Responsive Web Design: Where Do We Go From Here?

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I had the great pleasure of delivering the closing keynote at Responsive Day Out 3: The Final Breakpoint. Held in Brighton, UK on 19 June 2015, the conference is a gathering of designers and developers sharing their workflow strategies, techniques, and experiences with responsive web design.

Here’s what I had to say.

Today has provided an amazing tour of the world of responsive design. We’ve seen how to level-up our workflows and processes. We’ve learned new ways to improve the accessibility of our products. We’ve grappled with modern CSS and HTML capabilities that help us embrace the hugely variable display sizes that swirl and whirl around us.

We’ve explored the future of modular code and browsers’ capacity for working without network connectivity. And we’ve even taken a trip into the possible future of where the web might go.

We’ve come a long way since Ethan’s article, fluid grids, flexible media, and media queries. Those three tenets sowed a seed that has grown and flourished as we have come to better understand the implications of device proliferation. We’ve seen that the web is capable of going anywhere and doing pretty much anything.

I would argue that “Responsive Web Design” was the first article that really managed to capture the concepts that John Allsopp had discussed so many years before in “A Dao of Web Design” and distilled them into something the design and development community could really sink their teeth into. It provided a concrete example of the web’s ability to flex and mold itself into whatever shape it needed to take on.

It was the first time many designers had come to terms with the idea that “experience” was not some monolithic thing.

Sure, many of us in the web standards community had been talking the talk and walking the walk with regard to progressive enhancement. And we were gaining converts, but progress was slow. Ethan demonstrated—directly and succinctly—what the progressive enhancement of visual design could look like.

Providing an identical experience for each and every human being that tries to access our sites would be impossible. There are simply far too many factors to consider. We’ve got screen size, display density, CPU speed, amount of RAM, sensor availability, feature availability, interface methods … breathe … operating system type, operating system version, browser type, browser version, plug-ins installed, network speed, network latency, network congestion, firewalls, proxies, routers, and probably a dozen other factors my mind is incapable of plucking amid the whirlwind of technical considerations.

And that doesn’t even consider our users.

When it comes to the people we need to reach for our work to actually matter, we have to consider literacy level, reading acumen, level of domain knowledge, cognitive impairments like learning disabilities and dyslexia, attention deficit issues, environmental distractions, vision impairment, hearing impairment, motor impairment, how much they understand how to use their device, how much they understand how to use their browser, how well-versed in common web conventions they are, and a ton of other “human factors”.

Every person is different and everyone comes to the web with their own set of special needs. Some are always with them, blindness for example. Others are transient, like breaking your mousing arm. Still others are purely situational and dependent on the device you are using at the time and its technical capabilities or constraints.

Trying to devise one monolithic experience for each and every person to have in every context that considers every factor would be impossible. And yet, Sir Tim Berners Lee had a vision for a web that was capable of going anywhere. Was he insane?

Sir Tim’s vision for the web was that content could be created once and accessed from anywhere. Disparate but related pieces of “hypermedia” scattered across the globe could be connected to one another via links. Moreover, they would be retrievable by anyone on any device capable of reading HTML. For free.

Ultimately, Sir Tim envisioned universal accessibility.

For a great many of us, ensuring our websites are accessible is an afterthought. We talk a good game when it comes to “user centered” this or that, but often treat the word “accessibility” as a synonym for “screen reader”. It’s so much more than that. “Accessibility” is about people. People consume content and use interfaces in many different ways, some similar and some quite dissimilar to how we do it.

Sure, people with visual impairments often use a screen reader to consume content. But they might also use a braille touch feedback device or a braille printer. They probably also use a keyboard. Or they may use a touchscreen in concert with audio cues. Or they may even use a camera to allow them to “read” content via OCR and text-to-speech. And yes, visual impairment affects a decent percentage of the populace (especially as we age), but it is only part of the “accessibility” puzzle.

The contrast between text and the background is an important factor in ensuring content remains readable in different lighting situations. Color choice is an accessibility concern.

The language we use on our sites and in our interfaces directly affects how easy it is for our users to understand what we do, the products we are offering, and why it matters. It also affects how we make our users feel about themselves, their experience, and our companies. Language is an accessibility concern.

The size of our web pages has a direct effect on how long our pages take to download, how much it costs our customers to access them, and (sometimes) even whether or not the content can be reached. Performance is an accessibility concern.

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by Aaron Gustafson via SitePoint