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<h2 id="introduction" tabindex="-1">Introduction</h2>
<p>I realize not everybody’s going to ditch the Web and switch to Gemini or Gopher today (<span data-literal="that would be a difficult and unrealistic transition">that’ll take, like, at least a month /s</span>). Until that happens, here’s a non-exhaustive, highly-opinionated list of best practices for websites that focus primarily on text. I don’t expect anybody to fully agree with the list; nonetheless, the article should have at least some useful information for any web content author or front-end web developer.</p>
<h3 id="inclusive-design" tabindex="-1">Inclusive design</h3>
<p>My primary focus is <a href="https://100daysofa11y.com/2019/12/03/accommodation-versus-inclusive-design/">inclusive design</a>. Specifically, I focus on supporting <em>underrepresented ways to read a page</em>. Not all users load a page in a common web-browser and navigate effortlessly with their eyes and hands. Authors often neglect people who read through accessibility tools, tiny viewports, machine translators, “reading mode” implementations, the Tor network, printouts, hostile networks, and uncommon browsers, to name a few. I list more niches in <a href="#conclusion">the conclusion</a>. Compatibility with so many niches sounds far more daunting than it really is: if you only selectively override browser defaults and use plain-old, semantic HTML (<abbr title="plain-old, semantic HTML">POSH</abbr>), you’ve done half of the work already.</p>
<p>One of the core ideas behind the flavor of inclusive design I present is <dfn id="inc-by-default" tabindex="-1">inclusivity by default</dfn>. Web pages shouldn’t use accessible overlays, reduced-data modes, or other personalizations if these features can be available all the time. Personalization isn’t always possible: Tor users, students using school computers, and people with restrictive corporate policies can’t “make websites work for them”; that’s a webmaster’s responsibility.</p>
<p>At the same time, many users do apply personalizations; sites should respect those personalizations whenever possible. Balancing these two needs is difficult. Some features conflict; you can’t display a light and dark color scheme simultaneously. Personalization is a fallback strategy to resolve conflicting needs. Disproportionately underrepresented needs deserve disproportionately greater attention, so they come before personal preferences instead of being relegated to a separate lane.</p>
<h3 id="prior-art" tabindex="-1">Prior art</h3>
<p>You can regard this article as an elaboration on existing work by the Web Accessibility Initiative (<abbr title="Web Accessibility Initiative’s">WAI</abbr>).</p>
<p>I’ll cite the <abbr>WAI’s</abbr> <span class="h-cite" itemprop="citation" itemscope="" itemtype="https://schema.org/TechArticle"><cite itemprop="name" class="p-name"><a class="u-url" itemprop="url" href="https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/Techniques/">Techniques for WCAG 2.2</a></cite></span> a number of times. Each “Success Criterion” (requirement) of the WCAG has possible techniques. Unlike the <cite>Web Content Accessibility Guidelines</cite> (<abbr title="Web Content Accessibility Guidelines">WCAG</abbr>), the Techniques document does not list requirements; rather, it serves to non-exhaustively educate authors about <em>how</em> to use specific technologies to comply with the WCAG. I don’t find much utility in the technology-agnostic goals enumerated by the WCAG without the accompanying technology-specific techniques to meet those goals.</p>
<p>I’ll also cite <span class="h-cite" itemid="https://www.w3.org/TR/coga-usable/" itemprop="citation" itemscope="" itemtype="https://schema.org/TechArticle"><cite itemprop="name" class="p-name"><a class="u-url" itemprop="url" href="https://www.w3.org/TR/coga-usable/">Making Content Usable for People with Cognitive and Learning Disabilities</a></cite>, by <span itemscope="" itemtype="https://schema.org/Organization" itemprop="publisher">the WAI</span></span>. The document lists eight objectives. Each objective has associated personas, and can be met by several design patterns.</p>
<h3 id="why-this-article-exists" tabindex="-1">Why this article exists</h3>
<p>Performance and accessibility guidelines are scattered across multiple WAI documents and blog posts. Moreover, guidelines tend to be overly general and avoid giving specific advice. Guidelines from different places tend to contradict each other, especially when they have different goals (e.g., security and accessibility). They also tend to be focused on large corporate sites rather than the simple text-oriented content the Web was made for.</p>
<p>I wanted to create a single reference with non-contradictory guidelines, containing advice more specific and opinionated than existing material. I also wanted to approach the very different aspects of site design from the same perspective and in the same place, allowing readers to draw connections between them.</p>
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