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.
And this year marks the 11th year of roundups, over 500 link roundups published weekly since my first roundup post in August 2011.
In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about designing for non-native English speakers, find out what web a11y means, discover how to use HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) in your CSS, and more.
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
Blessed is the person who sees the need, recognizes the responsibility, and actively becomes the answer.
-William A. Ward
— Carlos A. Rodríguez (@CarlosHappyNPO) July 7, 2021
User Experience
- In How to Design for Non-native English Speakers, Manik Arora emphasizes the importance of clear communication, discusses common challenges, and offer his tried-and-tested strategies for solving the problem.
Animations don’t require any knowledge of language and can convey plenty of information to a diverse audience entirely through the use of visuals.
- A user researcher at Somia Customer Experience, Michelle Natalie Susanto reflects on the past 12 months of conducting remote inteviews and shares six reasons why remote interviews are more challenging than in-person research in her latest UX Magazine article.
- Visible local website navigation is a valuable orientation tool as well as wayfinding aid, providing a helpful indicator as to where users are and the opportunity to explore content within that category.
- With more applications moving to the web, Jorge Arango comments how some apps (and websites) requiring a specific browser to work adds friction to the user experience. And brings back memories of the bad old days of the web.
Accessibility
- With the release of the ARIA in HTML specification as a W3C Candidate Recommendation Snapshot, Scott O’Hara published a post explaining what ARIA in HTML is and isn’t.
- TPG Interactive is looking for participants in their smart-assistant technology research study. You must be over 18 years old, live in the United States, Canada, or Ireland, have English as your first language, be blind/visually impaired, deaf, or have a speech/communication disability.
- Small steps make a difference.
Web devs, hear me out. Accessibility in your daily work doesn’t have to be hard or time consuming. You simply have to do small things, like use automation in your testing, have accessible coding standards, and give a damn about the content you create. #a11y #accessibility #webdev
— Mark Steadman (@Steady5063) July 8, 2021
- I hope you’ll join me on July 22, 2021 for Unpacking the 2021 State of Digital Accessibility Report, a free webinar hosted by Level Access. One key finding: Individuals are far more concerned with inclusivity (92.5%) and user experience (81.5%) than their organizations.
- If you’ve been wondering what the heck “web a11y” is, or even how to pronounce it, Ashlee Boyer explains the what, how, why, and whether you have to use it.
WordPress
- The second release candidate for WordPress 5.8 is available for download and testing. Scheduled release of WordPress 5.8 is July 20, 2021.
- With the release of Jetpack 9.9 this week, users will find an updated Carousel, with improved support on touch devices and the ability to turn off metadata and comments in the settings.
- Congrats to WPBeginner on their 12-year anniversary this week! I’ve used their site for years: the helpful tutorials, news, and the boatload of how-to videos have helped me with my projects.
I started using WordPress when I was 16 years old and started WPBeginner at age 19 with a single mission: make WordPress easy for beginners.
- I’m a fan of uninstalling WordPress plugins using the deactivate then uninstall method. But I always have to check the file manager on the site to make sure all the files and folders have been deleted. And confirm entries have been removed in the database.
CSS and HTML
- Are you familiar with UITest, an online tool where you can check your site with more than 80 tools? Submit your website URL and analyze your site code, accessibility, performance, and more.
- Using placeholders in your form fields may be confusing to users, who may not know they can overwrite the text. Or they select the field, thinking they need to use the backspace to delete the placeholder text.
Can anyone share an example of a form where the placeholder attribute is implemented in a useful way?
Asking because I feel that we don’t need that attribute at all because most of the time the information
– is redundant
– should be a label
– should be text and always visible— Manuel Matuzović (@mmatuzo) July 8, 2021
- If you’ve used hex or RGB colors in your CSS, you now have another option: HSL (hue, saturation, lightness). Ahmad Shadeed explains how to use HSL in your CSS as he shares use cases and code examples.
- To answer Brian Kardell’s question whether using a new HTML element and CSS to get a native tabset in the browser is a win, my answer is a resounding “yes!” Check out his Tabs in HTML post and Spicy Sections demo and let him know what you think.
See the Pen
spicy-sections by Brian Kardell (@bkardell)
on CodePen. - Oops. You may have read about the $5.43 NFT (non-fungible token) sale of Sir Tim Berners-Lee source code for the World Wide Web. Well, it turns out there’s an HTML coding error in the video.
What I Found Interesting
- First reported in spring 2021, songbirds are mysteriously dying across the eastern United States. Scientists have ruled out some possible causes, but still don’t know what is behind the deaths.
- Stunning. Winners of the 2021 Audubon Photography Awards were announced this week. Which one is your favorite? I can’t pick only one.
- For podcasters looking for another option to add transcriptions, check out Welder for a free podcast transcript. It allows you to drag and drop your audio file to their site, providing you with an srt or text file to download.
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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.
