Inclusive Components: The Book

Now available in print from smashing magazine
book cover for Inclusive Components by Heydon Pickering, featuring a circuit board powering a bright light
  • Based on the blog, inclusive-components.design
  • But with updated content and demos
  • NEW: Exclusive bonus chapter on modal dialogs!
  • 47000+ words
  • Syntax highlighting by popular demand
€18 (ePub + PDF + Kindle *)
Buy the book!

About the author, Heydon Pickering

Rough, sketch of the moustachioed author by Cole Henley

Portrait by Cole Henley

Heydon has worked with The Paciello Group, The BBC, Smashing Magazine, and Bulb Energy as a designer, engineer, writer, editor, and illustrator. They were shortlisted for Designer Of The Year in The Net Awards.

Heydon previously wrote Inclusive Design Patterns for Smashing Magazine, which sold over 10,000 copies. Proceeds from this title were donated to the ACLU and The Democratic Socialists Of America, to help these organizations fight fascism and create a more inclusive society.

If you wish to hire Heydon, see their hire me page. You can also find them on Mastodon.

The book in brief

The book, in brief

Inclusive Components examines common web UI patterns through the lens of inclusion. The aim is to find more accessible and robust solutions for the patterns we author, plug in, and use every day.

Each chapter tackles a single component, addressing how different and vulnerable people might read and interact with it, and how they can be better accommodated. The in-depth explorations are meticulously illustrated and code examples culminate as working demos.

Inclusive design is not about wrong and right, but bad to better. You'll learn plenty of tips from Inclusive Components, but you'll also adopt the mindset to go on and make even better components.

example spreads from the epub, featuring annotated diagrams and code examples
Testimonials

Testimonials

“What Heydon achieves with his work on Inclusive Components is a pragmatic, friendly and approachable set of guides that help you to generate not just accessible components, but also resilient and progressive starting-points that will help you to build better websites and web apps in general.

I often describe this work as crucial learning material for this exact reason.”

— Andy Bell, No Divide

“If you want to make industry-grade components, you got to read everything on Heydon has on Inclusive Comps. He teaches you how to cater to every possible user (you never thought of) in witty and clever ways.”

— Zell Liew, learnjavascript.today

“Inclusive Components is chock-full of practical and comprehensive advice on building accessible UI. It's my go-to resource after the official WCAG and ARIA documentation. I've found it extremely helpful when building our design system!”

— Sarah Federman, Adobe

“Heydon is fucking cool. He knows his shit. Buy his fucking book.”

— Zoë Bijl, W3C Editor

“No other reference example has been more perfectly plagiarized by as many UI developers as any single component from Inclusive Components.”

— Paul Grenier, Deque Systems

“Inclusive Components is a very deep and thorough explanation of development of accessible components with real world examples. Heydon Pickering shows several alternative approaches and explains pros and cons of each. It’s also a pleasure too read!”

— Artem Sapegin, Wayfair

“Inclusive Components has invested an amazing amount of knowledge, energy and thought into taking seemingly simple problems which have an abundance of lazy solutions, and said 'Ok but here’s how you’d solve it properly, so that everyone can enjoy it.'”

— Tom Davey, Jisc

“Inclusive Components has been an indispensable source for exploring accessibility on the web. They navigate you through all the complexities of this difficult domain, pointing out common misconceptions and best practices along the way.”

— Dave Garwacke, Warby Parker
Back to top