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I was a teenager when the internet arrived in my household. I remember it as a window opening to the world. All of a sudden I had at my disposal more information than I could fathom, instantly.

ARIA is a recommendation defining a way to make web content and web applications more accessible to users relying on assistive technologies. It provides additional information about web elements to improve usability and understanding. In this article we'll look at what ARIA does (and doesn't do), and how to use it appropriately.

Watermark is committed to making our digital experiences usable for all. Among the steps our web developers can take towards this commitment is writing semantic code. Semantic is defined as “relating to meaning in language,” and for the purposes of this article, that means writing code that renders HTML based on its meaning and not how it looks.

As with any significant design challenge, research, testing, and feedback are essential for creating a strong solution. While this process is a core part of a designer’s problem-solving approach, there are often obstacles, such as insufficient time for thorough user research or a lack of resources for testing and gathering feedback.

We recently updated Ripple's Modal component to use the new dialog element under the hood and noticed it handled focus trapping slightly differently from what we were used to (and the way we had implemented it in Ripple).

Version 2.2 of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) was published as a “W3C Recommendation” Web Accessibility Standard on October 5, 2023. The update removes a success criterion and adds nine new ones.

LLMs (Large Language Models) are very promising for assisting people with visual impairments. Be My Eyes, who has been connecting blind people with volunteers who describe what they see, recently introduced a virtual assistant, Be My AI, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4.

This blog will explore practices and latest trends, share our experiences, and highlight the lessons we've learned from creating the Ripple Design System for the Watermark Education Impact Suite (EIS). Communication and collaboration are the cornerstones of the Design System team, and this blog is a new channel to share our stories and insights with our users, stakeholders, and beyond. 

In theory, the front-end developer translates the designer's specifications into code. In practice, some details are always left out of the specifications. How wide or narrow can the element get? What if the text is much longer than the one shown in the mockup? And so on. Sometimes it can be considered the designer's omission, but the reality is that it's a blurry line, and there is always a degree of interpretation in the implementation stage, as well as the discovery of edge cases that would have been hard to foresee from the drawing board.

Our product design team has made the strategic decision to transition from using Sketch and Abstract to Figma. Let’s explore the reasons behind this shift and how Figma empowers Watermark Product Design to deliver even more innovative and collaborative designs.