Weeknote 3: Long legs

Hello weeknote fans. This week, Owen talks about how he's been oversleeping but lots of good stuff has been happening in spite of the change in the season disrupting his mornings.

Testing testing

The investigation into the 3 tricky accessibility problems continue and they're very nearly wrapped. It's been pretty successful! Anika's been brilliant with testing possible solutions and boiling down what's working and what's not. All being well, our details component is going to be more accessible in the next release of GOV.UK Frontend. Some interesting quirks I wanted to highlight:

• Setting the display property of the summary element to inline-block hides it from VoiceOver. I'll note that I didn't find this but Ollie did in his very helpful PR. Screen readers can change how they interpret stuff based on if it's block-level or not so that's only a small surprise.
• Dragon (the dictation software) won't recognise the details element unless you give the summary element a role of button. Be careful about that finding as it's yet to be tested against other assistive tech. If it makes things worse for other people, it's probably not worth it.

The only outlier is Dragon operating our file upload component, which is basically a wrapper around the native file upload. There's something weird going on with our solution which was essentially DAC's recommendation. We need a bit more time to drill down on this.

Accessible content

The other thing we've been doing is planning an audit of our content to cover accessibility issues in the same content raised by DAC. My involvement in this has been fairly light but it's prompted me to look at ways we can automate the auditing process.

Once again standing on the shoulder's of other folk's work, I had a look at this old PR from Brett, yet another developer on paternity leave, to extend our automated testing to cover every page on our website. This has been great for specifically auditing our heading hierarchy but it's generally a good thing for catching low-hanging accessibility issue fruit. We haven't merged this yet because of concerns over how long the tests take, which is reasonable. They roughly triple how long our tests take to run! However I wonder if it's possible to run something like this manually or once every month or quarter, just to keep us afloat of issues before we find them ourselves.

Oh yeah, right, I'm a line manager

Mid-years continue this week which again took up a decent chunk of my head space. I've now run reviews with both my line reports so the process is over for them and for me for another 6 months. I always find running these reviews tiring, even though I have all the power. At the risk of being trite, my approach to line management is more working for my reports than getting them to work for me so I want to make sure they have everything they need to be happy and successful. It's important to caveat that it's not my neck on the line, so to speak, so I hold a privilege in the process, but the responsibility can still be stressful, especially in the awkward structure of the civil service.

I'm not worried about it too much though because from feedback, both my reports are doing well. They're both exceptional frontend developers getting on with good work. Inspiring.

LIFE

I'm going to try rattling through a few general things that happened this week instead of using headings for every little topic.

Like I said the change in season has impacted my ability to get out of bed. The positive is that it's not impacting my ability to sleep or function too much, it's just a change in light and temperature I have to work through. Something to focus on for the next few weeks.

Jiu Jitsu is going well. Twice a week is still working great. I'm starting to develop my attack game. I have abnormally long legs in relation to my abdomen which lends itself to spider guard but I need more practice. Once I catch it it's reasonably successful but I need to get better at catching it and keeping it in sparring.

As a little life/work crossover, we had breakfast over the weekend (at the PHENOMENAL 215 Hackney) with my wife's friend and former colleague from when she worked for a FAANG company which I won't specify. The friend still works there as a product manager and it was very interesting talking about their work, their troubles navigating the bureaucracy of the organisation and the difficulty in convincing stakeholders to prioritise their team, who have had their arc of inception into hype into maintenance but are still fundamental to the customer experience. Sounds a lot like another workplace I know...

Ok now the heading-worthy stuff.

It's Spanish for 'grey'

I finally picked up my switch again and played Gris. This was one of the landmark artsy fartsy games that triggered a million articles when it came out in 2018 about the capabilities of games as an art form (the answer is it's the same as film and print, the conversation is obvious and boring, talk about something else) like every game that tries to say something. It sailed past me at the time but I'm not gonna say no to a 90% discount for £2 on the switch store.

I really enjoyed it. It's clever in how it uses it's mechanics to represent the vague but not necessarily obtuse arch of the story and the character and feels nice to play. It also looks stunning. Agnostic to it being a game, it's one of the best showcases of 2D animation I've ever seen. My very late feedback that I'm sure nobody else has said is that I wish the character walked faster.

My coffee roadmap

My spending on coffee gadgets since I last spoke about coffee hasn't been zero but I'm not breaking the bank. Instead, I've been planning, which is almost as bad. I have quite a lot of tea bags left and once I get through them, I plan on not buying more bags but instead getting a 6 cup moka pot.

My rationale: I prefer a longer coffee person whilst my wife likes them short and strong. For a little while I've made filter for myself and a 3 cup moka pot for her (that is definitely not 3 portions of coffee, Bialetti you are lying) which works but it's extra time and cleaning. Taking into account me not wanting to spend loads or take up too much space eg: on an espresso machine, a larger moka pot is a nice compromise. She can continue having short coffees, I can make myself moka americanos. My transformation into a coffee freak will be complete.

In the mean time I'm enjoying the process of experimenting and dialing my wife's moka coffees to see what works. I think she'd just like a coffee which isn't repulsive, which 99% is what she's getting.