web-weaving.jamesg.blog
#20: Sara (sarajoy.dev)
In Episode 20, I chat with Sara, the author of sarajoy.dev and whimsica11y.net, among other things, the importance of web accessibility, screen readers, and the joy of exploring and making things on the web.
Enjoy the episode!
## Transcript
This episode was transcribed by Zachary, the proprietor of Lunaseeker Press. If you notice any typos in the transcript, please contact James.
## James
**0:00** — Welcome to ‘Wonders Of Web Weaving.’
This week I’ll be talking with Sara: the author of sarajoy.dev, creator of the CSS Joy webring, and author of whimsica11y.net.
Welcome to the show, Sara.
## Sara
**0:16** — It’s nice being called an author and creator. I don’t feel like one, but that’s grand. Thank you.
## James
**0:23** — You’ve brought many projects to life on the web. Creator and author and all the things fits.
I like to start with people’s journey into the web.
When did you start playing with the web, and when did you decide, “I’m going to make a website?”
## Sara
**0:48** — That’s ancient history. I was mid-teens, 13 or 14. 1997 or something? The internet was taking off, and I was fascinated by chat rooms. I loved chat rooms.
I didn’t have a connected PC at home, but we might go and chat at random festivals: there’d be an internet cafe set up and there’d be queues of people trying to get on the internet.
I don’t mean big music festivals, I mean stuff in cities. They would just be there.
Or if I was at a friend’s house and they had CompuServe, which they had here. It’s our version of AOL in Britain. I’m in Germany, but Britain was where I was at.
I was fascinated by having strangers in a text feed and talking to them. I found that addictive.
That happened for a while, and excitedly, I got a phone line up to my bedroom. I don’t know how I got anyone to agree to that. My dad was pushing it: this is the future.
I got on the internet and found the chat rooms and ICQ.
When you joined an ISP (got on the internet and had your internet service provider) they’d set you up with your email, and with Usenet for newsgroups.
I don’t think that was IRC, but I found my way to that, and to ICQ and things like that. Chat stuff.
They’d also give you hosting and a little byline of how you can get started: this is what FTP is, and you can connect here with this software to put files on the internet for everyone to see.
I did a lot of clicking around and copying stuff. My first website, uploaded to clara.net a long time ago, was generated in Word 97, because it had web authoring. I put a virtual machine of Windows 2000 on my computer, to see if I could get Word 97 running, to see if it had web authoring. It does.
I taught myself HTML by flipping from the code into Word. If I change something in Word, what did that change in the code? Maybe I could change it in the code and see what that did in Word.
It was awful, the stuff it generated, but it was there, and it grew. It didn’t take long before I gave up on Word and went to Notepad, and then Notepad++. It kept chipping upwards.
The first website went up in ’98 or ’99. I’ve gone through waves of doing them and not doing them, but that’s my first-website-on-the-internet story.
## James
**4:19** — Amazing. That interactivity of the web never gets old: you’ve got a document, you tweak something, you change a class, add an attribute, and you see the changes on your screen.
It still feels magical.
## Sara
**4:36** — I’m still addicted to that. It goes to the point where I’m doing something simple for work.
As much as I love CSS, and I know a lot about it, you still end up in weird corridors of: why doesn’t that work? You’re fiddling with properties and putting position relative on the parents in the hope that you get the right thing in the right place.
I can be snoozing the alarm that’s telling me to go and pick up my kids, because I’m thinking: if I try that, will it work? I always want to get it into a good state before I leave.
## James
**5:13** — It’s a combination of the visual and playful side. You’ve got a problem and you think: which CSS property do I use? Or where do I add this link so it doesn’t overwhelm the navigation?
## Sara
**5:31** — I love it. If I had my ideal job, I’d be noodling in CSS all day.
## James
**5:39** — That should be a job. Every town has a local person who does websites. That should be a thing.
## Sara
**5:50** — Yes.
## James
**5:52** — One of your projects that inspired me was Whimsica11y.
Before that, though, I’m curious. For some people, their website is the entryway into web accessibility. They see someone on Mastodon talking about alt text and think: I should do that.
