In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn how to empower an organization through design, find a proposal for a WordPress plugin checker, discover how to style with stateful, semantic CSS selectors, 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
The most important measure of success is not status, power, or wealth. It’s how much freedom you have—and how much freedom you give.
— Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant) July 4, 2022
Choosing how to spend your time and share your ideas is a right. Using your resources to help others gain that right is a responsibility.
User Experience
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As Viktor Dopke explains in how to empower an organization through design, there is a way to develop successful systems through design: you must have the opportunity to cause change from the inside out.
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Have you submitted to the 2022 World Usability Day Design Challenge? This year’s focus is showcasing excellent user-focused design for a general audience. Submissions are now open. Deadline to submit is September 20, 2022.
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Newest title from Rosenfeld Media! Natalie Marie Dunbar’s From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice was published this month. From the book description, the book is
… your blueprint for creating and managing a content strategy practice that is sustainable and successful.
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Join host Rahel Anne Bailie on July 13, 2022 as she interviews Greg Prickril about why product managers need content operations and how they can collaborate together. The one-hour webinar is free; preregistration is required.
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In the latest post of his series on design patterns and techniques to design better interfaces. Vitaly Friedman discusses designing a better pricing page. Key takeaways: simple pricing is helpful, but may not always be an option. Focus on key features first, avoid hover tooltips, provide social proof.
Accessibility
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From TetraLogical, Graeme Coleman takes a closer look at Android accessibility: roles and TalkBack at the code level. Coleman discusses when it’s acceptable for a role to be announced, what roles TalkBack announces, and what it means in terms of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) conformance.
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What should you say when your leaders and colleagues don’t hear the importance of disability inclusion? Join the Accessibility New York City meetup group on July 12 when Cam Beaudoin presents Speaking Up and Speaking Out: Tactical Communication and Consulting. The free event is online, but you need to preregister.
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There are hundreds of reasons for captioning. Here’s one more:
Use for captioning No. 1,251: student on graduate school campus is Covid+ and quarantined. She Zoomed into class in which I was captioning for the deaf professor. We sent her the Streamtext link so she could have full access to the class. #a11y
— Norma (@whitecoatcapxg) July 7, 2022 -
Share your feedback on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ‘s Making Content Usable for People with Cognitive Learning Disabilities. They’re updating content and want to include guidance that didn’t make it into 2021 version. The Your impressions of Making Content Usable survey on Google Docs is anonymous; if you want to save your progress in the survey, you’ll need to sign into Google.
WordPress
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Can you help? The WordPress 6.0.1 release candidate is available for download and testing. The release contains 11 bug fixes in Code and 18 bug fixes for the Block Editor. Scheduled release date is Tuesday, July 12, 2022.
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Felix Arntz shares more details about the proposal for a WordPress plugin checker. Similar to the theme check plugin, the plugin checker would analyze a plugin and flag violations of plugin development requirements and best practices.
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Save the date! Gutenberg Times will showcase the Pew Research Center’s “Block First Approach” in a live Q&A on July 22, 2022. Co-hosts Birgit Pauli-Haack and Anne McCarthy will chat with Pew Research Center’s Michael Piccorossi and Seth Rubenstein about how they streamlined their publishing process with Gutenberg.
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Creating a local development environment is a lot easier using Local, a development tool to set up and develop WordPress sites locally. Will Morris explains how four features—Blueprints, Local Connect, Site Defaults, and Live Link—in Local can free you to focus on your freelance web development business.
CSS and HTML
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It’s not as common as it was a few years ago, but masonry was a popular layout. Today, most people point to Pinterest as an example of masonry layout. Can you imagine creating a masonry layout in CSS?
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Thanks to Litmus for announcing how you can get involved with the email marketing community and email standards. A new community of industry professionals, the Email Markup Consortium is working to improve the accessibility, user experience, performance, consistency, and reliability of email markup.
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Ben Myers explains how to make your code more robust by styling with stateful, semantic selectors. Myers shares some helpful code examples as well as useful advice:
In short, building with accessible semantics from the get-go can give you expressive, meaningful style hooks for free.
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Have you wondered why the HTML outlining algorithm was removed from the spec? The truth will shock you, says Bruce Lawson. (Well, it will shock some people.)
What I Found Interesting
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Reminds me how some parents hide vegetables in the mashed potatoes. Penguins in a Japanese aquarium aren’t happy about being fed cheaper fish.
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What a lovely story about the 250 year-old American Elm tree at Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit, Michigan. I birded there last month for the first time and saw the tree. It’s impressive! Sad to learn it’s infected with Dutch Elm disease. I hope the tree makes it beyond 10 years.
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Imagine backing up all your Google Docs to your desktop in one click. That’s what the Bobby app does as it coverts them to usable formats on your desktop, external drive, USB, etc. Available in Windows and Mac, Linus is coming soon.
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Coinciding with final adoption of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act by the European Parliament this week, the chief executives of DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, and Quant published 10 principles for fair choice screens and effective switching mechanisms. It shouldn’t be so complicated for you to change search engines for your browser.
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