It’s that time of the year again, and after taking a year’s pause, I found myself hurtling towards Bristol for Pixel Pioneers, a conference about front-end development and UX design. It was a blessedly air-conditioned train ride while the country was firmly in the grip of a massive heatwave.
Pixel Pioneers holds a special place in my heart as it was the first conference I attended as a member of Studio 24 back in June ’23.
There is no spoon – Léonie Watson
The day started with a bang, and the brilliant Léonie Watson gave her thoughts on the role of AI in the field of accessibility. She offered cautions on the over-reliance on AI to help plug accessibility holes, as well as pointing out the ethical dubiousness some of the tools blatantly gloss over.
Léonie gave an anecdotal look at how ChatGPT handles accessibility, including the reasons for the knowledge being in the state it’s in, where it has improved in the last few years, and how we can help it get better.
I found it fascinating to see how AI was used by those with sight disabilities (as Léonie herself is blind, this was the main perspective in the talk) and found myself cringing along with the rest of the audience when ChatGPT was giving such confidently incorrect answers.
The talk was, for the most part, a cautionary tale on how AI can be less than helpful as an in-house accessibility expert. However, improvements to the training data in the last three years have produced results that are coming close to the point where Léonie would feel comfortable using AI more often. But she emphasised there is still a long way to go.
The serious subject matter of this talk was perfectly balanced with Léonie’s dry sense of humour, making it a joy to listen to and a roaring start to the rest of the conference.
Debugging Performance – Jack Franklin
Jack Franklin, an engineer on the Web Performance Tools team at Google, had the difficult job of following Léonie’s talk. With the knowledge he brought to the table, along with his effortless delivery and inclusive stage presence, it is clear that he was more than equal to the challenge.
His talk gave insights into how Chrome works from a Web Performance Perspective and had a great breakdown of how a developer can solve common performance problems, including:
- the tools we could use
- preventative measures to take in the future
- how to not get overwhelmed when the DevTools are spitting out an intimidating wall of errors and warnings
- how to sort through the noise.
There was a lot in this talk that blew me away and a lot of tools that I will absolutely be making liberal use of in my job hereafter!
Maintaining and Modernising Legacy CSS – Ana Rodrigues
One of my favourite talks in the conference was Ana Rodrigues comparing inheriting codebases to her recent experience of renovating a house.
There are many occasions when we inherit a site, and our first job is usually demystifying it and documenting it in our own words. This resonated with me, thinking about our work with HMICFRS.
Rodrigues’ argument was: instead of taking the ‘easy way out’ in the form of a rebuild that usually ends up being more time-consuming and less attractive to clients and PMs alike, look at it from the perspective of the foundational work that has already been done.
The developer’s job is to take a user’s perspective on the current site, note down the pain points, incrementally make small improvements, and fix issues as you come across them.
This approach also helps with the ‘analysis paralysis’ we developers are often plagued by when inheriting new projects. Even if some things are in places that you wouldn’t necessarily expect them to be, you can determine how helpful it would be to move them to a more conventional location.
This point was hilariously illustrated by Ana’s discovery that the fusebox for the house she bought was on the turn of the staircase and was only accessible by prying open the step and reaching into the wall behind!
There was also a great segment on the importance of documentation to warn of potential pitfalls that could arise if a particularly finicky bit of content were to be changed without the ramifications being clearly communicated.
This, too, was fantastically illustrated by her discovery of some ‘documentation’ the previous builders had left about there ‘maybe’ pipes underneath the flooring!
ARIA, the good parts – Hidde De Vries
As the conference came swinging into its final act, we were treated to a defence of ARIA in accessibility by a friend of the studio, Hidde De Vries of none other than W3C!
Hidde kept up the brilliant energy established by the previous speakers. He highlighted the fact that even though ARIA is largely advised against by most accessibility folk, he feels ARIA gets a bad rap. Much of the data is based on incorrect uses and applications of the ARIA role on elements where ARIA isn’t necessary.
He also highlighted the benefits of using ARIA roles in certain situations, such as the correct use of aria-collapsed and aria-labelledby.
He cautioned against the well-meaning but incorrect use of ARIA roles, such as setting the aria-role of a button to something like cool-content to originally indicate that cool content lay on the other side of the button press. A screen reader would announce that the user was currently interacting with a ‘Cool Content’ element. But this gives the user no contextual clues as to what a ‘Cool Content’ element could possibly be and how in the world one would go about interacting with one.
There were plenty of callbacks to talks and speakers earlier in the day, and Bristol-related humour to highlight his points, which made his talk easy to listen to his personality shine through.
Death of the Browser – Rachel-Lee Nabors
The final talk of the conference was the prophetic, slightly harrowing, but ultimately immensely enjoyable and informative ‘Death of the Browser’. It was delivered by Rachel-Lee Nabors, a self-confessed ‘American Werewolf in London’ and prolific developer in her own right.
I find the best and easiest talks to listen to are one part well-distilled information and one part anecdotal use cases, and this talk felt like a 1-2 punch of both with every slide.
The long and short of Rachel-Lee’s provocatively titled talk was that:
- the ‘agentic web’ is becoming more and more prevalent in our everyday lives,
- Rachel-Lee’s vast experience gives her ample reason to believe that the future of everyday web use doesn’t lie in the ‘Adpocalyptic’ future we’re currently hurtling towards
- we’ll have a soft return to the earlier days of the Wild-Wild-Web, where people can be a lot more selective about the content they’re served
- as a result, people will be a lot less overloaded and have the mental capacity for a glorious return to passionate endeavours.
One of Rachel-Lee’s quotes that stuck with me was: “The last time something was growing this fast and this much was when the Internet itself was born. The genie has been let out of the bottle and it is not going back inside any time soon.”
As someone who has thus far taken the Aaron Burr approach to AI (“I’ll wait here and see which way the winds may blow”), the points highlighted in the talks have spurred me to research, act on, and have more agency in the trajectory of my role in the industry.
Bye-bye Bristol
The talks at Pixel Pioneers are always incredibly engaging. The knowledge and passion exhibited by the speakers, as well as the flawless execution by the organisers, make it an event I look forward to.
Whether you’re showing up with your posse of multi-disciplinary mates from work, or you’re going solo, the atmosphere is always welcoming and makes it easy to chat with people from all across the industry (and indeed the world, with many international attendees this year!).
A huge thank you to the team at Pixel Pioneers, and I look forward to coming back next year!