How did you get started thinking about web accessibility? Your site? Word? Something else?
## Sara
**6:22** — I was unaware of it for all teenagerhood. The sites were simple, and I wasn’t trying anything too crazy or unusual. Although I love me an iframe, which didn’t help.
Finding my way into accessibility happened when I was going: I’m unhappy in my current job, I’m going to try something else.
That something else was me at the end of having had two maternity leaves in a job which was fine and interesting, but which I’d lost momentum in. I thought: I used to love playing with websites.
I’d done other things in electronics, and I tried to be a teacher for a while. I’ve got a classic ADHD career history, where you try lots of things for a few years and move on.
This one feels like it’s sticking.
I spent a lot of time talking to people on Twitter, because at the time (I can’t remember his name, Leon something) was doing 100Devs, a free bootcamp.
It was after the start of the COVID pandemic. There was lots of hiring, lots of people into bootcamps and learning, because this seemed like the business to get into to get hired. It was, for a while.
There was encouragement, people egging each other on and talking about stuff in an excitable way.
I started following people who said things about accessibility. They were into CSS, and I now know there’s a massive overlap between the people who love CSS and people who care about accessibility.
That’s how it snuck in.
Once Pandora’s box had opened, I thought: if we make things in this slapdash way, we’re excluding a bunch of people. We don’t want to do that. It’s been obvious since.
Though I’m into accessibility, I’ve said this before: it feels like a hot thing because it’s important, because being inclusive is important. It’s not an excitement thing.
I’m not excited about accessibility. I’m angry there isn’t more of it.
## James
**9:15** — I watched your talk at State of the Browser in London. I know David would want everyone to go and buy tickets, so you should do that.
When I watched your talk, it was like seeing the web with new eyes. You asked how we go beyond compliance to something more fun: seeing accessibility not as complying with checklists, but as how you create an experience for someone on your site that’s unique and interesting.
When did you start building that lens, and how did it lead to Whimsica11y?
## Sara
**10:02** — You’re talking about Whimsica11y as if it’s something that is. It exists, but the page is work in progress, and I stalled on it. That’s what the talk is about: why I stalled, and what worries me.
People on the internet love to argue. Even in the inclusive, caring accessibility community, there are people who love to argue about the right way and the wrong way to these things.
If you look for the guidelines, the web…wait. WCAG. What does the C stand for again?
## James
**10:39** — Content. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
## Sara
**10:42** — It’s long, and there’s a lot to read, and you can’t just sit and read it. There are good guidelines on the internet, and lots of lovely websites that try and break it down and make it easier, but it’s still easy to get sucked into this feeling of: I could never get that right.
Some people throw up their hands and not bother, happy to think, maybe it’s not my problem.
My reasoning was: when you’re building your website, it’s your thing, your hobby thing. You’re playing, you’re experimenting. Having something like that hanging over you is off-putting.
It shouldn’t be, especially for a personal website. If people are starting from the ground up, they have to do a lot to make something inaccessible. That comes with React and the big frameworks, where people start rolling their own everything out of divs, and badness happens.
I also know lots of the people building their websites are neurodivergent, or have visual problems, or might be deaf, or might have all kinds of issues, or might be coding using a sip-and-puff switch.
They’ll want to be inclusive. The way in was me trying to make this a friendly, open, non-scary way of introducing accessibility to people doing it as a hobby.
The other point is websites aren’t just content. You’ve got the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and that’s about making sure the content and the actionable stuff is available.
That stuff doesn’t always have personality.
People who start building their websites often, like I do, toy around in CSS, because it’s so visual and it’s fun: look at all the colors I can make, and the funny shapes, and what can I do with this text.
It’s great, and it makes great vibes and cool little websites, but none of that gets through if you’re not sighted, or you’ve got severe visual impairments.
It was also the thought of: we want these people to have fun too. They should also have fun looking at the bonkers websites. How can we do that in a way that isn’t difficult?
