About

Hello, I'm Grace 👋🏼

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

My History

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 the blog?

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.

Thanks

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

Andy Bell's Learn Eleventy from Scratch course
Steph Eckles resources on Egghead.io
John Kemp-Cruz's post on creating drafts in Eleventy
Duncan McDougall's post on building sass with Eleventy

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

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):

~~Check and improve site in Windows High Contrast mode~~ — complete Sept 2024
~~Fix missing table headers on the Glossary~~ — complete Sept 2024
Add comment functionality using GitHub issues
Add an option to turn off variable font sizes (or maybe remove them altogether!)
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
~~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 100% accessible!)
Add a user control to turn all my styles off, if desired
Ensure all core functionality works js-free
Make the table of contents sticky on the side of larger screens
~~Add a 'back to top' link somewhere…~~ — complete Aug 2023
Tidy styles, maybe even use Tailwind… I'm still deciding on that one
~~Add user-preferences theme support~~ — complete 21 Jan 2023
~~Add tables of contents to posts~~ — complete 22 Jan 2023
~~Mute colors to (hopefully) improve experience for those with astygmatism~~ — complete 23 Jan 2023

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