Gemini Makes Web development More accessible

A bit of a meta, inside baseball post here, so bear with my nerdiness.

One part of Curb Cuts’ design that has stuck in my craw from the beginning is how I could never get headlines to properly stylize brand names like “iPhone,” iPad,” “iOS,” and so on. This website doesn’t have a codified style guide, but I know, as one prime example, I prefer using letter case in headlines whereby every word begins with a capital letter. The problem with that approach, however, rears its ugly head when using Apple product names. My blog’s template likes to capitalize every word—as it should 95% of the time—even the lowercase “i” in iPhone and its brethren. It’s been driving me nuts, but I’ve let it be because, well, at least I can control stylization in my body copy, right? That is, until today when I got fed up and decided to be more intrepid in fixing the issue and to assuage my slightly obsessive-compulsive, design-centric sensibilities.

Enter Google Gemini. It came to rescue and proved my salvation.

I explained the problem to Gemini and what I wanted to accomplish. After a good bit of back-and-forth and trial-and-error, Gemini helped me identify the core issue: I needed a handful of CSS and JavaScript code to properly stylize the aforementioned product names. The technical part is cool, but the big win—notably from an accessibility perspective—is Gemini itself. I’ve written about this in the past, but it bears repeating here: having the chatbot do all the grunt work such that all I do is hit ⌘-C and ⌘-V (copy/paste on the Mac) into the “Code Injection” section of this site’s backend, press Save, and watch the magic happen is so much more accessible than manually using umpteenth Google searches to find the technological Tylenol I needed to remedy my website’s headache . What’s more, I know only basic CSS/JS; the code Gemini generated for me in 30 seconds’ time is far beyond my aptitude level. But that’s the whole point—my experience this afternoon making these tweaks to Curb Cuts’ layout is a perfect illustration of the power of generative AI to be an assistive technology. To do the grunt work myself is possible for me, but nonetheless comes with the costs of suffering eye strain and fatigue, hand fatigue from typing, and headaches from stress and tiredness. Those after effects aren’t trivial—things which are exacerbated for others who must account for coping with different and/or more severe disabilities than I do.

Chatbots can be far more benefits than mere convenient conduits for trivial pursuit.

Gemini made web development more accessible—and made my site look better too.

Finally.