It’s fun, because people worry about accessibility making things boring, and it’s not. It can be fun.
I’m rambling now.
## James
**13:39** — The thing about accessibility that stuck with me was a TetraLogical post about types of disability. It introduced the idea of temporary disability: you might be in a loud environment so you can’t listen to something, or the sun is blazing on your phone and you can’t see the screen as well as you could, or you might have an eye injury and your sight is temporarily changed.
That’s worth thinking about when we talk about accessibility on the web.
It’s not just for one group, it’s for everyone.
You don’t know if you’ll be on the subway with no internet and can’t load that big website. You might not know your friend is colorblind and can’t see your links are the way they are.
## Sara
**14:32** — Temporarily-abled: I’ve read that once or twice, and I like it. I see my age-related stuff arriving alongside it and getting in the way.
Another one: screen readers are also useful if you’ve got a site you want to read but you’ve got washing up to do. You can set the screen reader going, and your eyes are busy doing other things.
It’s grand. There was another point I had.
## James
**15:10** — It’ll come back.
Talking of screen readers, and this more joyful side of the web: I’ve tinkered with a screen reader, VoiceOver on Mac, and it’s fun to play around with, because I think: this is how others see the web.
The aperture of how I look at the web page is opening up.
I understand why skip links exist now. I’m getting these layers, and as a programmer and a web developer it’s cool to start thinking: okay, my web page needs this to cater to this audience.
It’s not boring to me. The long documents can feel boring, but when you start using this stuff it’s like: this is a skill, and you can help people through this skill.
## Sara
**16:06** — With the trainings I’ve managed to bring into my company, people just don’t realize. I don’t want to call people ignorant, it’s just that they haven’t come across it.
It’s just the way it is. People in the industry haven’t come across the idea of a blind person using a computer, which boggles my mind.
Either way, there’s this guy I befriended on the internet, who I keep bringing in.
He’s called Florian Beijers, and he’s blind from birth. He uses a screen reader, but he can also read Braille, and he can develop: he reads code. He games, so he’s reviewing games for accessibility, and he’s a streamer and a consultant and all these things.
One thing he did that was most impactful was sending his audio through to us. It was happening remotely, and he went through our company website and showed everyone what it sounds like.
People hadn’t got the idea using a screen reader is like having a tiny little dot of focus that roams down the screen with the text. You’re only ever in one point at once. You can’t see a flash message that turns up somewhere else, you can’t see the toast that’s turning up over here.
You have to go through the whole thing if there’s no skip link.
If you open a modal and close it, and it loses where you opened the modal from, you’re thrown back to the top of the page and you have to find your way back to where you were.
All these little things people don’t have in their heads, unless they’ve seen it happen.
A lot of this stuff is watching someone do it.
One video I saw (I don’t know where) was a guy using a sip-and-puff switch.
People use switches in all sorts of ways. They might have something on a wrist where they roll their hand to and fro, or a button they’re hitting with their head. Not hitting, but pressing.
I couldn’t understand how an on-off momentary switch could do anything, but it showed the screen, and it’s carefully timed presses. They have a display which brings up a keyboard, and it starts tracking every row of the keyboard, tick tick tick tick, top to bottom. You tap the row you want, and it pulls out sections of keys, and you go: yes, that section of keys, yes, that key. It starts over again.
That’s got to be such a long-winded way to do things. It’s about making sure you only have to type a few things here and there to use your website, or not having too many clicks, because it’s hard.
Sometimes these people take ages writing out a short message, and that’s exhausting.
I found that video interesting, just like the people at my company found hearing the audio stream from a blind user new.
It’s just seeing experiences. It’s the same with anything, right?
We get more empathy with people we’ve met, and if they’ve never met many disabled people, they don’t understand. Then accessibility becomes a list of checkboxes to tick.
## James
**20:07** — What opened my eyes this year was a video by Smashing Magazine, where Léonie Watson showcased how she uses her screen reader. She set it much slower so we could understand.
