VoiceOver is a screen reader that comes bundled free with OSX. Designing for screen readers is essential for a pleasant user experience with low vision users, and also has the added benefit of helping with SEO. But in order to design for screen readers, it helps to understand how they work.

Here are 6 quick tips to get you started with VoiceOver and Safari…

The *I’m a web developer and I’ve been stuck with the simplest app for the last 10 days* Medium post gained a lot of attention on HN and /r/programming yesterday. The article is in no way unwarrented or off-base, I can sympathize. However, I want to address the two reoccuring themes from the comments:

• “Well you should try X framework!” …

While Framer Studio makes it extremely easy to get a sharable link to your prototype, your company might not be too happy to find their work on a public (although obscure) URL. Here’s how you can use Azure to lock things down.

1. Create an Azure Web App. It’s free, but you have to hand over your credit card number…

The landscape of software performance, especially for UI, is complex, mysterious, and poorly understood by many. This is the story of a dark hole that I found myself in.

Today, the developer created a list UI component…

Update: I contributed to the official MSDN documentation. It contains everything in this post and more, so go there instead.

High contrast is a source of confusion for many. This is a practical guide that extends the MSDN guidance and sample for developers who would rather not think about it…

tldr: UI frameworks should stop putting type in a box because it’s counter to the design intent and doesn’t withstand localization. I’ve created a prototype implementation of the TextLine paradigm in XAML.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the elements of good typography lately. Specifically, I’ve thought about aligning type to a grid and how to technically achieve…

Update: Jekyll is out, hand-rolled is in! Jekyll is hard enough to install on Windows that I wrote a quick blogging engine with node.js and gulp.

Before now, I’ve tended to write in many different locations. From now on, this will be the one-stop-shop for everything. It’s new! It’s fun! It was created using Jekyll! You can find my previous writings here: …

Microsoft Word is historically a WIMP application – the UI was heavily optimized for mouse and keyboard input. As the consumer market moves beyond the desktop we set out to reimagine the Word experience for a variety of devices and inputs. Our goal was to increase overall user engagement on tablets, especially edits to existing documents…