In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll discover content predictions for 2021, find out why machine learning is not sufficient for image alternative text, learn why you might move a client site from self-hosted WordPress to hosted WordPress.com, 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
Today a friend said that under the current conditions, we all meet the standard for clinical depression.
Be gentle with yourselves and with each other. I am rooting for all of us.
— Tenessa Gemelke (@gemelket) January 4, 2021
User Experience
- A closer look at how Group Sessions work on Spotify highlights what’s working in the new feature which allows friends to listen to music together. And where Spotify can improve the user experience.
You can often combine steps to remove unnecessary actions.
- Learn what content strategists, user experience practitioners, journalists and other experts predict will happen with content in content predictions and plans for 2021.
- A lesson in higher ed information architecture, something I was involved with when I worked on the community college web services team. When Wayne State University restructured the College of Education website, they chose to use the label ‘Career Paths’ on their main navigation. An A/B test of ‘Career Paths’ vs ‘Programs’ revealed the new label wasn’t converting well.
- If you’re a user experience designer looking to build your client base in 2021, here are seven projects to include in your design portfolio.
Accessibility
- As Léonie Watson explains in thoughts on screen readers and image recognition, while machine learning has progressed in recent years, a text description of an image by the content author is needed to provide context in alternative text.
- For the past few years, I’ve been transitioning to everyone, you all, and team. How about you?
Interesting positive bit: after taking four classes on Apple’s Fitness+ I have noticed that not one of the instructors used the word “guys”
Team, squad, fitness fam… heard all of those. But not guys.
It can be done!#LanguageMatters #inclusion
— Derek Featherstone (@feather) January 8, 2021
- On January 21, 2021, in celebration of the first anniversary of the Accessible Canada Act and the 30th anniversary of the American with Disabilities Act, The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (RAIC) and the U.S. Embassy in Canada will host A Celebration of the Accessibility Acts of Canada and the US. Cost is free for RAIC members, cost for non-members is $10.00 plus taxes.
- Timing is everything, as Derek Featherstone demonstrates with a captioned video of a cooking contest. The video is captioned, which is good. But there’s no reveal to match what hearing people experience when they watch the video.
WordPress
- For January, WPMU Dev has launched their Master WordPress Security program to educate users about security. Their first post: how to easily secure your WordPress site for free highlights steps to secure your site in the WordPress admin as well as their free Defender security plugin.
- I found helpful tips and info in Kinsta’s GeneratePress vs. Astra: which WordPress theme should you use in 2021? comparison post, highlighting features, performance, integrations, and support. I’ve been a fan of GeneratePress for years.
- While self-hosted WordPress sites offer control over your site design and functionality, with that control comes a lot of responsibility. Find out why I moved my client from self-hosted WordPress to a plan on hosted WordPress.com.
- Want to get WordPress users angry? Enable auto updates on the latest version of your plugin, without telling users. Who would do that? The authors of the All in One SEO plugin turned on automatic updates in their mid-December update.
CSS and HTML
- Shoutout to Lea Verou on her election to the W3C Technical Architecture Group!
Very humbled to be elected to the @w3ctag!
Huge impostor syndrome rn.
Huge thanks to every company who voted for me. Special thanks to @bocoup and @openjsf for travel funding and @openjsf for nominating me.
Looking forward to making the Web better alongside fellow TAG members!— Lea Verou (@LeaVerou) January 7, 2021
- Heydon Pickering has published the second video in his Webbed Briefs black and white video series: Is Progressive Enhancement Dead Yet? Fun to see a shark in a fez and zombies explaining progressive enhancement.
- What a gorgeous post on newsletters by Robin Rendle. The black-and-white illustrations accompanying his excellent points kept me wanting to read more.
What really excites me about the sudden popularity of newsletters is that it shows us how people desperately want this kind of writing still.
- From LogRocket, a helpful tutorial on how to use Chrome DevTools to debug CSS Grid. First up: you may need to enable Grid debugging in the DevTools settings. Why? It’s still considered an experimental setting.
What I Found Interesting
- Good news for Microsoft Teams users! The Dynamic View feature expected in March 2021 will allow users to share content side by side with participants.
- If you were disappointed to learn Quibi was closing down, you’ll be happy to learn the Roku Channel is bringing Quibi content to streamers later in 2021.
- Will the three Mars missions launched in summer 2020 finally make it to Mars in February? Learn about what cool space things are happening in 2021.
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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.