Seeing those barriers people run into, and also, as a sighted person, seeing how the website is: it makes you think differently as a web developer. How do I make this easier?
It’s a new and interesting question.
How do I help someone get to the right information quicker? How do I condense the information?
## Sara
**20:55** — When we open a website and we’re sighted and there’s lots of it, we get a big scroll bar, or the scroll bar gets small, and we can see it down the side. They don’t get that affordance either.
I’ve heard that it’s useful to have the reading time, or however many thousand words are in the article, at the top. Otherwise they start on a passage and don’t know how long it’s going to be.
The other thing someone pointed out was: I don’t understand this website, the table of contents is at the bottom, it doesn’t make any sense. I was like: no, it doesn’t, let me look.
Visually it was in a column on the right, but in the document object model (the HTML) it was right at the bottom, because it was a three-column layout, and the right column was at the bottom. That makes no sense. If you want it on the right, you have to put it higher and fake the order visually.
Things like that just don’t occur to you unless you start playing, or asking someone who’s blind and uses a screen reader.
I’ve also heard the advice using a screen reader isn’t easy. I don’t find it easy. The people who use them on the daily have all kinds of shortcuts, and they use them in different ways. Some let the whole page be read out, some skip by headings, some tab and jump around from there.
There are lots of other shortcuts which I don’t know. There are so many commands.
In some ways we do better to follow the checklist than to use a screen reader and go: it’s not pronouncing that thing properly, I should make it pronounce it properly.
Then we start taking away the autonomy of the people using these technologies.
You can go to and fro for ages.
This is where I got stuck with Whimsica11y. There’s so much information and advice, and so many things I worry about getting wrong that I’m scared of giving advice.
But really: I don’t know what all these acronyms stand for.
There’s WAI, Web Accessibility Initiative. They’ve got a website which breaks down WCAG, and a section called ‘It’s About People,’ and that’s got videos showing you how people use the web.
Even if you don’t go into the guidelines or worry too much about success criteria and all that, going through those videos is good, to have a bit of understanding.
## James
**24:17** — I love that phrase: it’s about people.
One thing that struck a chord: semantic HTML gets you far. There are these ARIA things, ways to make things sound differently, but if you use semantic HTML and your document order is correct, then as a site author, a personal website author, you can get far.
## Sara
**24:43** — That’s most of it.
That’s the other thing: everything in a header element is called the banner, and the footer is the footer. If you put your navigation in the banner, or at least in a nav (because there’s a nav element) screen readers let you skip past those, if you know the right buttons.
Even if you don’t have your skip link, if they’re in the right elements, you’ve already given affordance to the people using these technologies.
## James
**25:14** — I need to double-check this, but the thing I was doing was the main HTML element. You have nav and main. Those would be two separate landmarks, so you could skip to main and over the nav.
## Sara
**25:34** — A few allow you to skip to main as a standard command. There are so many commands.
## James
**25:41** — People should explore this stuff. It gets me thinking: this is something people who write HTML can do, and it’s about people. Just as we put a fun picture on our website to express our personality, so too can we write playful alt text that describes that image.
## Sara
**26:11** — I don’t know if I’ve done that on my site. I might have. I add alt text to everything.
One bit of advice I like to give is: if a picture means a lot to you, write a lot about it. Why not stuff the alt text? You could put a warning at the beginning of the alt text: warning, alt text is long.
Lots of the advice says the alt text should be short, like text-message length, 140 characters or something plucked out of the old SMS limits.
That’s the thing. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are geared to e-commerce and government websites. Things everyone has to use or needs to use, where in order for everyone to be equal, all these things need to have accessible content.
With personal websites, they’re not always about the content. They’re often about some kind of vibe. Some are hard to navigate even as a sighted person, and that’s often on purpose. Some are hard to read, but there’s also all kinds of interesting stuff going on visually.
A lot have audio, like MIDIs. I came across one the other day that had an emulated Winamp. That’s fun. Why not? There’s less audio on the internet nowadays, and it can be there. It’s just songs.
