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The Open Source for All Initiative: Investing in Underrepresented Minorities in Tech - How 2 Companies are Kicking Off 2020 with $20,000

Published Feb 5, 2020

Updated Feb 14, 2023

2 min read

This article was written over 18 months ago and may contain information that is out of date. Some content may be relevant but please refer to the relevant official documentation or available resources for the latest information.

Here at This Dot Labs we are a development consultancy that is known for its work in providing opportunities to underrepresented minorities in tech. We are very excited to be partnering with StackBlitz, a company that is an online IDE used by millions of developers every month & adopted by open source projects such as Angular (Google), RxJS (Microsoft), and many others. We have teamed up this January to announce the Open Source for All Initiative to provide $20,000 of opportunities to those who need their first foot in the door.

With only 50% of boot camp students able to find employment within 3 months of graduation (Dice), we both feel passionate about trying to help bridge the divide between graduating boot camp and someone's first development job.

The $20,000 investment from StackBlitz and the supply of mentors (senior software engineers) from us will give paid apprenticeship opportunities for boot camp graduates to contribute to prominent open source projects.

We have over 20 bootcamp partners including Fullstack Academy, Coding Dojo, Prime Academy, Vets Who Code and The Last Mile.

“It’s tough to go from a bootcamp to an entry level developer role,” says Co-founder and CEO Tracy Lee, “and that challenge is compounded if you are a minority. Our apprentice program makes it easier for folks to transition to a full time job smoothly.”

StackBlitz is already used by open source projects such as Angular (Google) and RxJS (Microsoft) in their documentation.

"We have been very happy to work with the StackBlitz team and hosting the Angular documentation code samples on StackBlitz has been great for developers." said core team member Stephen Fluin.

“StackBlitz has been a great partner at helping provide code samples in our documentation, and I admire Tracy's work with under-represented groups in tech,” says Ben Lesh of the RxJS core team, “The pairing for this initiative is great and I expect good things to come out of it.”

Those interested in participating in the program as apprentices can apply here. If you’re an open source project who wishes to provide opportunities to underrepresented minorities and have great code examples in your documentation enhanced for free, sign up here. We can’t wait to work with everyone and make a difference in the tech world!

This Dot is a consultancy dedicated to guiding companies through their modernization and digital transformation journeys. Specializing in replatforming, modernizing, and launching new initiatives, we stand out by taking true ownership of your engineering projects.

We love helping teams with projects that have missed their deadlines or helping keep your strategic digital initiatives on course. Check out our case studies and our clients that trust us with their engineering.

Giving Thanks for Diversity in Tech: Angie Jones

Angie Jones is a San Francisco-based Senior Developer Advocate at Applitools, as well as the Director of Test Automation University, a free, community-driven educational program that provides training to test automation teams. A Master Inventor, Angie currently holds 26 patents across both the United States as well as China, and has garnered a reputation as a leading innovator in the tech community through not only her work, but also her regular international speaking engagements. Angie has delivered talks on topics ranging from visual testing, to clean code, and even testing AI-enabled applications, having recently spoken on large international stages, including Selenium Conference in Chicago, STAREAST Testing Conference in Orlando, and Agile Testing Days in Potsdam, Germany, just to name a few. Not only a prolific speaker and creator, Angie also finds time to volunteer with Black Girls Code, an organization through which she hosts workshops for young women interested in getting into web development. Angie has a very busy 2020 on the horizon, with upcoming talks at JSConf Hawaii, Devnexus, TSQA, SauceCon, STPCon, RenderATL, and Agile Testing Days. We can’t wait to see what else she will accomplish in the new year! Want to keep up with everything Angie is doing in 2020? You can follow her at @techgirl1908!...

Dec 31, 2019

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Giving Thanks to Diversity in Tech: Faiza Yousuf

