Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development Resources: December 12, 2014

How to develop a living style guide, looking for the Section 508 refresh, a walkthrough of installing bbPress the first time, and collaborative responsive workflows are a few of the resources you’ll find in this week’s roundup for web designers and developers.

Each Friday I publish a weekly roundup of some of my favorite posts I’ve read in the past week for user experience, accessibility, WordPress, CSS, HTML, and responsive design.

Stay-up-to-date daily with resources like these by following me @redcrew on Twitter.

This week’s photo is of Historic Fort Wayne on the southwest side of Detroit, along the Detroit River. I had a great time last weekend visiting the fort during their Civil War Christmas event. Fascinating fact: in the over 160-year-history of the fort, it’s known to have “never saw a shot fired in anger.”

Favorite Tweet

“Your keyboard is one of the most important tools for accessibility testing.”—@marcysutton at #smashingconf

— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) December 10, 2014

User Experience

• Edd Souden discusses their team’s process for developing a living style guide for GOV.UK using a four-component solution.
• If you’re a user experience designer interested in user interface prototyping, these tips and tools from TechSmith will get you started.
• There’s been a lot of articles about the “fold” in the past couple weeks. Deborah Pang Davis joins the discussion with her Above the Fold, Below the Fold…‘There is No Fold’ post. Davis says all this talk about the fold takes away conversation about more important questions regarding structuring content, actions we want users to take, how our story can be used to connect with users, and more.

• One of my favorites: RT @ritchielee: Are you sure about Cancelling? Click OK to Cancel, and Cancel to not Cancel #ux pic.twitter.com/os24uoNbRo

  — Annoyed Richard (@WhatAnnoysMe) December 11, 2014

Accessibility

• There are many positive reasons why companies should be captioning more content. Learn how subtitles add value, not just access, by improving communication, learning, video metadata,and speech recognition.

• Love the new Android 5.0 TalkBack green dashed outline focus indicator! Plus High Contrast Text! Awesome! 🙂 #a11y pic.twitter.com/3hTL1aL3Q6

  — Paul J. Adam (@pauljadam) December 9, 2014

• Only three days left to nominate your accessibility hero for the first annual Community Heroes of Web Accessibility Awards. Nominations are due December 15, 2014 and voting will take place in January 2015.
• Everybody’s been looking for the Section 508 refresh. And so have Karl “the Viking” Groves and Billy “the Lumberjack” Gregory.
  
• If you weren’t able to attend Deque Systems’ webinar this week, catch up on Paul Adam’s presentation with my takeaways from mobile accessibility 101. Did you know it’s better to test Android accessibility with Firefox, not Chrome?

WordPress

• The WordPress 4.1 release candidate is available for download. With an expected ship date of Tuesday, December 16, the team could use help with testing. Can you help?

• Plugin/theme devs: Write about the use cases for your plugin, not just how to use it.

  — Angie Meeker (@angiemeeker) December 8, 2014

• Jeff Chandler walks you through a new user’s experience installing and using bbPress for the first time. It didn’t go as smoothly as Jeff expected. Check the comments for more discussion of the plugin and configuration.
  
• Announced this week, the WordPress Theme Review team now requires all themes in the WordPress theme respository to be translation ready. Any existing themes that are updated will also need to translation-ready.

Responsive Design

• Sibylle Weber takes a look at designer-developer collaborative responsive design workflow, shares her thoughts on what doesn’t work, and how we can improve.

• Knee deep in responsive web design, this is by far my favorite challenge of web development. #rwd

  — Joel Jenkins (@unculturedswine) December 12, 2014

• Great to hear the Microsoft IE team latest roadmap update includes implementing the srcset attribute for image elements as well as date input controls as well as adding support for the main element.

CSS and HTML

• Chris Coyier shares his design text overlays on images coding demos, and points out what to keep in mind for text breaking, background color, text color, and color combinations.

• I really hope 2015 will be the year #CSS Regions see the light in browser implementations again.

  — Sara Soueidan (@SaraSoueidan) December 9, 2014

• Every week I learn about some amazing work created with CSS. Here’s what I discovered this week: an incredible spinning fractal (hat tip to CSS Weekly).

• HTML4 FTW
  http://t.co/WrcIGZ5VdZ pic.twitter.com/1rfTlNGc50

  — CommitStrip (@CommitStrip) December 12, 2014

What I Found Interesting

• How are you spending Computer Science Education Week? Have you tried an hour of code?
• Learn how Google search works in less than five minutes with this interactive site.
  
• People have the same three misconceptions about mentorship, says Ryan Holiday. Want to learn how to do it right? Learn why you don’t have a mentor.
  

  If you can work hard to be well-adjusted and dependable—you’re less likely to blow up and ruin the whole opportunity.