It doesn’t auto-play, so it’s fine, as long as there’s a button to press to start and stop it.
During this chat I’ve gone into the nitty gritty of how complicated these things are, and the stuff you need to look out for. The deal is, like you said: semantic websites.
These screen readers and assistive tech devices are built on an assumption the website and the web is built, in a certain way. It doesn’t have to be perfect, but the more you tinker, the more complicated you get, the more JavaScript you pile on top (and CSS sometimes) the less accessible it can get.
People doing their websites are in a good place.
They’re not abstracted miles away, not knowing what’s on their website. They’re seeing all the code in front of them and might know what’s there. They’ve got less to worry about.
## James
**29:28** — A personal website can be more of a playground. You can experiment with the semantic elements and play around in CSS to style them the way you want.
Because it’s your space, there’s no pressure to worry about error messages and forms unless that interests you. It might, and it interests me, but for my site it’s more like: are there link underlines, is the navigation element marked up, is there an article element where I have posts?
That stuff I’ve been learning over years, but it builds up, and you’ve got this checklist you can take to your personal stuff and work stuff and say: okay, new document, this element, this element here.
## Sara
**30:16** — I have to admit, I still find myself in this web of complexity sometimes. I look at my website and I bare my teeth. I don’t have time to rework the thing, and I know I’d do it better next time, but there are still things that aren’t so great, because it was organically grown since 2021.
When I get to work, especially when there’s a big existing codebase, there are some things I can root out. I can be like: this button shouldn’t be a div, I can fix that, that’s easy. Other things are intricate, and at some point I go, you know what, fine: use 13-point font, but no lower. No lower.
Okay, fine, grey on grey, but it has to be this grey, and please no lower.
## James
**31:21** — I love that approach of taking it slow and incrementally building.
I’d like to bring a new dimension into that. We’ve been on the outskirts of this: we spoke about accessibility, and about bringing in whimsy.
The web is a playground. You make web pages about the things you love, you share them with friends, and that can be your whole web experience. You don’t need to worry about learning, mastering and teaching email or JavaScript or whatever. It’s just: you bring you.
Since you’ve thought a lot about this: how can we bring more joy into the web, whether we code, or we just have a website somewhere else?
## Sara
**32:09** — I have found more joy since starting that webring.
I thought: cool, webrings are great. I found a place that hosts them for me, so I don’t need to worry about the coding or the deep maintenance of it, which is great.
Until then, I knew Neocities was around, and I knew there was the 32-Bit Cafe and the IndieWeb and all these other little communities into making their own website.
What I had lost sight of was the people. Random people, not devs, doing it as a hobby, making their own website in their own time because they find it fun. Real random people who do all kinds of other jobs, all kinds of different lives, who happen to be enjoying making websites.
There’s so much random stuff, just like I remember in the early 2000s, and websites I would’ve seen then. Plenty have joined my webring, and they’re bonkers, and they bring more joy than I realized.
I don’t know how I try and bring some.
My site started as a portfolio, and I shoved a blog onto it, and it’s grown and it’s organic. It’s got random bits and silly streaks in the code. I’m not sure mine is the best example.
I think browsing these webrings, like Melonland by this Irish artist whose name I’ve forgotten right now, who calls himself the Melon King. He’s into the web revival, and there’s the Melonland Surf Club. Just pottering through and seeing all these amazing sites.
The other thing is that of course that’s speaking visually, and you may be going through this webring and hitting next, next, next to see what there is.
One thing that worries me, especially in the age of AI and Grammarly, is people are scared to let their voice be their voice. They’ll write an article and panic about how well it reads or scans, and put it through an AI or Grammarly, or prompt the AI to write it in the first place.
Then we lose their voice, and we get this generic internet voice, and that’s dull, right? Just like I enjoy hearing people’s accents, I enjoy reading different writing styles.
That’s one way we can bring a lot of joy: allowing our own humanity to come through.
I say this as a native English speaker.
People who aren’t native English speakers will be more likely to want to check their writing, and will probably take on more of the suggestions of Grammarly and all that sort of thing. So it’s tricky.
