In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about designing better navigation with navigation queries, find out what accessibility coaching is, discover helpful checklists, 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
Your health is more important than your deadline.
— Brad Frost (@brad_frost) April 20, 2022
User Experience
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In Designing Better Navigation with Navigation Queries, the latest post in his Design Patterns series, Vitaly Friedman discusses navigation shortcuts to help users get to where they want to go. For example, our local government website uses the “I want to” navigation query to display options.
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Nominations for User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) Board of Directors closes April 27, 2022. Open positions include: Director of Web, Director of Finance/Treasurer-Secretary, and Director of Marketing and Communication. Are you interested? Or do you know someone?
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Thanks to Dan Klyn and Abby Covert for sharing their 21-minute YouTube video of their Information Architecture Conference (IAC) 2022 presentation, Understanding the Influence: Placemaking and Sensemaking in IA Work.
When we make content, we are not just delivering information.
We are making decisions that will hopefully lead our audience to an interpretation within the bounds of what we intended.
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Sad news to share with the UX community: UserWorks founder and longtime UX advocate Dick Horst has died. Cory Lebson and Chris Hass share their memories of Dick Horst.
Accessibility
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Have you registered? Ability Summit 2020 is a free virtual community event on May 10, 2022, bringing together people with disabilities, allies, and industry professionals to discuss and learn about the future of disability inclusion and accessibility.
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Michael Fairchild explains what accessibility coaching is and why it matters. Have to admit, accessibility coaching is a new phrase for me. From what Fairchild says, it’s still evolving.
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Crystal Preston-Watson released her Accessibility from A to Z YouTube trailer (15 seconds) this week. Her video series launches May 3, 2022. New videos will be released on the first and last Tuesday of the month. According to the announcement, the first video of the month will be a deep dive into a specific topic; the second video will be Q&A.
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Are you familiar with spoon theory? It’s the concept that your physical and mental capacity has a fixed number of spoons that get replenished each day. Lē McNamara discusses the impact of spoons on online experiences for disabled people, touching on her own personal experience.
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If you’ve ever wanted to, but were hesitant, my friend Eric Karkovack explains how to start testing your website with a screen reader. Like Karkovack, I’m a fan of the free open-source NVDA screen reader. You can use built-in screen readers if you prefer: VoiceOver is available on Macintosh and Narrator is available on Windows.
WordPress
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The second beta of WordPress 6.0 is available for download and testing. Final release of WordPress 6.0 is scheduled for May 24, 2022.
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WordCamp US 2022 extended their call for speakers. Deadline is now April 25, 2022. Consider submitting your idea for a workshop, lightning talk, or traditional session. Reminder: speakers are asked to make their presentations applicable to both in-person and virtual audiences.
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In this week’s WordPress Briefing 14-minute podcast episode, Josepha Haden Chomphosy walks you through the basics of making a WordPress blog. From concept to domain name to downloading and installing WordPress to choosing a theme and more, Chomphosy gives a high-level introduction to getting your first WordPress blog up and running.
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I’m not a fan of nagging ads in the WordPress admin. Which is why I was glad to install Clarity – Ad Blocker plugin to remove obtrusive ads.
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The WordPress plugin review team has limited ownership and committer changes for officially-recognized featured and beta plugins in the WordPress plugin directory. Why? According to the review team’s announcement, they’re trying to limit potential for abuse from a new owner or committer.
CSS and HTML
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While CSS Toggles is an Unofficial Draft (which means it’s experimental and subject to change), it’s exciting to learn Chromium will start prototyping with CSS Toggles. Bramus Van Damme’s The Future of CSS: CSS Toggles post explains the power of toggles and the various use cases.
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Handy online tool, the typographic scale calculator helps you choose the right font size from a harmonious type scale.
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Good tip from Eric:
Been getting a fair bit of mileage out of this #CSS recently:
— eric-meyer.css (@meyerweb) April 21, 2022
max-width: max-content;
margin-inline: auto;
Applied to a block box, it inline-centers the box when its container is wider than the box’s max-content, while allowing it to fill the container width when it’s narrower. -
Given the outline algorithm was never implemented in User Agents (which has led to misleading content in the HTML specification), Steve Faulkner’s pull request is to replace the current outline algorithm with one based on heading levels. As one commenter said, it’s sad, but the right thing to do.
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These 6 useful checklists every developer should know is a helpful resource for design, performance, product launch, marketing strategies, and online security.
What I Found Interesting
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Today is Earth Day, how are you celebrating the day? For those readers who are freelancers, consider how you can make Earth Day every day by becoming a greener freelancer. One way: turn off your equipment when it’s not in use.
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Which ones have you read? Or want to read? Or want to re-read? For me, Jens Meiert’s 4 Books to Become a Greater Person has me pulling out my copy of Profiles in Courage to re-read it.
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Not only for developers, the productivity methods described in 20 easy ways to be more productive as a developer applies to everyone.
Personally, I’m a fan of method 20: recharge. Walk away from what you’re doing and take a break.
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