning or banner that explains nuances the “production ready” line? These are choices to be made, to balance between what makes the product look less good and what harms end users.

Ableism

Many of the responses were ableist: they discriminate or contain social prejudice against people with physical or mental disabilities. A key point to make here is: don't feel offended if you or your comment is called ableist. Instead, listen and learn (seriously, it's an opportunity). The system is ableist, on top of which individuals make comments that can be called ableist. We (as a people) need to identify and break down that system, but also, people can individually learn: everyone has a degree of ableism (like they have some degree sexism and racism). I know I do. I've been learning about accessibility for about 15 years and still learn new things all the time (same for sexism, or racism, etc, these are all things need regular introspection; and they are related, see also intersectionality).

Learning from the responses

Below, I'll list some responses I found problematic, and try and explain why. I'm hoping this is helpful for people who want to understand better why accessibility is critical, and why accessibility specialists point this out.

• “can’t expect them to make everything perfect, especially in the alpha release” - I think it's fair to have expectations from a company that is a large voice in the web development community
• “Here's a better framing”, “Why the agressive tone?”, “Why are these people so insufferable? (…)” - this shifts the question about accessibility to one about how the person asking for equality phrases their feedback (this is tone policing, a common derailment tactic)
• “🤮 being an insufferable dick to well-meaning, well-intentioned people is not going to work for your cause, no matter how good of a cause it is” - this seems to suggest that inaccessibility is ok as long as the intentions are good (that is ableist; equal access cannot be bought off by good intentions only. It is actual equality that is required)
• “Paying a six figure engineer to add features only 1% of your user base needs only makes profit sense after, idk, 100K active users? [screenshot of ChatGPT to prove the number]” - it’s not only about profit sense, it’s also about ethical sense and legal sense. If you want to focus on profit only: about 20% of people has a disability (says WHO). Also, almost all people will develop disabilities in some form throughout their life while they age.
• ‘You are complaining about a WYSIWYG editor not being accessible to the blind---do you make similar complains about sunsets and VR headsets?’ and ‘I don't think anyone using this site needs accessibility’- this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how people with disabilities use the web. Yes, blind people use WYSIWYG editors (and so do people with other disabilities, which is why creators of these tools care, see the accessibility initiatives for tools like TinyMCE). See also Apple's videos on Sady Paulson, who uses Switch Control to edit videos or on how people use tools like Door Detection and Voice Control.
• ‘Then what is the argument for accessibility, if not screen readers or search engine crawlers?’ - again, there are many more ways people with disabilities use the web, and beyond permanent disabilities (as mentioned, about 20% of people), there are people with temporary impairments (from broken arms to word) and situational impairments

Some responses were particularly hostile and personal. “I'm shocked that you're unemployed ..🤯🤯😅”, “Okay, Karen”, “(…) She wants attention”, “No matter how much you shame Vercel, they don't want you. They never will”, “Go accessibility pimp else where (sic) and pretend that others give a shit”, “[you are] being an insufferable dick”. These are all unacceptable personal attacks.

If you work at Vercel (this was relating the v0 product), please consider speaking up (silence speaks too) and/or talking with your community about how accessibility is viewed and how people in the community interact. The quotes in this post are all real quotes, from people defending Vercel. To his credit, the CEO gave the right example with his response (”Thanks for the feedback”)

Wrapping up

So, in summary: the “production ready” claim and lack of nuance about what that means is problematic. Pointing it out got responses I'd call ableist, plus a few responses that were plain hostile. All of this reflects badly on the community.

It's not new that accessibility advocates get hostile responses to reasonable requests (or when doing their job). But it's been a while since I've seen so many of those responses, so I wanted to take the opportunity to write down some common misunderstandings.

Originally posted as Ableist interactions on Hidde's blog.

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For the Dutch government, I'm co-organising the third edition of a virtual week-long design systems event, as part of my role in the NL Design System core team. Will it be interesting? Yes!

At NL Design System, we work with a lot of government teams to ultimately try and make a “greatest hits” of their components. Heavily simplified: we want to find the best front-end components/guidelines/examples in use across government, test them (for accessibility and usability) and then publish them for wide reuse. That's a long, but (hopefully) very fruitful journey, that can result in widely-agreed upon solutions and avoidance of some common design system pitfalls.

That's not really how design systems used to work. Design systems came a long way from pattern libraries for developers who need to copy/paste HTML to much better thought-out systems with communication and support protocols, advanced theming, versioning and solid accessibility guidelines. Over time, the promises we make have probably also evolved.

Promises vs reality

My favourite promise of design systems is the opportunity to try and do high quality front-end work and then spread the result across lots of projects. So, like, you could get the component right and build it accessibly, with a usable API, excellent guidance, and so fort. Good things you could then spread around. Other promises of design systems include cost savings through efficiency and improved user experience through consistency. But realistically, promises remain promises until they are realised (as those who work on design system teams will probably be well familiar with).

That's not to say designs system promises are too good to be true. They do often come true. Just look at what some teams out there are doing! But there's a lot to say about approaches, benefits and potential pitfalls for design systems teams. How does everyone do it? Because while the work could be made to sound easy, it often isn't. This is partly why we're organising Design Systems Week (the third edition this year): we want to hear from others about their successes, learnings and challenges. Or… peak inside other teams, basically. And when I say “we”… I should say the team already ran two editions, I'm just helping out with the third.

Design Systems Week

So, Design Systems Week 2023 is coming, in the first week of October! The program is starting to shape up nicely. We'll have speakers from across the Dutch government, such as the Chamber of Commerce and various city governments. New in this year's edition is that we also wanted to hear from people from outside the Netherlands, in government and private sector.

So far, we've announced (among others):

• Inayaili León from GitHub on DesignOps
• Joe Lanman from GOV.UK on their Prototype Kit
• Daniëlle Rameau from Sanoma Learning on Design Systems as a way to get accessibility right (in Dutch)
• David Darnes from NordHealth on Web Components (what works and what doesn't)
• Mu-An Chiou from Taiwan Design System on design systems as public infrastructure
• Aleksandr Beliaev from Estonia Design System on the design system of the first digital society

And there's a few more coming that I can't wait for the team to announce.

We know people are busy and don't necessarily have time to watch virtual events all day, so we've designed the sessions to be 20-25 minute “snacks” that you can catch between meetings (live via Teams (government), or watch via the published records afterwards).

I'm really looking forward to this. If you want to join us, you can sign up for individual sessions or check out the main event page.

Originally posted as Co-organising Design Systems Week 2023 on Hidde's blog.

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