Getting people’s personality through is what we need.
We’re in this ‘AI-generated everything,’ and we can’t trust it’s a human unless there’s something obviously human about it. Obvious human things are often rough around the edges.
## James
**35:59** — I wish I could hold up a sign that says: I want to hear you.
When I’m surfing the indie web and looking at websites, I love the slices of life of a group of friends in New York just as much as I love people writing about data protection, or people sharing their latest travels to Singapore, or somebody talking about their connection to their hometown in the UK.
I love those stories, and that’s why I come to the web. I was chatting with someone this week and they were like, “James, I do this because of the people.”
That feels like what we should be doing. That’s why we’re here.
## Sara
**36:45** — That’s why I was obsessed with chat rooms. All these people are there, and they’re talking.
Sure, lots of them would be asking your age, sex, location and trying to find out your bra size, but that was a different time. I’m sure that still happens somewhere. I had another point, and it’s gone.
## James
**37:14** — You were saying you want to see more people.
## Sara
**37:20** — Yes. That was something I’ve seen a few times, where people are starting to worry their blogs are going off topic, and they think: I should spin off another blog which is all the personal stories, and then this can be my tech blog and this can be my personal blog.
My first instinct is: no, that’s the good stuff.
Part of me wonders: does it mean I prefer the personal blog?
I’m not sure I do, because I’m reading the tech stuff, and I’m intrigued by the person and I want to find out more. Or I’ve got to know a person and their personal stuff is so interesting, I then value their tech opinion more, because I know where they’re coming from.
I love the mixture. People do that on social media: sometimes they have a tech account and a personal account. I don’t give two monkeys about the tech account. I can find that information if I want. I often follow both, but it feels odd to separate them.
## James
**38:34** — I asked myself that question too. I was like: if I put technology next to my coffee post, is that going to deter one audience over the other? I concluded I can’t be bothered to set up another website, and I embraced it after the fact: people can come for one thing and stay for another.
## Sara
**38:56** — You can tag them and say: here’s all the tech ones, and here’s all the personal ones.
## James
**39:04** — I’ve never thought about this, but especially today, there’s something about how information about technology should be in the hands of everyone.
We can talk about HTML and CSS because we’ve been doing it for a while, but there are a lot of people (just today I was in a chat with someone who’s learning HTML) and sharing tech stuff matters, because there’s people for whom today is the first day they’re learning that the web exists.
## Sara
**39:44** — That’s something I miss from Twitter. Because of 100Devs, and that wave of people all learning at once, even as I was learning myself I was able to give a leg up to other people.
I feel like it’s gone, or not so easy to find.
I don’t know if it’s an economic thing, that the hiring boom stopped and now there are AI layoffs, which aren’t really AI layoffs, they’re just because they over-hired in the boom. Or if there was something about Twitter and people haven’t found their way to Mastodon or Bluesky.
Or if I’m just not following the right people now.
I miss hearing about people with a hunger to learn more, but maybe I’m starting to see them again.
The other day I did that Whimsica11y talk for the Bad Website Club. Have you heard of that?
## James
**40:47** — Yeah.
## Sara
**40:49** — They’re doing stuff like this. I don’t know if they’re doing it every year, but the Bad Website Club is a free bootcamp, with lots of keen people.
There are people who would’ve been making their living off educational materials for developers, who’re struggling. I suspect that’s also to do with this hiring boom having ended, and there aren’t so many juniors using the education budgets on these things. Which sucks.
## James
**41:35** — Things are changing.
It’s with that in mind I’ll come to my final questions.
We spend time thinking about where things are, and it’s nice to step back and ask: where do we want them to be in the future? If we talk about this, everyone knows another direction is possible.
Where would you like the indie web to be in five years? What would you like to see more of? What creative renaissance do you think we could help enable?
## Sara
**42:14** — I’m not sure I can predict.
I’m being surprised left and right by how much more of the independent/social/personal/small web (whatever we call it, web revival stuff) keeps finding me at the moment, from random places.
