In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn how to expand the impact of UX research across an organization, find a guide for designing focus indicators, discover five resources for learning about accessibility, 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
Picard management tip: Get excited about your work. Your excitement is contagious.
— Picard Tips (@PicardTips) August 18, 2021
User Experience
- Tight deadlines and information fatigue are two barriers that get in the way of UX research results reaching people in an organization. Sofia Linse offers four strategies to expand the impact of UX research across an organization.
- Did you miss Working Content’s recent community panel discussion? The recording of Landing your first content design role is now available.
- There’s a reason Jakob Nielsen’s 10 usability heuristics are in use more than 25 years after they were first introduced. They work. And those same heuristics can be applied to complex, domain-specific applications.
Error messages should be discoverable, descriptive, and help the user understand how to fix the error.
- Wondering why you’re having trouble with the Twitter redesign? Jorge Arango explains how Twitter ignored a commonly user interface pattern. And made users think.
Accessibility
- Do you want to learn about creating accessible websites? Nidhi Amin shares their top 5 resources for learning accessibility. Top of the list is one of my favorites: Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
- Prefer watching and listening to web professionals discuss inclusive design and accessibility? Mark your calendar! Attend the free online Inclusive Design 24 event on September 23, 2021.
- And if you’re a web developer, here’s how you can improve the accessibility of your next project:
Been seeing a lot on pair programming lately. From an #Accessibility standpoint, the best thing a #webdev can do is sit with an #a11y expert and build a component together! So much knowledge and skills can be transferred just from that alone! I do it a lot and it works wonders!
— Mark Steadman (@Steady5063) August 19, 2021
- When you’re reviewing a design for accessibility, adding annotations about the page elements helps describe the semantic and accessibility features on the page. I’m curious, what do you use to annotate designs?
WordPress
- Do you remember the one feature that got you to start using WordPress? Jeff Chandler does. For me, it wasn’t one feature. WordPress was the second content management system I tried. But it took five more years before I started using it all the time.
- The more plugins you add to your WordPress website, the more likely the CSS for those plugins will be different than the styles you’ve established for your site. Eric Karkovack offers multiple methods for you to create a more consistent look from the many plugins and many styles installed on your site.
- In the latest post in their block tutorial series, Will Morris explains how to use the WordPress Page Break block. For best results, Morris recommends you use page breaks in moderation and add subheadings to each sub-page.
- Have you registered? Tickets are available for WordCamp US 2021 on October 1, 2021. Did I mention tickets are free?
CSS and HTML
- Whether you call them sentence forms, fill-in-the-blank forms, or Mad Libs forms, the once-popular sentence forms are seeing increased popularity. Bringing with them a number of accessibility and usability issues, says Adrian Roselli.
- Agree. I wish more people understood this.
CSS is a whole world. If it’s the only programming language you know on top of HTML, and you know it well, that should be more than enough for a full time job.
— Heydon (@heydonworks) August 18, 2021
- In HTML is Not a Programming Language? Alvaro Montoro answers the three common arguments used to claim HTML is not a programming language. And argues we should celebrate that
HTML is the backbone of the Internet.
- A shorter text version from her Practical Accessibility video course, a guide to designing accessible, WCAG-compliant focus indicators is a deep dive by Sara Soueidan for designers and developers.
What I Found Interesting
- The latest update of Google Calendar recognizes you won’t be going back to the office soon. Starting August 30, 2021, Google Calendar will allow you to mark working location and hours with different location options: office, home, unspecified or somewhere else.
- Sometimes the simplest answer is best. Learn how birds stay perched on a branch while sleeping and why they don’t flip upside down and fall off the branch.
- Instead of a rocky or icy material in the core of Saturn, a new study published in Nature Astronomy this week suggests Saturn has a fluid core that wobbles. The source for the study? Seismographic data collected by NASA’s Cassini mission from 2004 to 2017.
If you like what you’ve read today, share the post with your colleagues and friends.
Want to make sure you don’t miss out on updates? Subscribe to get notified when new posts are published.
Did I miss some resources you found this week? I’d love to see them! Post them in the comments below.
