In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn how to include people with disabilities in your UX research, find a recap of Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word keynote address, discover the results of the 2021 State of CSS survey, 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
before you send that email, ask yourself: is this a december problem or a january problem?
— Dr. Nneka D. Dennie 💁🏾♀️🇻🇨✊🏾 (@BlkGrlBrilliant) December 14, 2021
User Experience
- Looking to improve your efforts to include people with disabilities in your research? Samuel Proulx shares insights on recruiting people with disabilities for accessibility UX research with Erin May and JH from User Interviews .
- With 1 of 13 people suffering from anxiety, Jeremy Cherry questions whether modern technology and product design are partly responsible in A designer’s guide to anxiety.
- Does the word “users” still have a place in your work? Or have you transitioned to using different wording? Some UX folks question whether it’s clear language for their clients.
I have stopped saying ‘users’ altogether.
In all my #UX briefs and presentations, they’re folks, visitors, people, customers…#humanfirst
— Jess Vice (@JessViceUX) December 14, 2021
- For UX designers, it can seem services and applications are produced in an invisible digital world. But digital has consequences; developing a software feature causes an increase in CO2, says Gerry McGovern.
As managers, designers, developers, we should weigh our decisions to create something or not against the amount of damage and pollution it will cause.
- Thanks to An Event Apart for their holiday treat! Morten Rand-Hendriksen’s 2021 Fall Summit Session, Practical Ethics for the Modern Web Designer (44-minute video), can be watched for free.
Accessibility
- Good news for Twitter users! The Twitter accessibility team announced the next step in their support for captions: all videos will be auto-captioned. I have it working on Android Twitter, but it’s been hit or miss on the web with having the CC selection option.
A couple months ago we rolled out video caption file upload. Starting today, all videos will be auto-captioned.
To see them, turn on captioning in your mobile device settings, or select the CC button on Web.
What do you think of the experience? https://t.co/fywdjC6yDI
— Twitter Accessibility (@TwitterA11y) December 14, 2021
- In response to Jake Archibald’s writing good alternative text post, questioning whether skin tone be mentioned, Léonie Watson shares her thoughts on skin tone and text descriptions.
Here’s a question for you: if you read a text description that says “A person”, what does the image in your head look like?
- Not surprised, but I’m wondering what took so long for the lawsuit? SiriuxXM sued for failing to provide podcast transcripts for Deaf users. The suit, filed by the National Association for the Deaf, says podcasting companies are in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
- In response to the recent discussions about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 3.0 Working Draft, Eric Eggert says WCAG 3 is not ready yet. And it won’t be ready for a while.
- If you missed Smashing Magazine’s December Smashing Meets for All, they’ve posted the 35-minute video of Building the Most Inaccessible Site Possible with Manuel Matuzovic.
WordPress
- The third beta of WordPress 5.9 is available for download and testing. The current schedule is for the final version of 5.9 to be released on January 25, 2021.
- Did you miss this week’s State of the Word? Check out my notes of Matt Mullenweg’s keynote address.
- If you have All in One SEO plugin installed, and don’t have automatic updates activated for minor version updates, you’ll want to make sure you update to the latest version. All in One version 4.1.5.3 patches severe vulnerabilities.
- From this week’s Toronto Web Performance meetup, Felix Arntz (developer relations engineer at Google and WordPress core committer) was one of several presenters talking about WordPress and web performance.
“Images and JS are the main issues and result in 70% of #webperf problems (on wordpress)” – @felixarntz #webperf #perfmatters #StateOfTheWord
join us live!
🎥: https://t.co/bqtqz62wM9 pic.twitter.com/Pw8MIKLk0y— Henri Helvetica v3.0 👨🏾🚀 🇭🇹 (@HenriHelvetica) December 15, 2021
- Join WordPress bloggers around the world for a month-long blogging challenge in January called Bloganuary. Each day you’ll receive a new writing prompt as inspiration for you to publish a post.
CSS and HTML
- The final two chapters of the 2021 Web Almanac have been released, all 24 chapters are available online. Or you can download the free 775 page ebook.
- It’s December and that means Lynn Fisher published her annual portfolio refresh. Try resizing your browser. According to Fisher, Firefox and Edge handle it best.
- In Explain like I’m five: Web Performance Optimization, Stoyan Stefanov explains the four principles of web optimization: do less work, work in parallel, pre-work, and post-work and how they apply to web performance.
- Something we’ve been waiting for years to be implemented. In Edge Canary: built-in fully stylable and accessible
selects, with no libraries or custom JavaScript needed. To see it in action, you’ll need to turn on the “Experimental Web Platform features” experiment in about:flags.See the Pen
Fully stylable and accessible selects by Patrick Brosset (@captainbrosset)
on CodePen. - It’s out! Results of the State of CSS 2021 survey was released this week. Over 8,700 developers around the world participated. A few demographics that stood out for me: 65% of survey participants identify as men, only 8% identify as women. And almost 50% of participants used a CSS-in-JavaScript library.
What I Found Interesting
- Who remembers the AltaVista search engine? I do! This week, AltaVista celebrated its 26th birthday.
- I admit, I have lots of books. It’s hard for me to consider letting go of them, but LifeHacker’s recommendations for getting rid of books you no longer need (or use) has me considering cleaning up my bookshelves.
- Competition for Canva? Adobe announced its free Creative Cloud Express online product, which includes functionality of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro.
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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.