Things appear in my feed, and it’s not through the stuff I’ve sought out.
When I got on the internet, people like me were messing around with the stuff they got from their ISP. There was the odd website which was sort of corporate, but they didn’t know how to do e-commerce, so there wasn’t any. A lot of us got this idea that personal messing-about web had disappeared, and I’m more and more convinced it never did. I don’t know if it shrank.
There was a post that came out: ‘The Boring Web,’ by Terry Godier.
The argument was it never went away. Or: the web isn’t dying, just the veneer that’s been pasted over it for the last ten years is dying, and that’s not a bad thing.
Because search engines have become rubbish, because there’s so much AI and dross to filter through, we’re having to rely more on curation and word of mouth and shared links and webrings, and other indexes of websites people are building, like these portal websites that Yahoo used to be.
We’re finding our way through in a human way again, instead of tapping it into a search engine and going where it tells us to go. We’re relearning how to surf that web that’s been there all the time. We forgot how to use it, because everything popped up in our feeds or in the search engine and we didn’t have to make the effort to surf anymore.
My prediction is that’s going to keep coming up, especially as Google has gone: we’re defaulting to AI.
What’s the other thing? This veneer they’ve painted on the internet. You can call it the silos: the big social medias like Facebook, and Google to some degree, and Twitter.
It’s good these platforms exist for the people who don’t want to build websites, because those people exist. There are people who don’t want to build websites but would still like to communicate.
Platforms should always be available. But the rest of us are refinding our roots. Without searching.
## James
**45:50** — We’re building a different topology of the web.
We’re rebuilding the one we had, where I find people’s websites because my friends tell me about them, and I learn about different parts of the world because I’m looking through Bear Blog and someone new signed up and posted photos, and I’m exploring their website thinking: how cool.
The way I’m thinking about the web is changing. It used to be that I’d go to a search engine with a query in mind, but now I go to a community, and I surf.
## Sara
**46:34** — That used to be more normal. I remember going down the categories if I was finding something I wanted, and I remember going to people’s link lists or blogrolls or whatever.
Even before blogging was a thing, people would make a website and keep adding pages, and their front page would be a page with links to those pages. They weren’t articles, they weren’t blogs, they weren’t dated. They were a page with: my favorite buttons, here’s my friend list, a page about my cat.
The surfing was bouncing around these things, and it was entertaining. Why not carry on doing that?
Especially in the dev world, we get stuck with: we’ll have a website, it’ll have a nav, it’s got an about me, I should probably blog on it, we should have articles and they’re going to be dated, and there’s going to be a portfolio page, and I’m going to have a contact page.
It feels like: here’s how it’s going to be.
I don’t think it’s wrong, but we all do that, and we don’t have to. I did that, of course I did.
## James
**48:01** — As soon as you said that, I thought: last year I redesigned my home page. I wanted to give my home page more personality, so I gave it a different layout to the rest of the site.
I was writing it and thinking: it needs to say this is a coffee blog, and I need to have the name. Then I thought: I could use one of the fonts Taylor Swift used on one of her albums.
Another blogger wrote a post where they identified the fonts on her album covers, so: great, okay.
Most people don’t know that’s there, but I do, and it’s so recognizable Taylor Swift fans would get it. This is me bringing a little personality, and it’s not groundbreaking. It’s not a new interaction design paradigm. It’s just a little something someone might recognize.
## Sara
**49:01** — If you wanted to do that for someone who couldn’t see the font, you might, in your introductory paragraph or something, randomly sneak lyrics in.
## James
**49:08** — I love that, because I’ve got hidden messages in my source code, so I’m already doing that for people who view source. Hidden messages for a screen reader? That’s interesting.
## Sara
**50:23** — There are little things like this that I’m trying to think of. I struggle: I’m sighted, and I play with CSS in a very visual way. Whimsica11y was also: I don’t know how to do this either, but let’s see what we can do to get good vibes across to everyone. Not just people who can see it.
