In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn how to improve UX writing, find a free virtual WordPress conference, discover how to use CSS for internationalization, 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
Surround yourself with those who bring out the best in you, not the stress in you.
— STOKED⚡ (@StokedDaily) April 24, 2020
User Experience
- Finding the right name for your personas matters, it’s crucial to select a name that is memorable and your team takes seriously.
- In part one of a two-part series, Andrew Wilshere has compiled a UX design glossary of 84 terms to help get you started. Useful!
- To improve UX writing, use simple tenses, write in active voice, and and address the user directly say Punam Saxena and Samiksha Chaudhuri.
To ensure a good user experience, it is essential to design user-interface text to be accessible to users with different abilities.
- Content designers, can you work on this? Nicolas LePan has visualized the length of terms of service agreements and the results will astound you. Microsoft’s terms of service takes over an hour to read. Twitter’s takes 23 minutes to read.
Accessibility
- States moved quickly to create coronovirus pages, but unfortunately created multiple accessibility barriers for blind users with low color contrasts, empty links or buttons, and missing input labels.
- With more people moving to ordering restaurant food online, Josefin Wessman highlights five ways to improve the accessibility of takeaway apps.
- Avoid limiting accessibility to visual design.
When we talk about the design aspects of accessibility, many people think about visual design: colour, colour contrast, typography. Do not limit a11y to visual design.
We must also think of interaction design: keyboard flow, activation of things, feedback, and “what’s next?”
— Derek Featherstone (@feather) April 23, 2020
- The coronovirus pandemic has led to restrictions for people around the world, but has opened up the world for people with disabilities.
- My friend Meryl Evans explains what’s important for captioning videos correctly as she reviews the best automatic captioning tools for video calls. I was sorry she didn’t get as good results as I have with Web Captioner.
WordPress
- If you weren’t able to attend the virtual WPBlockTalk event, all WPBlockTalk videos are available on WordPress.tv.
- Learn how to display recent posts on your WordPress site, using a block, widget, plugin, shortcode, or by adding the code manually.
- Wondering how to set up a staging site? Check out this review of five free and premium staging site plugins. Note the different features offered, including push-to-live options.
- Returning for the second year, the free WP Feedback Virtual Summit returns April 27, 2020 for WordPress freelancers and agencies. Thirty world-class WordPress experts will share their experiences and knowledge in the pre-recorded sessions.
CSS and HTML
- In Ahmed Shadeed’s latest in-depth article, he delves into spacing in CSS, explaining what you need to know about
padding,margin, CSS Grid Gap, CSS Flexbox Gap, and CSS positioning. - The website pages we create have become too big, too heavy, they take too long to download. We’ve ruined the Web. Here’s how we fix it, says Jeremy Keith.
We should all be responsible for this, no matter what your job is.
- In part 2 of his “Here’s what I didn’t know about…” series, Manuel Matuzovic shares what he’s learned about the CSS color property. Did you know that when you change the color value of an element, its border color changes as well?
- Long read, well worth it to learn how you can use CSS for internationalization. You’ll discover what methods to use to apply different styles to different languages on a multilingual page with CSS as well as what CSS properties provide layout and typographic capabilities.
What I Found Interesting
- A three-week fundraising effort raised $23 million for tablet-style laptop computers with free internet access for more than 50,000 Detroit students to help with their online learning.
It looks like there aren’t any great matches for your search.
What an interesting change. In getting to great matches in Google Search, Google explains what happens when it can’t find any matches for your search query.- The Zoom 5.0 version updates security and provides privacy improvements including locking meetings, passwords enabled by default, and restricting screen sharing.
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Did I miss some resources you found this week? I’d love to see them! Post them in the comments below.
Thank you for adding the article, Deborah. Web Captioner’s main downfall is that I cannot get it to contain the captions within the window. I need to have the video in front with the captions. Between captions and lipreading, it’s the most accurate option. Well, humans captioning is the very best. (I just added that to the article.) If there is no video, then Web Captioner could very well be the best option.
Hi Meryl,
Thank you for your comment. I wish there was an easy solution for captioning that would just work. Don’t make me (or anyone) think!