In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn how to get better insights with smaller surveys, find out how to fix low-contrast text, discover a privacy-focused secure browser, and more.
If you’re new to my blog, each Friday I publish a post highlighting my favorite user experience, accessibility, WordPress, CSS, and HTML posts I’ve read in the past week.
Hope you find the resources helpful in your work or projects!
Want more resources like these on a daily basis? Follow me @redcrew on Twitter.
Tweet of the Week
Been reflecting on trust within teams, and realized one of the most effective ways I know to build trust is to ask for help when you need it and to willingly give support when others ask for help. Don’t view it as disruption or delay of the work but part of a healthy process.
— Karen VanHouten (@designinginward) April 9, 2022
User Experience
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Whether you’re a solo freelancer or design team member in a large organization considering a design system, it’s important to remember design systems are a journey. They’re never finished, says Dan Donald as he shares his insights around the artifacts of design systems (case study).
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The five-step process of backward design can help product managers build better user-focused products.
It helps you find the real focus — user value and/or business value.
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Surveys are easy. Why not make them useful? Get more insight from smaller surveys by patchworking, says Carolyn Jarrett.
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For folks in the United States, our federal taxes are due on Monday, April 18, 2022. We’ll hurry to file our taxes online before the deadline and discover plenty of examples of bad form design. Which Jack Moffett did as he wrote about tax form failures with disappearing hint text and pre-fill follies.
Accessibility
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Inspired by Dave Rupert’s post What if… one day everything got better, Ben Meyers published part 1 of six resources for improving accessibility on your own websites. This week’s post: How to fix low-contrast text. Thanks, Ben!
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Another developer inspired by Dave Rupert’s post shared their tips on how to resolve common accessibility issues you can fix today.
Let’s all put in the work to make sure we, our colleagues, our clients and our users avoid these issues.
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In Why web accessibility matters to me, data visualization developer Aditi Bhandari shares her web accessibility journey, starting with her first college class learning about UX design principles and web accessibility. And discusses how she’s approached her own accessibility education. https://source.opennews.org/articles/starter-pack-accessibility-resources/
We need to make sure that as we try to make our work more inclusive for all users, we still address the needs of the disabled users that accessibility standards were made for in the first place.
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Did you miss last week’s WordPress Accessibility Meetup with my friend Nic Steenhout? No worries, I’ve published my takeaways from The Internet is Unusable: The Disabled View.
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Join the WordPress Accessibility meetup group on April 18, 2022 when they host Cam Beudoin who will present HTML Forms and Web Accessibility. The online event is free, but pre-registration is required.
WordPress
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The first beta version of WordPress 6.0 has been released and is available for testing. Scheduled final release is May 24, 2022.
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In the latest post in his Building with Blocks series, Justin Tadlock walks you through building a timeline page with blocks. Tadlock uses the Timeline Block for Gutenberg, which works with any theme that supports the block editor.
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And it’s on hold. No surprise, after receiving lots of critical feedback from the WordPress community. The WordPress Performance team has put a hold on WebP format by default in WordPress 6.0.
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If you missed the news, Caldera Forms is now closed. All updates and support have been discontinued. If you haven’t already switched to another forms plugin, you need to switch now.
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I’ve been a fan of ManageWP for years, using it for the client sites I manage. It’s saved me so much time and effort in site maintenance, cloning, and backup. I agree with the WP Marmite team: ManageWP is the essential tool to manage the maintenance of your WordPress sites.
CSS and HTML
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They’re not supported in every browser and operating systems don’t always update them in a timely manner. Which adds to the struggle of using native emoji on the web.
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Get inspired with Wyatt Nolen’s polygon animal morph, created with only CSS. Since it’s an animation, which can be problematic for some people, I’m providing the link to the animation rather than embedding the CodePen
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The use cases for the
:hasCSS pseudo-class are numerous as Matthias Ott explains. You can style all kinds of elements based on whether the child of an element is selected, has focus, or doesn’t exist. -
Ahmad Shadeed also takes a deep dive into the CSS parent selector as he shares 16 use cases for
:hasand offers further resources to learn more.
What I Found Interesting
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This is why I love the web: people coming together to help each other. Meet the 1,300 volunteer librarians and archivists racing to back up Ukraine’s digital archives.
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Google has made it easier to join a Google Meet video call, with a new feature that allows you to join a video call directly from Google Docs, Sheets, or Slides.
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A Mac-only, beta version by invite only secure browser from privacy-focused search DuckDuckGo has been released. Features included privacy by default, password management, bookmarks, tab management and more.
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