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As much as Medium has been a great platform for me to make some side money with my writings, it continues to astound me at just how badly written, inconsistent of function, and ignorant of basic accessibility it is. Particularly when things like the lack of scripting off graceful degradation, UI inconsistency, massive endless mindless “JS for nothing” and “JS doing HTML/CSS’ job”, and flipping the bird at usability and accessibility is figured into things.
Not to bite the hand that feeds me, but… like a Matra Magic at 8 miles, I’m going pitbull.
Accessibility Woes
Right out of the gate we have the use of serif fonts on screen media. Whilst retina/HDX users who run everything zoomed in — or scaled up — double might have the ppd (pixels per degree) to render serifs cleanly, “normal” people on “normal” displays typically do not.
Then there’s the willy-nilly font sizes and absurdly undersized fonts. Like as I type this the “Draft in” text and “Publish” button are absurdly below acceptable minimums because they declared them as 16px instead of as EM, so as someone three feet from a 28" 2160p display that’s set to 1rem == 24px, it’s below legibility minimums. They’re called EM and REM, use ‘em!