In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about best practices for autocomplete suggestions, find out why accessibility is writing, discover Core Web Vitals tools to improve web performance, 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
For those at the back: you don't need to compare making something "easy to use" with "your mum could use it". It's an outdated, lazy analogy to insinuate women/mums aren't technology literate. I'm a mum. I also have a computer science degree. And so do many, many others #uxdesign
— Laura Yarrow (@laura_yarrow) August 12, 2022
User Experience
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Be flexible with your process, tools, and timing says Nadia Roumani when you integrate co-designers with lived experiences into your design practices.
Engaging community members in the entire process, rather than during one-time interviews, builds a solid foundation to collaboratively tackle complex challenges as a community.
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That’s exactly what I did when I worked at the college, on the web services team. If your user research feels incomplete, try talking with your customer support team. And be the one to initiate the conversation.
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According to Baymard Institute’s recent eCommerce UX research study, 80% of e-commerce websites provide autocomplete suggestions, but only 19% of sites get everything right for users. Learn what 9 UX best practice design patterns for autocomplete suggestions Baymard recommends.
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Did you miss this week’s UX Research and Strategy event? No worries, check out my recap of rapid UX research to empower your teams with Amanda Gelb.
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In how to research components and patterns: common challenges and how to overcome them, Carolyn Jarrett, Ignacia Orellana, and Amy Hupe explain why it’s best not to rely on just one approach for researching components and patterns.
Accessibility
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Congrats to my friend Sarah Bourne who is being honored with the 2022 Tom Hopkins Disability Access Award from the Massachusetts Office on Disability on October 27. She was the former Commonwealth Director of IT Accessibility when she retired earlier this year. Bourne was the first state webmaster, contributed to establishing web accessibility standards, and published standards and guidance over the years.
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Here we go again! Similar steps happened 12 years ago. Lainey Feingold shares her take on the U.S. Department of Justice announcement to adopt web accessibility regulations for state and local governments.
To me the most important part of the July 2022 announcement is the Department’s stated goal to help public entitles comply with existing obligations to make their websites accessible.
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Join TPGi on August 17, 2022 when they present Create Inclusive Customer Experiences: The Basics of Kiosk Accessibility. Presenters Laura Boniello Miller and Traci Murray will discuss the basics of what kiosk developers should consider before launching their kiosks. Webinar is free, pre-registration required.
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The deadline to submit your presentation for WP Accessibility Day has been extended to August 15, 2022. Share your lessons learned, submit a lightning talk, or consider joining with colleagues for a panel discussion.
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Only currently available to Windows 11 Insiders, the new Live Captions tool provides automatic transcription for any spoken content from audio, whether a website or from microphones. Which means you can get captions for a live, in-person conversation. [three-minute video]
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Accessibility principles all digital writers should know, from my colleague Patrick Garvin, are highlighted in Ian Demsky’s accessibility is writing post. A foundation of understanding plain language, link text, and alternative text will go far in your writing.
WordPress
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Do you contribute to WordPress? Share your thoughts in Allie Nimmon’s five-minute WordPress Contributor Survey. It’s an anonymous survey; I’m hoping the results will be published in the near future.
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Are you using the Classic Editor and want to convert your posts quickly to blocks? You’ll be interested in my friend Jeff Chandler’s experience with a new plugin that converts posts published in Classic Editor to blocks. Based on his experience, the new plugin needs more testing and improvement.
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The new Twenty Twenty-Three default theme is in development, using a stripped-back version of Twenty Twenty-Two as the base. Check out the Twenty Twenty-Three theme preview where you’ll find different color styles have been applied, new heading font, and reduced-size heading styles.
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Find out what’s new in Gutenberg 13.8.3 plugin. Personally, I was interested in the new accessibility improvements.
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Wikis are not as common as in the past, but they serve a need: organizing information online where multiple people can submit, maintain, and share content. If you’ve ever wanted to create a wiki with WordPress, Kinsta’s guide to creating a WordPress wiki is for you.
CSS and HTML
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Daniel Schwarz shares best practices and examples of pages for how you can create a comfortable reading experience as you design long-form articles. My favorite tips: bump up line height and increase font size. But Schwarz also highlights other practices you may not have considered, including how to format for reader mode.
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I didn’t know about Treo or Calibre before I read Zara Cooper’s review of Core Web Vitals tools to boost your web performance scores. Which tool do you use on your sites?
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Every week I look forward to CSS comic strips created by Álvaro Montoro and this week’s is pretty amazing! Check out CSS OOP, Montoro’s review of CSS as a programming language.
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Be more specific when you ask the question:
Asking “How do I get started with web dev?” is like asking “How do I get started with cooking?”
— ⚡️ Salma | whitep4nth3r (@whitep4nth3r) August 9, 2022
Decide what you want to make. And then reframe the question.
“How do I make lasagne?” or “How might I build a blog?” is more straightforward to answer — and you’ll get better help. -
You can have a gradient for a border in CSS. But there’s a few things to keep in mind when you create gradient borders on one or more sides with border-image, says Ben Frain. Including being aware that some elements have borders by default.
What I Found Interesting
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Fun story about bird migration and the mystery of the Lesser Yellowlegs is revealed. With a Michigan connection!
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Heartbreaking news to read about the death of David McCullough. Like many other people, he was a huge influence for me with his focus on writing and history. My friend Scott Monty gives a lovely tribute to McCullough in a larger way of looking at leadership.
Leadership is inextricably linked with life. And therefore, the stories and examples we find in history help us apply those life lessons.
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He lives in the county next to ours. And built a fiber-to-the-home Internet provider because he couldn’t get good broadband service from AT&T or Comcast. Now he’s expanding his Internet service to hundreds of homes.
If you like what you’ve read today, share the post with your colleagues and friends.
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