Faiza Yousuf is a multifaceted open source technologist. She wears many hats, serving as the CTO of a stealth-mode startup, working as a product consultant, and running WomenInTechPK, a 6000+ member community for women in Pakistan. In addition to these roles, Faiza also runs a Coding Bootcamp in Karachi, PK with her partner Shamim Rajani, which has taught over 700 girls how to code, and have placed many of them in paid internships and jobs! Despite already organizing her own massive tech community, Faiza is also the Pakistani chapter leader of CryptoChicks, through which she has hosted numerous hackathons. Faiza also regularly speaks at engagements both locally and internationally, having most recently delivered talks on Empathy in Business, and served on panels discussing the challenges that women face in the workplace. “My team and I have been working tirelessly to create a better tech ecosystem locally and so far we have seen that the first step is to make people aware of their biases and to learn to distinctly see stereotypes and not let them cloud their judgement. Understanding our biases is the first step towards learning to value and appreciate all people.” When asked about her perspective on inclusion in the tech industry, Faiza added that, “The next step is to have more role models for women, for people of color, for differently-abled people, for people from underprivileged or disadvantaged backgrounds.” Even with her busy schedule, Faiza is an avid reader, and commits herself to reading one book every week! She encourages people, who would like to attend one of her local conferences, or international talks, to keep an eye on her Twitter page: @FaizaYousuf, where she will update you in the coming year!...

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Understanding the Difference Between `:focus` and `:focus-visible` in CSS

Understanding the Difference Between :focus and :focus-visible in CSS I have learned my fair share about the importance of keyboard accessibility, so I know that visual indication of the focused element is very important. But the well-known :focus pseudo-class is not always the best fit for this job. That's where :focus-visible comes in. Let's look at the differences between these two pseudo-classes and explore the best practices for using them effectively. What is the :focus Pseudo-Class? The :focus pseudo-class is a CSS selector that applies styles to any element that receives focus, regardless of how that focus was triggered. This includes focus events from keyboard navigation, mouse clicks, and touch interactions. Example Usage of :focus ` In this example, the button will display a blue outline whenever it is focused, whether the user clicks on it with a mouse, taps it on a touchscreen, or navigates to it using the keyboard. What is the :focus-visible Pseudo-Class? The :focus-visible pseudo-class is more specialized. It only applies styles to an element when the browser determines that the focus should be visible. This typically occurs when the user navigates via the keyboard or assistive technologies rather than through mouse or touch input. Example Usage of :focus-visible ` Here, the button will only show a blue outline when focused through keyboard navigation or another input method that usually requires visible focus indicators. Key Differences Between :focus and :focus-visible :focus - Behavior: Applies to any element that receives focus, regardless of the input method. - Use Cases: Ensures that all interactions with the element are visually indicated, whether by mouse, keyboard, or touch. :focus-visible - Behavior: Applies styles only when the focus should be visible, such as using a keyboard or assistive technology. - Use Cases: Ideal for scenarios where you want to provide focus indicators only to keyboard and assistive technology users while avoiding unnecessary outlines for mouse and touch users, typically required by design. Accessibility Implications :focus - Pros: - Guarantees that all users can see when an element is focused, which is critical for accessibility. - Cons: - Can lead to a suboptimal experience for mouse users, as focus styles may appear unnecessarily during mouse interactions. :focus-visible - Pros: - Enhances user experience by showing focus indicators only when necessary, thus keeping the interface clean for mouse and touch users. - Tailors the experience for keyboard and assistive technology users, providing them with clear visual cues. - Cons: - Additional considerations may be required to ensure that focus indicators are not accidentally omitted, especially in older browsers that do not support :focus-visible. - There may be cases where you want to show focus indicators for all users, regardless of input method. Best Practices for Using :focus and :focus-visible To achieve the best accessibility and user experience, combining both :focus and :focus-visible in your CSS is often a good idea. Combining :focus and :focus-visible ` Here is a Stackblitz example of what such styling could look like for you to try out and play with. Additional Tips - Test with Keyboard and Assistive Technology: Ensure that your web application is navigable using a keyboard (Tab, Shift + Tab, etc.) and that focus indicators are visible for those who rely on them. It's never a bad idea to include accessibility testing in your e2e testing suite. - Provide Clear Focus Indicators: Make sure that focus indicators are prominent and easy to see. A subtle or hard-to-spot focus indicator can severely impact accessibility for users who rely on keyboard navigation. Conclusion The :focus-visible pseudo-class offers a more refined way to manage focus indicators, improving accessibility and user experience, particularly for keyboard and assistive technology users. By understanding the differences between :focus and :focus-visible, and applying best practices in your CSS, you can create more accessible and user-friendly web applications. Remember, accessibility should never be an afterthought. By thoughtfully applying focus styles, you ensure that all users, regardless of how they interact with your site, can easily navigate and interact....

