In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about usability issues with disabled buttons, find an updated list of accessibility and inclusive design meetup groups, discover how to align a button label vertically with CSS, 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
When delivering feedback, you want to ensure that you are delivering the feedback in a clear way, in a direct and candid but kind way. Being direct and/or candid is not the same as being harsh, condescending, or demeaning.
— A-A-Ron (@aaroni) August 3, 2021
User Experience
- In the latest post in the Smashing Magazine design series, Vitaly Friedman takes a closer look at a frustrating design pattern: disabled buttons. He explains common usability issues with disabled buttons, discusses how to fix the issues, and questions whether disabling buttons makes sense.
- Join Working in Content at their free online community panel of content design leaders and hiring managers discussing how to land your first content design role. The panel is Tuesday, August 10, 2021 at noon Eastern Time. Once you register, you can send questions ahead of the panel.
- Planning to conduct a website review? Makes sure it’s a success with Paul Boag’s helpful how-to guide when running a website review.
A website review can take many forms and focus on many different areas, and your budget may limit how your reviewer can realistically investigate many of those areas.
- Bias in surveys can occur at the content and design stage, data collection stage, or during data analysis, says Jason Stockwell. Which is why getting more out of your surveys requires a focus on two core elements.
Accessibility
- Announced this week: the Shopify Theme Store has new accessibility requirements for new theme submissions. Themes must be built with valid HTML. Be sure to test theme defaults.
- I updated my post of accessibility and inclusive design groups around the world. Wonderful to learn about new groups starting and a few groups starting up again. Groups have moved their events online, join one today!
- Twitter Marketing folks shared their guide to designing inclusive marketing campaigns, highlighting partnering with influencers as well as creating for and with the disability community.
Build a proactive accessibility plan for your brand’s events. The recent shift to virtual events has made it easier for people with disabilities to connect via technology.
- Want to learn how to test sites for accessibility? Join the IxDA Birmingham group on August 12, 2021 for Accessibility: 2/4 Testing, the second in a four-part series on accessibility. The free online class covers browser testing, not automated testing.
- When I read Jake Archibald’s Writing great alt text: Emotion matters post and how Léonie Watson improved Archibald’s alt text, it reminded me of the a11yNYC recap I published a few years ago, How Learning Sign Language Improved My Alt Text.
WordPress
- Not surprised to learn WordPress dominates market share of the top 10,000 websites, according to research conducted by GigaPress.
- Another story of a plugin being bought out and changing from a previously free product to a premium product. Termly acquired the GDPR/CCPA Cookie Consent Banner plugin recently, resulting in some upset users. However, the new plugin owner was transparent about the change, announcing what would be happening two weeks before the new version.
- One of the advantages of using the Classic Block: you can keep your content together as one unit, rather than separate blocks.
- It’s a long read, but Kinsta has updated their guide to the using the WordPress block editor (Gutenberg) with the latest WordPress 5.8 changes, including info on using blocks in sidebars and footers.
CSS and HTML
- Did you know fonts have unique line-heights? This can cause issues for alignment. Ahmad Shadeed offers a solution for aligning a button label vertically.
- Paul Ratcliffe takes a deep dive into skipping to content as he walks you through the HTML and CSS coding to add landmarks and skip links to provide a better experience for all users.
- Thanks to A List Apart for sharing an excerpt from chapter 2 of Tom Greenwood’s Sustainable Web Design book. While it’s almost impossible to measure the amount of carbon emissions produced from a web product, we can measure the efficiency of our websites, says Greenwood.
- Have you already found Layoutit, the free online CSS Grid layout builder? Quickly draw page layouts and it creates the HTML and CSS you can export to CodePen.
What I Found Interesting
- When news broke that Mike Richards was in negotiations to become Jeopardy’s permanent host, fans were not happy. What do you think of the announcement?
- Helpful, thoughtful advice.
Career advice: Avoid thinking or saying “I am like this” or “I am not good at this”. It will stifle you. No human is static. State to yourself what you would ideally want to be like. Slowly but surely, you will progress in that direction.
— Mårten Mickos (@martenmickos) August 4, 2021
- Get ready for the 2021 Perseid meteor showers! They’ve already started (began July 25, 2021), but peak on the evening on August 12, 2021. Should be good viewing, since the new moon is August 8 and skies will be dark for the annual shooting stars display.
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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.
