Tag
design-constraints
- Jun 16, 2026 Fitts Law as a Target-Size Constraint: Throughput, Index of Difficulty, and Hit Area How the time to acquire a target scales with distance and width, why width beats distance in interface layout, and what the model does not predict about real pointing. accessibility
- Mar 28, 2026 Linearization: Why Visual Reordering Breaks Reading and Focus Order How DOM order determines both the reading order for assistive technology and the focus sequence, why CSS ordering properties desynchronize them from the visual layout, and how to keep the four orders aligned. accessibility
- Feb 17, 2026 Designing for the Tails of an Ability Distribution, Not the Mean Why a design calibrated to an average body or an average user excludes most people, and how percentile bands and requirement envelopes replace the average as a design input. accessibility
- May 14, 2025 Error Tolerance and Recovery as a Layout Requirement Why reversible actions, confirmations that name their consequence, and recovery paths must be designed as structure rather than added as dialogs, and how undo stacks and draft persistence change the cost of a mistake. accessibility
- Dec 6, 2024 Permanent, Temporary, and Situational Constraints as a Single Design Axis How the same underlying limitation appears as a permanent impairment, a temporary injury, or a situational condition, and why grouping requirements by function rather than by cause avoids duplicated and conflicting solutions. accessibility
- Feb 21, 2024 Reflow Under Magnification: What a Layout Must Give Up at 320 CSS Pixels How text scaling and page zoom change the effective viewport, which layout techniques fail first under magnification, and the constraints that keep content usable when the viewport shrinks to a narrow column. accessibility
- Oct 27, 2023 The Curb-Cut Effect and the Marginal Cost of Building a Constraint In Why constraints that are cheap at design time are expensive as retrofits, how the benefit of a widened constraint spreads beyond its original justification, and where the reuse argument stops being true. accessibility
- Dec 8, 2022 When Inclusive Constraints Conflict: Partial Orders and Documented Exceptions How to resolve collisions between accessibility constraints using a stated priority order, why an unordered checklist produces inconsistent decisions, and how to record exceptions so they stay auditable. accessibility
- Sep 1, 2022 Encoding Accessibility Constraints in a Design System Token Layer Why constraints enforced by review decay while constraints encoded in tokens and components persist, which properties belong in the token layer, and what the approach cannot express. accessibility