Chris Ashton is a Developer working for the Government Digital Service. When he’s not busy coding, he enjoys singing as a tenor in the BBC Symphony Chorus.
Data can be prohibitively expensive, especially in developing countries. Chris Ashton puts himself in the shoes of someone on a tight data budget and offers practical tips for reducing our websites’ data footprint.
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A sighted user puts himself in the shoes of a non-sighted user. Chris Ashton experiences first-hand difficulties that visually impaired users face and describes what we can do as web developers to help.
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Many of us are taught to make sure our sites can be used via keyboard. Why is that, and what is it like in practice? Chris Ashton did an experiment to find out.
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Have you ever wondered whether it’s possible to do anything on the web without JavaScript? How many sites use progressive enhancement in practice? Chris Ashton did an experiment to find out.
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Publishing content to so many media without lots of extra development overhead can be difficult. Chris Ashton explains how they’ve approached the problem in BBC’s Visual Journalism department.
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Cross-browser testing is time-consuming and laborious. This, in turn, makes it expensive and prone to human error… so, naturally, we want to do as little of it as possible. This is not a statement we should be ashamed of. Developers are lazy by nature: adhering to the DRY principle, writing scripts to automate things we’d otherwise have to do by hand, making use of third-party libraries — being lazy is what makes us good developers.
The traditional approach to cross-browser testing doesn’t align well with these ideals. Either you make a half-hearted attempt at manual testing or you expend a lot of effort on doing it “properly”: testing in all of the major browsers used by your audience, gradually moving to older or more obscure browsers in order to say you’ve tested them.
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