Guides, Opinions, and Other Things

I'm Melanie Sumner; you may know me from such places as the internet. I started learning how to build for the web in 1997, and I'm still as thrilled about it today as I was then. I figured I should write some stuff down before I start forgetting things. So here we are.

Articles

  • Reflections on Marriage

    Despite my persistent reticence to go anywhere during winter holidays, I received an invitation to attend a cousin’s wedding in California, and, after talking it through with my husband, decided to go. I hadn’t seen these cousins for nearly 30 years. I also found out that my two sisters planned to attend, and the three of us haven’t been in the same place at the same time since at least 2002. At this point in my life, I’m an experienced traveler, so that part was easy. The rest? Not so much. Today I want to talk about some things I experienced and reflect on what marriage has come to mean to me. So if you are usually just here for the awesome accessibility advice, feel free to skip today.

  • Living with ADHD

    For years, I felt like there was this persistent fog around my brain. If I could just try a little harder. If I could train my mind and focus a little more. I could do so much. I could be the best version of myself. If. The list was endless. Turns out, it wasn’t me, it was my brain. I had ADHD, I just didn’t know it yet. I’ve been on this journey for many years now, so maybe it’s time to talk about it. Maybe my story will help someone a little bit.

  • If You Care

    I avoid using the word “care” when I talk about accessibility, and I believe that part of my success in reaching engineers is that I have avoided that word. I try to avoid all emotion words, really. Many web developers/software engineers get really upset if you use the word “care”, because in doing so, you’re implying some shortcoming on their end if they do not. And heavens forbid a software engineer being forced to face a shortcoming…or a feeling. It is, as memes would suggest, a well-known flaw.

  • A11y at Work: When Team Opinions Differ

    Sometimes working with a larger team means that you’ll get more varied opinions about how something should be done. Now, this is good when the final result is one that covers more gaps and includes more use cases. But what about accessibility? WCAG is the conformance standard, but it’s the bare minimum. Specifications can be confusing or interpreted differently depending on your background. Teams have a lot of challenges, and accessibility is one of the big ones.

  • Understanding AccName: Part One

    Before we begin, some disclaimers and other things of note:

    1. While I am, at the time of this original post, one of the co-editors for the Accessible Name and Description Computation specification, this does not mean that I am a comprehensive authority on the topic. I am the co-editor because at the time, another editor was needed and I stepped up. I learn more all the time.
    2. There will be some swearing in this series.
  • How I audit

    I really, really, REALLY hate accessibility audits.

    Okay, maybe I should clarify. I really really REALLY hate getting generic accessibility audit reports that companies pay a lot of money for but don’t produce useful results.

    Maybe I should explain.

    So when my place of employment (at the time of this writing) was asking, “hey some customer asked for a thing called a VPAT, do you know what that is?” I was really interested at the opportunity to weigh in.

    Okay, so I’ve ended up doing the audits for our public accessibility conformance reports(ACRs); while it’s not as satisfying as writing new linting rules, strategizing about Continuous Accessibility, or crafting new design system components that are accessible and have great documentation, it has been satisfying because I’ve been able to undo some of the irritations I’ve experienced in the past.

  • How I use my Stream Deck

    I bought an Elgato Stream Deck in the fall of 2020, and it came up recently that I may use it in a non-conventional way. Elgato has my attention as a gamer; I use their key lights, microphone, and even tried their web cam for a while (the web cam didn’t keep; I have a Sony ZV-1 and I’m happy with it).

    I currently use my Stream Deck attached to my Macbook Pro for work; here are some of the things I have it set up to help with:

    • GitHub commands I can never remember (or, just don’t want to get wrong)
    • CLI commands for MacOS (especially the one I have to run after every update)
    • Zoom
    • Rectangle, because Mac doesn’t have the awesome screen snapping stuff Windows has
    • Code snippets I use a lot
    • Zakim commands for W3C IRC chat

    So let’s talk about a couple of these use cases.

