In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about research operations, find a helpful post on accessible headings, discover a free video CSS course, 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
Right now, very few organizations are stepping outside their own point of view to get a better perspective about people. There is an opportunity here for future-minded orgs to build understanding of people and create resilient, respectful solutions with that knowledge.
— Indi Young (@indiyoung) January 5, 2022
User Experience
- Have you heard of ResearchOps, an abbreviation for research operations? Or Relationship Ops, an abbreviation for relationship operations? According to Rachel Miles, RelationshipOps is a growing aspect of ResearchOps, focusing on participant recruitment and nurturing participant relationships for the long term.
- Jorge Arango revisits IA’s past as he shares his thoughts on a review of the first edition of the polar bear book and the contrast between websites of the late 1990’s and today.
- For the past few years, there’s been a lot of discussion on social media and in blog posts about whether user experience professionals should have a portfolio. My personal belief follows Chicago Camps tweet:
You’d think that if an employer wanted the opportunity to review samples of someone’s work…
The least they could do is post the salary range for the role.
— Chicago Camps (@ChicagoCamps) January 7, 2022
- In the fifth blog post in the Beginner’s Guide to Product Research series, Kelsey Ward highlights common pitfalls to avoid in product research. One of the most common pitfalls: a long survey causing participant fatigue.
- Test your usability knowledge with Nielsen Norman’s User Experience quiz, based on articles they published in 2021.
Accessibility
- My friend Rian Rietveld takes a deep dive into headings in her latest Accessible Heading structure post on a11yproject. Did you know you should only use one
h1heading on your page? - Good news to read about ADP’s settlement agreement with San Francisco LightHouse for the Blind to improve ADP’s product accessibility. In addition to a schedule to remediate the web and mobile app barriers, ADP will adopt new digital accessibility policies as well as implement training and hire an accessibility consultant.
- Labels are crucial for identifying and describing things, says David Swallow as he highlights scenarios of label misuse in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Swallow describes a scenario I get frustrated with all the time: placeholder text used as labels in form fields. Useless when focus changes to the form field and the placeholder text disappears.
- Join Accessibility New York City on Tuesday, January 11, 2022 when they host Crystal Preston-Watson presenting Broke with Accessible Taste: Understanding the Economics of Digital Access in the United States. The event is free, but preregistration is required.
WordPress
- The first release candidate for WordPress 5.9 is available for download and testing. WordPress 5.9 is scheduled for release on January 25, 2022.
- Speaking of WordPress 5.9, you’ll be happy to learn of the performance improvements in the 5.9 version, including improvements to the Insert, Block Themes, and List View.
- You’ve spent hours creating accessible PDFs to upload to your WordPress site. Only to discover all the tags are stripped out after you upload the PDF files. What happened? Learn how to make sure your accessible PDFs stay accessible in WordPress.
- Congrats to Anariel Design on the release of Bricksy, their third WordPress block theme. I’ve been a fan of their work since I first used one of their themes on the Canton Goodfellows site.
- Lazy loading of images is enabled by default in WordPress. But if you want more control over lazy loading the images and videos on your site, you can use a plugin as Will Morris explains in his lazy loading in WordPress post.
CSS and HTML
- I always look forward to reading Chris Coyier’s annual thank you on CSS-Tricks and this year is no different. Lots of info about analytics, content, a big jump in mobile traffic. In 2021, 1 in 5 of their website visitors used mobile. Are you seeing any significant jump in mobile visits on your site?
- Nice! My friend Jen Kremer’s Getting Started with CSS course is free on Frontend Masters. In the captioned three-hour video course, you’ll learn how to use CSS the right way as you build a professional portfolio website.
- Make an absolutely positioned pseudo/child cover their entire parent using CSS. Thanks, Ana Tudor!
See the Pen
Make absolutely positioned pseudo/ child cover entire parent by Ana Tudor (@thebabydino)
on CodePen. - In his 29-minute video, Kevin Powell explains the six most important CSS concepts for beginners. I like his approach, especially his discussion of why the concepts matters.
- Have some fun with Guess CSS, an interactive CSS game. You’ll be presented with a layout and three CSS examples to choose to match the layout.
What I Found Interesting
- Want to learn to code, but only have an Android phone and a slow Internet connection? Check out the Offline Code Camp app, which allows you to complete FreeCodeCamp courses on an Android phone.
- I’m a Firefox and Firefox Focus fan, but if you’re considering another browser in 2022, check out this side-by-side comparison of Chrome and Microsoft Edge.
- No, it’s not a three-headed deer. But it looks like it could be. Check out this optical illusion, a photo taken by Renatas Jakaitis of three deer walking in single file.
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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.
