Robin Whittleton

https://front-end.social/@robinwhittleton

Accessibility at IKEA. Opinions my own (or at least not IKEA’s). he/him 🇪🇺🇸🇪🇬🇧

#designSystems #accessibility #standardEbooks

Homepage: https://www.robinwhittleton.com
GitHub: https://www.github.com/robinwhittleton

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Last Notes

2026-10-25 10:03:17 UTC

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https://www.wired.com/story/we-linked-150-ikea-speakers-to-make-a-wall-of-sound/

2026-09-28 11:41:02 UTC

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good question: my partner’s got the Kodak equivalent but I hadn’t considered that. Could you pull them apart and recycle the plastic and metal in the usual way, then cut up the film and landfill it?

2026-09-24 17:47:06 UTC

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then hype them back up with Flight of the Bumblebee!

2026-08-20 14:58:04 UTC

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as much as I want to believe this, I’m having a hard time with the idea that a senior member of staff would tweet something that obviously immediately opens them up to 4,000 lawsuits.

2026-08-17 20:58:42 UTC

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I got an Alternativ för Sverige one. It actually made me laugh, how insane it was.

2026-08-13 16:27:13 UTC

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<wbr>. I’ve never had a case for it that wouldn’t be better served by a soft hyphen or possibly zero-width space, and now the CSS hyphens has good support it’s completely obsolete.

2026-06-23 16:41:03 UTC

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still got lots more to do though! The ambition has never been just compliance.

2026-05-17 11:23:18 UTC

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long enough stops to charge up enough to get back to the other side.
Incidently I’m just about to drive onto Grotte to take me back to Esbjerg. https://hvidesandeshipyard.com/nb-145-grotte/
https://cdn.masto.host/frontendsocial/media_attachments/files/116/589/655/148/333/984/original/76799836a1556832.jpeg

2026-05-17 10:11:07 UTC

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see also https://www.dfds.com/en/about/media/news/dfds-to-invest-1-billion-euro-in-battery-electric-ships-for-the-channel

2026-05-03 12:01:52 UTC

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this video on my local one was good: https://youtu.be/rE_M1n-ClOA

2026-05-03 11:16:05 UTC

Nice to see electric ferries becoming a thing. My local ferry service to Denmark has two of their three boats electric. And I’ve just booked a ferry to Fanø where one of the two is.

2026-04-09 16:13:33 UTC

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at least on Mastercard there are different types of notch for different types of card; I’d hope that Visa has followed suit? https://www.mastercard.com/global/en/news-and-trends/press/2021/october/mastercard-introduces-accessible-card-for-blind-and-partially-sighted-people.html

2026-03-07 17:56:34 UTC

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they’re not cheap, but I’ve broadly moved completely to Nudie as they seem pretty much bullet-proof, and they do free repairs if you’re near one of their locations: https://www.nudiejeans.com/en-SE/stores?filter=Repair+Partner&filter=Nudie+Jeans+Repair+Shop

2026-02-14 14:14:51 UTC

Given the recent Ars Technica fuckup I’ve cancelled my subscription. Any non-US equivalents worth supporting with that money? (The Verge and 404 Media would be candidates, but they’re a bit US-centric.)

2026-02-11 09:07:48 UTC

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I read the first three a couple of years ago, really should finish it off.

2026-01-08 22:45:43 UTC

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Gritney Spears was a good one

2026-01-01 08:19:02 UTC

The Danes turn out to go all out on fireworks. In the small (~1.5K people) town I’m staying in, fireworks started at around 7pm, and ramped up until midnight, at which point commenced what I can only describe as a bombardment for over an hour.
If nothing else, I’m surprised that people have this much money to burn. But mostly I’m just sad for the poor dogs, who had gone past shaking with fear and into some sort of mental shutdown. At least it all seems to have been forgotten this morning.

2025-12-13 09:59:49 UTC

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similar research won an Ignobel Prize in 2014: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3882779/

2025-09-29 08:34:35 UTC

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I was poking at the site and I’m quite impressed with not only how unreadable the font on https://www.taylorswift.com/my-letter/ is, but how zooming in on the page zooms it out.

2025-09-28 21:11:36 UTC

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what’s important is first independence, and then if help is needed a plurality of methods to allow people to pick the way that best suits them.

2025-09-28 19:15:50 UTC

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I’d definitely read that as the second option, unfortunately.

2025-09-23 18:50:04 UTC

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we’ve got a product called Kreativ that does most of that. The default planner doesn’t have ceiling height and isn’t the same level of detail as the kitchen planner, but it’s probably enough. Alternatively you can scan your actual room, then try 3D IKEA furniture in it (it’ll let you delete existing furniture if there’s something you want to replace). https://www.ikea.com/de/en/home-design/

2025-08-25 11:09:18 UTC

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can you do it the other way around by working with the user to sort them out with a retainer?

2025-07-16 09:19:35 UTC

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that’s my assumption. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure about the rule as I can’t find anything about it online, but I did check in with a couple of colleagues who confirmed they’d been asked about it when they gave blood recently.

2025-07-16 09:10:15 UTC

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unfortunately I’m blocked in Sweden from giving blood because I lived in the UK in the late 80s / early 90s.

2025-06-03 07:47:29 UTC

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what matters is not the design but the outcome of the design. Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point (and please correct me if I am) but I do not see how providing a palette of high quality options and context to a designer leads to disempowering designers to effect change.

2025-06-03 07:42:29 UTC

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that design systems are somehow designed to exclude designers. The assumption here is that design systems remove autonomy from designers, but:
(a) most design work should realistically be service and content design anyway, and
(b) it doesn’t stop visual designers from doing interesting work, it just shifts the level that interesting work is done at away from noodling on a button to page-level visual design supported by design system components and tokens

2025-06-03 07:29:35 UTC

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what a horrible take on design systems. Design systems empower designers to focus on the design that matters.

2025-04-24 05:44:25 UTC

For better or worse, I’ve ended up as the unofficial owner of IKEA’s digital font implementation, so I’ve written up the six-year journey to the current setup of Noto IKEA: https://medium.com/flat-pack-tech/ikeas-web-fonts-8e3879f4ccbb

2025-04-21 18:39:50 UTC

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on Safari and Firefox on iOS at least, a long press on the back button will pop open a scrollable list of pages in the history for that tab.

2025-03-28 13:03:30 UTC

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if you’ve got an iphone and Apple Wallet you can select a card for transit mode on London Underground: it’ll dramatically speed up the blip time, and will work even if the phone is out of battery.

2025-02-16 20:05:31 UTC

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every time I go back to the UK now I get weird looks because I don’t have an exit stamp in my passport. I’ve given up and just present both British and Swedish passports and let them pick which one they’re interested in.

2024-11-28 12:47:07 UTC

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I was playing around with https://a11y-consultant.netlify.app/ yesterday, but as I’ve never taken CPACC I’ve no idea how accurate the questions and answers are. They seemed to repeat occasionally as well?

2024-11-26 14:38:06 UTC

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oh wow

2024-11-12 12:56:22 UTC

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replied for his bit of IKEA (landing page) but it’s also in use in my part (ecom), just not to a great extent on customer-facing stuff just yet.

2024-10-10 11:55:16 UTC

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I think it’s fine. I’ve used ruby in a production of Tristram Shandy for latin annotation (https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/laurence-sterne/the-life-and-opinions-of-tristram-shandy-gentleman/text/chapter-3-11-la) and I’m currently using it in a production of 1,001 Nights for metre marks in an explanatory appendix.