August 5, 2022 Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development News

In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn how to set up a remote UX team, find an online site to test if your video triggers epileptic seizures, discover how to fix a horizontal overflow problem on mobile, 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

Just in case you need to hear it today:

– protecting your mental health matters
– finding joy matters
– taking a break matters
– resting matters
– downtime matters

Anxiety is not activism ❤️

— Amy Hupe (@Amy_Hupe) August 1, 2022

User Experience

• Setting up your first dedicated UX team for your department is hard enough. But setting it up during a pandemic is even more challenging. Martijn Zwart explains how they grew their team from zero to seven, outlining the three ingredients you need to set up a UX remote team.

• Would you add anything else to Doug Collins’ list?

  #UX #design secrets they don’t hear in school/bootcamp:
  
  1. Your experience matters more than your education.
  2. You’ll almost never use your ideal process on any given project.
  3. *Everyone* deals with Imposter Syndrome.
  4. The best pros still Google a lot of REALLY basic stuff.

  — Doug Collins (@DougCollinsUX) August 3, 2022

• One of the first things I learned in my user experience classes was Fitts’s Law:

  “The amount of time required for a person to move a pointer to a target area is a function of the distance to the target divided by the size of the target.”

  In this week’s Nielsen Norman Group post, Rauluca Budiu explains how Fitts’s Law applies to UX applications.

• Join the Content Strategy Seattle meetup group on August 9, 2022 when they host a panel discussion, Content in Design Systems and Beyond: The Discussion Continues. Panelists include:

  • Michael Haggerty-Villa, senior product design manager at Compass
  • Rebekah Wolf, content design and strategy for Microsoft’s Fluent Design System
  • Michael Andrews, content strategy evangelist at Kontent.ai
  • Vanessa Schuller, senior UX writer at Condé Nast

• Learn to document the history of your work and make sense of the design history of your project so it will be useful for future teams, says Anindra Das and Ignacia Orellana. It will help you avoid duplicating what’s already been done and build a summary of design decisions already made.

Accessibility

• Using subtitles on TV doesn’t mean you’re getting old. Would you be surprised to learn four out of five viewers aged between 18 and 25 years old use subtitles all or part of the time compared to only one out of four viewers aged between 56 and 75? Note: in the UK subtitles are what many people call closed captions.

• As an accessibility advocate or web developer, it can be easy to focus on the no’s and feel like you’re not making progress. As Mark Steadman reminds us, it’s important to take the small wins in accessibility.

  Be kind to yourself. We all may feel defeated and beat down, but keep fighting.

• I’m enjoying these monthly updates, to learn what’s in progress and what features are coming up next.

  August #TwitterA11yStatus
  
  Limited release:
  – Image description reminder
  
  In progress:
  – Accessibility settings updates
  
  Up next:
  – Closed captions toggle
  
  Exploring:
  – Spaces live captioning
  – Closed captions customization
  – Profile photo descriptions
  – Image description OCR

  — Twitter Accessibility (@TwitterA11y) August 2, 2022

• Improved keyboard navigation and a better screen reader experience are two new Slack accessible and equitable updates rolling out to Slack users on August 10.

• Wondering if your video might trigger epileptic seizures? Upload your video to Evan Levesque’s free online photosensitive epilepsy seizure trigger detection tool.

WordPress

• Good news to read! WebP by default will be merged into core for WordPress 6.1. Guess my how to convert images to WebP format blog post will need to be updated once 6.1 is released.

• Sorry to read the news. It’s the end of an era with DesktopServer shutting down. My first development environment was DesktopServer. I met and had breakfast with Marc Benzak and Gregg Franklin (who both worked on DesktopServer) at WordCamp Phoenix 2014.

• Glad to see Carrie Dils has updated her WordPress i18n (internationalization): what is it and why should you care? post. Years ago, I worked at a software company where I coordinated internationalization projects. One of the most challenging steps then, as it is now: making your code translation ready.

• Looking for a different way to display your blog posts? Here’s how to display your posts in a grid layout, either using the block editor to create a post grid, a plugin, or by adding code to your theme template file.

• Check out this quick how-to tutorial from Brian Gardner on creating a splash page with the free Frost theme. From what I can tell, these seven steps could be applied to any block theme with a Blank page template.

CSS and HTML

• Your content is overflowing on mobile. First up, figure out where the offending element is and ask whether it needs to that width, says Chen Hui Jing. Then you can start looking at options for resolving the horizontal overflow problem.

• Jhey Tompkins takes a closer look at what many people are calling the parent selector, :has(): the family selector. Note: as of August 3, 2022, it’s currently supported in Safari, expected in Chromium 105, but has no support in Firefox.

• Some basic HTML terminology to remember:

  <h1> to <h6> are HEADINGS
  <header> is a HEADER
  <th> is a TABLE HEADER
  <thead> is a TABLE HEADER GROUP
  file under #HTML terminology

  — Steve Faulkner (@stevefaulkner) August 2, 2022

• I enjoy reading Rachel Andrew’s monthly updates about web browsers. In her new to the web platform in July 2022 post, Andrew highlights stable browser releases for Firefox 103 and Safari 15.6. In Firefox 103, you’ll find support for the backdrop-filter CSS property. Which means now all three major browser engines support it.

• Good to see the new Cloud Four dot com redesign, where Tyler Sticka highlights redesign changes to create a more accessible, readable, and responsive website. Their changes included a new color palette, laying a foundation for a dark mode, and simplifying contributions.

What I Found Interesting

• When it comes to delivering talks, you’ll find lots of advice. What I like about Chelsea Troy’s how I do (and don’t) prepare a talk for a tech conference is her focus on the audience as she builds her talk. And that she chooses not to include a lot of memes, puns, gifs, or cultural references. (I zone out at any presentation that references movies or TV shows I’ve never watched.) Troy focuses on one guiding principle:

  What new skills do I want my audience to have, and know how to use, when they leave this room?

• Need some inspiration? Check out the August 2022 desktop wallpapers from Smashing Magazine, designed by artists and designers from around the world.

• It’s a bit confusing, Google’s video chat merger begins and there are two Google Meet apps. Google Duo branding is changing to Google Meet. So you’ll see two Meet apps: “Google Meet (original)” and “Google Meet: the updated Duo app.”

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