In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about design-pattern guidelines, find an upcoming talk about why we need more accessible designers, discover how browsers work, 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
Designing for accessibility only seems hard because you’ve spent so long in an industry where exclusionary design is the default.
— Carys (@blindandb0ujee) December 6, 2021
User Experience
- If you’ve worked in user experience for a while, you know the path to UX looks different for everyone. In True Stories of Overcoming Self-Doubt in UX, Indeed UX team members share their journeys and how they found motivation to overcome doubt.
- In the second of a two-part episode, Todd Libby of Front End Nerdery talks with UX teacher, speaker, and consultant Joe Natoli about user experience, party lines, big box stores, customer service, and more.
- Nielsen Norman Group continues their series of study guides, this week’s guide is focused on design-pattern guidelines. From input controls to forms to dialogs and more, you’ll find a helpful collection of links to Nielsen Norman Group articles and videos.
- Do the research first.
UX people need to spend less time designing persona “documents” and more time doing actual research to inform the personas. #ux #userresearch
— Sarah Doody (@sarahdoody) December 6, 2021
- Looking for holiday gifts for a fellow UX team member? Or yourself? Rosenfeld Media has a 25% off sale on their books through December 15, 2021, using code HOLIDAYSALE2021.
Accessibility
- Join Accessibility Talks on December 15, 2021 when they host a presentation by Anna Cook: Why We Need More Accessibility Designers. Cook will discuss what it means to be an accessibility designer and how you can advocate to create accessibility designer roles.
- Craft meaningful link text that can be understand when read aloud.
Accessibility tip #1:
Don’t hyperlink the word “here”.
Use descriptive language. If you are linking to your quirky introduction video, hyperlink that whole phrase. Imagine a screenreader skipping through to each hyperlink and just hearing, here, here, here, here.
— Digital Learning (@dltdavidson) December 9, 2021
- Deque Systems announced the axe-con 2022 agenda and speakers for their three-day conference March 15 through March 17, 2022. While the entire conference schedule looks amazing, the third day looks to me to have some fantastic presentations!
- Celebrating two accessibility wins in one week doesn’t happen to me very often. Thanks to Simply Schedule Appointments and Balsamiq for acting on my suggestions to improve the accessibility of their content.
- I’m not a fan of PDFs, but if you need to create an accessible PDF from Microsoft Word, you first need to create an accessible Word document. Learn how to use Word’s built-in accessibility checker in the two-minute Making PDFs Accessible with Word video from Microsoft.
WordPress
- The second beta of WordPress 5.9 is available for download and testing. Currently, the 5.9 final release is scheduled for January 25, 2021.
- If you’re one of the Gravatar users notified by Have I Been Pwned this week, you’ll be interested in Jeff Chandler’s post about the unintended user of the Gravatar API which led to the public data scrape. Chandler’s recommendation: consider an alternative to Gravatar.
- Given I found no Advent calendar for WordPress this year, I decided to create one myself. Focused on already-published content, the WordPress Advent Calendar 2021 highlights content that falls into the “I didn’t know that” category as well as not-as-well-known WordPress authors.
- The Toronto Web Performance Group hosts a WordPress Web Performance meetup with livestream on December 15, 2021. Five speakers are currently scheduled to speak on optimizing images, prioritizing performance, making WordPress faster and more secure. The event is free, but pre-registration is required.
- What a surprise to learn Helen Hou-Sandí is leaving WordPress agency 10up. Hou-Sandí, who celebrated her 10th work anniversary at 10up in August 2021, talks about her WordPress journey, including the opportunity to work on the White House website for the Biden-Harris administration. Wishing her the best in the future!
CSS and HTML
- Announced this week, CSS aspect-ratio is now supported cross-browser. No more need to create padding-top hacks. Maintaining a consistent width-to-height ratio is critical in preventing cumulative layout shift.
- If you’re looking for a deep dive into how browsers work, check out Web Browser Engineering, a free online ebook. It explains everything from the history of the web, drawing graphics, viewing documents, and more.
- Did you know
!importantis automatically removed from the property’s value by the CSS parser? Bramus share codes examples and outcomes in their latest post, CSS custom properties and!important.
What I Found Interesting
- Good news for Google Calendar users. You can now customize recurring tasks in Google Calendar. Rolling out now to all Google Workspace, G Suite Basic, and G Suite Business customers.
- If you’re a Windows users, you’ll be glad to to learn Microsoft has updated their popular Notepad text editor with a dark mode, translucent elements, and multi-level undo. The new design is currently only available to Windows Insider users.
- I agree, the hardest part about writing a blog post is getting started. Use the same process every time says, Sonia Simone from Copyblogger who offers 7 practical steps for bloggers to write a good blog post.
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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.
