Minimalism and progressive enhancement

Posted 16th July 2019 in Design and Development

I’ve been enjoying reading though Adam Silver’s archive of articles around accessibility and inclusive design over the past few days, and his take on progressive enhancement really struck a chord:

Progressive enhancement makes us think about what happens when things fail. It allows us to build experiences with resilience baked in. But equally, it makes us think about whether an enhancement is needed at all; and if it is, how best to go about it.

That last sentence is the key for me. It brings Dieter Rams’ tenth principle of good design to mind:

Good design involves as little design as possible

A website should be carefully thought through: every tag, script, style, page, paragraph, and full-stop.

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More posts

Here are a couple more posts for you to enjoy. If that’s not enough, have a look at the full list.

  1. Images as the first thing in a button or link

    If the text of an interactive element like a button or link is preceded with an accessible image, we’ve probably got an accessibility problem.

  2. Alt text for CSS generated content

    There’s an interesting feature in Safari 17.4 that allows content added with CSS to have ‘alt’ text. I’m not sure how I feel about this.