A small work announcement: over the last month or so, I’ve been working with Aquent Gymnasium to produce a series of five short tutorial videos, which have been launching over the course of this past week. Since the last video just went live, I’m thrilled to share the whole list with you:

  1. Introduction to using VoiceOver on macOS
  2. Designing beautiful focus states
  3. Flexible and accessible typesetting
  4. Responsively designing with viewport units
  5. Designing beautiful and accessible drop caps

From browsing the titles, you can probably tell there’s a theme of accessibility running throughout all five videos. Whether it’s introducing folks to their first screen reader, or communicating the importance of moving away from pixels for font sizing, my goal for each tutorial was to give the viewer one thing to consider when it comes to making the web beautiful for a broader, more inclusive group of people. My hope is that these videos help the idea of accessible design feel…well, more accessible to more people.

I said earlier that these were short videos, and I meant it! Gymnasium calls these “Take 5” videos because they’re five minutes long — or less. And wow, that was a really fun, challenging constraint. When you’re trying to show someone how to use VoiceOver on a Mac for the first time, what parts do you focus on? And just as importantly, what do you leave out? I think we struck the right balance in each one, but if you — or a friend! — check out any of these videos, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I’d like to close by thanking Jeremy Osborn, who’s the academic director over at Aquent Gymnasium. I first met Jeremy ages ago, when he was the director of the impressive web design program at Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts. Ever since then, we’d been trying to find a project to collaborate on, and I’m so happy that we’ve finally found one. Working alongside Jeremy on these videos was such a treat, and I’m looking forward to the next thing we’ll work on together.