## James
**50:52** — One of my conclusions is the web is a conversation.
We’re talking about how we want the web to be, how it is, how it was.
It’s important that we ask ourselves questions on the periphery of what’s being done, to see: can we make the web more whimsical? Can we make the web more in the shape of how we want it to be?
## Sara
**51:15** — Agreed.
Josh Comeau has a course about whimsical animations: stuff that makes a website look more alive. I’m sure he also includes little audio bits in them. I know that’d drive some people nuts, if a website would always make a noise on a click, or various other things. Also, why not, as long as there’s an off button? Always an off or on button. This auditory world can be influenced by the words that you give to the screen reader, but you could also provide some audio.
Another thing I did in the Whimsica11y talk: Keenan has a blog, and is expressive when reading and speaking. Does voiceovers and podcasts of posts, and adds an audio player into the pages.
It’s so good. You get to hear that person enunciate those words. The words are already beautifully written, but hearing it in the author’s voice is extra, and great.
## James
**52:52** — Talking of voices, I don’t know whether to bring this up. If I bring it up, someone listening who knows specs might say we should bring this back. I’m going to bring it up anyway.
I learned two years ago there was this concept called aural style sheets and it was talking about voices, and you could have an attribute for stress and richness and cues.
I don’t know how far this went. There was a big red note saying the document I was reading was a W3C thing, like I was saying. But people thought about aural style sheets, and it’s interesting to think about: how would you design that page with an audio experience in mind?
## Sara
**53:35** — There’s a thing still in the works called CSS Speech. I don’t know if that’s the same. Léonie was talking about it. It has to be opt-in, because some people would be driven crazy by that. Often someone who uses a screen reader has a specific voice, because they can make it go fast and still understand it. In moments where you’d like to hear something and annotate it nicely, that’d be good.
It seems odd we’ll put bold, italic, and underlines, and in our head we read them with more enunciation. How do you read out italics? How do we read? It’s different.
I don’t know where I’d start without making it annoying.
## James
**53:45** — That’s where it needs to start: in the rough, and we talk about it.
## Sara
**53:58** — There’s CSS Speech. Léonie is doing stuff with it. It’s hard to push forward, because it’s niche. Anyone listening can make that a reality. That’d be cool. I like giving people homework.
## James
**54:38** — With that said, we’ve come to the end, but I like to end on a fun question. You mentioned you’re in Germany, so: is there a German dessert you like? Or a savory food, if you’re more savory.
## Sara
**54:54** — When I moved to Germany, I was like: it’s just bread, beer and sausages.
Oddly, they’re into beer and sausages, and I find the beer and sausages here are nowhere near as interesting as what you get in the UK. The Brits are super into tea and drink boring tea, whereas here, if you order tea, they’ll offer you ten infusions: which would you like?
What’s my favorite German food? I don’t know. I go through many weird moods with food. My kids love Spätzle, a South German variant on pasta.
You’ve put me on the spot. There must be food I love here, but I can’t think of one offhand.
Spaghettieis. They take vanilla ice cream and push it through a mincer so it comes out like spaghetti. They add strawberry, raspberry or cherry sauce. Looks like spaghetti, but it’s ice cream.
## James
**56:20** — That’s amazing.
I love German chocolate. I went to Berlin and got chocolate from the supermarket and thought: this is so good. There’s mango chocolate. Why does everywhere not have mango chocolate?
## Sara
**56:40** — There’s a good variety. It’s got more cocoa solids than the British stuff.
## James
**56:47** — The last question is: where can people find you on the web?
## Sara
**56:55** — I’m active on Mastodon, @[email protected], or Bluesky, where I’m @sjoy.lol. Otherwise, you mentioned my site, and that’s got the links to wherever: sarajoy.dev.
## James
**57:24** — Thank you so much, Sara, for taking the time to chat. This has been so fun.
## Sara
**57:30** — Thank you. I hope I was coherent.
## James
**57:33** — Of course. When we’re planning the future of the web, the mental cogs are turning.
## Sara
**57:39** — They are.