Nov 8, 2024

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The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use

The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use Dialogs are a common component added to applications, whether on the web or in native applications. Traditionally there has not been a standard way of implementing these on the web, resulting in many ad-hoc implementations that don’t act consistently across different web applications. Often, commonly expected features are missing from dialogs due to the complexity of implementing them. However, web browsers now offer a standard dialog element. Why use the dialog element? The native dialog element streamlines the implementation of dialogs, modals, and other kinds of non-modal dialogs. It does this by implementing many of the features needed by dialogs for you that are already baked into the browser. This is helpful as it reduces the burden on the developer when making their applications accessible by ensuring that user expectations concerning interaction are met, and it can also potentially simplify the implementation of dialogs in general. Basic usage Adding a dialog using the new tag can be achieved with just a few lines of code. ` However, adding the dialog alone won’t do anything to the page. It will show up only once you call the .showModal() method against it. ` Then if you want to close it you can call the .close() method on the dialog, or press the escape key to close it, just like most other modals work. Also, note how a backdrop appears that darkens the rest of the page and prevents you from interacting with it. Neat! Accessibility and focus management Correctly handling focus is important when making your web applications accessible to all users. Typically you have to move the current focus to the active dialog when showing them, but with the dialog element that’s done for you. By default, the focus will be set on the first focusable element in the dialog. You can optionally change which element receives focus first by setting the autofocus attribute on the element you want the focus to start on, as seen in the previous example where that attribute was added to the close element. Using the .showModal() method to open the dialog also implicitly adds the dialog ARIA role to the dialog element. This helps screen readers understand that a modal has appeared and the screen so it can act accordingly. Adding forms to dialogs Forms can also be added to dialogs, and there’s even a special method value for them. If you add a element with the method set to dialog then the form will have some different behaviors that differ from the standard get and post form methods. First off, no external HTTP request will be made with this new method. What will happen instead is that when the form gets submitted, the returnValue property on the form element will be set to the value of the submit button in the form. So given this example form: ` The form element with the example-form id will have its returnValue set to Submit. In addition to that, the dialog will close immediately after the submit event is done being handled, though not before automatic form validation is done. If this fails then the invalid event will be emitted. You may have already noticed one caveat to all of this. You might not want the form to close automatically when the submit handler is done running. If you perform an asynchronous request with an API or server you may want to wait for a response and show any errors that occur before dismissing the dialog. In this case, you can call event.preventDefault() in the submit event listener like so: ` Once your desired response comes back from the server, you can close it manually by using the .close() method on the dialog. Enhancing the backdrop The backdrop behind the dialog is a mostly translucent gray background by default. However, that backdrop is fully customizable using the ::backdrop pseudo-element. With it, you can set a background-color to any value you want, including gradients, images, etc. You may also want to make clicking the backdrop dismiss the modal, as this is a commonly implemented feature of them. By default, the <dialog> element doesn’t do this for us. There are a couple of changes that we can make to the dialog to get this working. First, an event listener is needed so that we know when the user clicks away from the dialog. ` Alone this event listener looks strange. It appears to dismiss the dialog whenever the dialog is clicked, not the backdrop. That’s the opposite of what we want to do. Unfortunately, you cannot listen for a click event on the backdrop as it is considered to be part of the dialog itself. Adding this event listener by itself will effectively make clicking anywhere on the page dismiss the dialog. To correct for this we need to wrap the contents of the dialog content with another element that will effectively mask the dialog and receive the click instead. A simple element can do! ` Even this isn’t perfect though as the contents of the div may have elements with margins in them that will push the div down, resulting in clicks close to the edges of the dialog to dismiss it. This can be resolved by adding a couple of styles the the wrapping div that will make the margin stay contained within the wrapper element. The dialog element itself also has some default padding that will exacerbate this issue. ` The wrapping div can be made into an inline-block element to contain the margin, and by moving the padding from the parent dialog to the wrapper, clicks made in the padded portions of the dialog will now interact with the wrapper element instead ensuring it won’t be dismissed. Conclusion Using the dialog element offers significant advantages for creating dialogs and modals by simplifying implementation with reasonable default behavior, enhancing accessibility for users that need assistive technologies such as screen readers by using automatic ARIA role assignment, tailored support for form elements, and flexible styling options....

Oct 25, 2024

4 mins

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The Open Source for All Initiative: Investing in Underrepresented Minorities in Tech - How 2 Companies are Kicking Off 2020 with $20,000

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