  • Approaches to Accessibility and Other Things

    Some context: This blog piece is really me unpacking some emotional stuff. I know! Feelings! In a tech blog? No way! But seriously, maybe it will help you too, though. If not, that’s totally fine…YMMV.

    Yesterday, I was in a discussion about an accessibility-related technical issue, and a person in the discussion said something along the lines of “I don’t understand how you can’t empathize with the user here.” TBQH, my brain…broke.

    I wanted to laugh/scream/cry because isn’t that why I do what I do? I choose to continue in a technical niche that also happens to have a great deal of emotional labor attached. Their comment felt like an attempt at emotional manipulation, and I reject that.

  • Reasonable WCAG Additions

    I’ve been reading the WCAG Success Criteria on a nearly-daily basis for…well, for a really long time now, and I have come to the opinion that some no-nonsense, reasonable additions would be useful. Note that all of these are based on my own personal experience and don’t reflect anyone else’s opinions but my own, unless they share this blog post with you and tell you that they explicitly think these things are a good idea. Which they are, of course.

    I’m also grateful for WCAG Success Criterion 1.3.1 Information and Relationships because it covers a multitude of sins, BUT I dream of a little more clarity, a little more guidance, a little more explicit “lolno quit that.”

  • Let's talk about Lensa

    Recently, my internet has been awash with Lensa.ai images. At first I was resistant, but then I realized that the computers have my everything anyway, so might as well. How would AI imagine me? What would I learn about myself? Would I finally have an avatar I didn’t hate? I had questions.

  • The Web I Want(ed) To Dev

    If you’re unfamiliar with me, or my work, there’s a good chance you won’t automatically grok the context for the work that I do. You might even be tempted to find me on Twitter and tell me how wrong I am about any number of things that I have written. Or if I was a real developer I wouldn’t have been okay with leaving something out. But the truth is, the reality of the work we do as web developers is much different that then work we wish we did as web developers. So for now, let’s dream a little.

  • My Process for Accessibility Testing

    This is a guide. This document intends to provide insight into the steps that I take when evaluating the accessibility of a page. It can be used to estimate the work needed to do any kind of accessibility evaluation in general, or help inform your own process.

  • Getting Started With Accessibility

    This article is meant to be a practical guide to answer the question, “how do we get started with accessibility?” This is based on my own experience, but that’s a lot of experience, so it’s probably sufficient for unpaid advice. Hopefully you found this because you’re interested in building an accessibility practice at your company, and not just because you asked accessibility experts to give you their time (without compensation).

  • Links in Labels

    It seems to be a relatively common pattern to have links in labels, but is that accessible? In this article, I’ll explain what’s going on, and explore some options, see how they work with a screen reader, and (hopefully) provide some food for thought.

  • How to Learn Ember

    I get asked this question enough that I have the answer saved to a file so I can copy/paste it. I think I’ll post it here, that way anyone can benefit from it.

  • The Cost of Copying Design

    They say that you can tell an experienced developer because when you ask them a question about how they would approach or solve a specific problem, their answer will be “it depends.” These days, if a designer were to ask me if it would be okay to design a component in a certain way (“just like Twizonple does it”), my response is probably going to be “I’ll look at it, but it’s unlikely since they are well-known for inaccessible design. Out of curiosity, what features do you like best about it?”

  • Details-As-A-Menu

    A few months back, I had to work on a situation where the details element was being used as a dropdown menu for a site navigation. In this post, I’m going to explain why I think you should not use a details element as a dropdown menu. TL;DR? Don’t use the <details> element for a dropdown menu, use a <button> element that toggles open a list of links instead.

  • The Web is Awesome, the Web is Horrible

    Today marks the 25th year of my first foray into building something for the internet. Happy web-versary to me! It seems like forever ago, but it also seems like just yesterday. I suppose this is the nature of how time passes, or feels like it happens. If you are focusing on it then it doesn’t seem like any time has passed at all, but if you ignore it for a bit it just flies by.