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About

Hello, I'm Grace 👋🏼

I hope you like this FED (Front End Development) blog, a collation of mentoring advice...

About Grace

I come from a journalistic and design background, then taught myself front end development (FED) over the course of several years. My real passion though, is for equality, which has led me to take a keen interest in web accessibility.

Specialising in accessibility consultancy for a fantastic agency based in Bristol (UK), I work fully remotely and now split a lot of my time between accessibility and front end mentoring.

As well as agency work, I do take on private accessibility-related contracts and speak at events. Please get in touch to discuss.

Why create FED Mentor?

For the last few years I've been spending loads of time mentoring junior or aspiring FEDs on Frontend Mentor. The problem with this, is a lot of the time I'm giving out the same advice again and again.

I hope this site will be a place to collate the common feedback I share and provide a lasting resource to help FEDs build inclusive accessible sites that follow good coding practices. I also hope it can help me to improve and document what I learn!

About this site

Although my primary goal is to help front end developers build using accessible practices, this site is also a bit of a playground for me to try out new things. It's built with 11ty using their base blog starter.

Privacy Notice

This site has NO cookies and NO tracking. You're welcome. 😉

The theme toggle at the top of the page (if you have JavaScript turned on) will store one key in your browser's local storage. This simply sets your preferred theme so you don't have to set it again next time you visit. That's it!

Development roadmap

I try to work out in the open, even though this repo is private for now... My to-do list for this site includes (in no particular order):

  • Add user-preferences theme support — complete 21 Jan. 2023
  • Add tables of contents to posts — complete 22 Jan. 2023
  • Mute colors slightly to (hopefully) improve experience for those with astygmatism — complete 23 Jan 2023
  • Add a 'back to top' link somewhere… — complete Aug. 2023
  • Check and improve site in Windows High Contrast mode — complete Sept. 2024
  • Fix missing table headers on the Glossary — complete Sept. 2024
  • Complete a full a11y audit and backlog remediation works complete Sept. 2024 (Note: an audit is compliance focused, it doesn't guarantee this site will be accessible to all!)
  • Improve hover colours for tags, buttons and links — complete Jan. 2025
  • Ensure all core functionality works JavaScript-free — complete Jan. 2025 (themes now switch based of system preference if JS is disabled).
  • Add comment functionality, maybe using GitHub issues
  • Move the mailing list away from Mailchimp (OR shut down the mailing list as I hardly ever send anything)
  • Improve code blocks with language, light theme and copy functionality
  • Add a user control to turn all my styles off, if desired
  • Make the table of contents sticky on the side of larger screens
  • Tidy styles, maybe even use Tailwind… I'm still deciding on that one

⚠️ If you have suggestions to improve this site, or you experience any usability issues with it, please get in touch.

How to stay updated

This site has an RSS feed.

Alternatively, subscribe via mailchip for the occasional (or RARE!) email update.

Acknowledgements

During build I referred to various sources to help me with the tooling, including:

A11y Webring.Club

This site is a member of the a11y-webring.club — a network of digital accessibility practitioners.

Contact

The best places to contact me are on the Frontend Mentor Discord server or by email: grace@fedmentor.dev.