In this week’s web design and development news roundup you’ll find a helpful checklist for moderating usability tests, discover why accessibility matters, learn eight ways to declare color in CSS, 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
As designers, we must be reminded that in very few situations you are designing something >for you<.
— Patrick Neeman (@usabilitycounts) June 2, 2022
You are designing for someone else.
You also are not the user. Compassion and empathy is really important.
User Experience
-
Use the ten-point checklist for moderating a usability test from Nielsen Norman Group to help your sessions run more smoothly. At the end of of the article, you’ll find a link to download an example facilitator guide.
-
Graeme Fulton discusses infinite scroll techniques, including putting the footer in the header navigation. I didn’t realize Unsplash uses that technique, providing access to the footer within the hamburger menu of the main navigation.
-
In the fifth episode of the UX Geeks podcast, Tina Ličková interviews senior UX researcher Stéphanie Walter about building trust in UX and her experience as a UX designer and researcher working for a large enterprise.
-
Results of the User Experience Professionals Association 2022 salary survey are in. Based on 625 responses from 31 countries, 72% of the responses came from the United States. One of the findings: median salary is $109K, which is 15% higher than the 2018 median of 95K.
Accessibility
-
In Smashing Podcast episode 47 (48-minute podcast), Vitaly Fiedman chats with Sara Soueidan about why accessibility matters and why it’s important to get it right. Making a design decision can impact whether a person can find the information they need or complete a task. Or if they face a barrier.
-
While organizations often use technology when hiring new employees, that technology can make it harder for disabled people to get hired. Even when they are qualified for the job, says Lainey Feingold as she discusses warnings from two U.S. government agencies about hiring technologies that discriminate against disabled applicants.
-
It’s all about education.
Picked my kid up from 3rd grade this afternoon and the first thing he said was I MADE ALT TEXT FOR MY SLIDE SHOW ABOUT DELTAS AND ESTUARIES. First he taught his teacher what alt text is, then they researched how to add it to Google Slides together😭
— Andrew Leland (@quailty) May 31, 2022 -
a11yTo Camp returns June 18, 2022 for a free day of accessibility learning. Tickets are available for the in-person/virtual event. This year’s camp is a traditional BarCamp with a single track and shorter talks.
-
Mark Steadman explains how learning HTML can create cleaner more accessible code.
If you want to make your HTML be the easiest part of your code base to understand, then learn to value semantic and native HTML.
-
Level Access announced their new Access Academy – Free Community Edition training courses to help you and your team learn about accessibility. Their nine free introductory courses and interactive learning hub are an excellent option to begin your accessibility journey.
WordPress
-
The acquisitions in the WordPress space keep happening. This week WP Engine acquired five plugins from Delicious Brains, including the popular Advanced Custom Fields plugin. (If you recall, Advanced Custom Fields was sold a year ago to Delicious Brains.) Several members of the Delicious Brains team have been hired by WP Engine to continue their work.
-
While it hasn’t been widely publicized, there is a WordCamp Europe 2022 livestream for Track 1 and 2 on June 3rd and 4th this week.
-
One of my frustrations as well.
WordPress plugin subscriptions… you shouldn’t have to go through 5 pages of guilt and click a “Yes, I’m sure I want to cancel” button 5 times. I think 2 is plenty.
— Mike Oliver (@mikeoliver_me) June 2, 2022 -
Jetpack announced you can now build your own Jetpack with individual plugins. For the first time, you can customize which Jetpack features you want from six individual plugins: Jetpack Backup, Jetpack Protect, Jetpack Boost, Jetpack Social, Jetpack Search, and Jetpack CRM.
-
Nice shoutout on People of WordPress for Dee Teal. I met Dee years ago in a small online design group for WordPress folks. Wonderful to learn more about her WordPress journey!
CSS and HTML
-
Good news from the folks at WebPage Test announcing new features to help you take the guesswork out of performance. One of the new features: info about accessibility of your site in every test result.
-
I’ve been working with it for over 25 years. CSS keeps getting better and better.
CSS ten years ago: you may have a little bit of flexbox. It’s buggy but that’s the best we can do, sorry
— Mayank (@m_yxnk) June 1, 2022
CSS now: what do you need? clamp? aspect-ratio? container queries? :has? inert? cascade layers? not only is it possible, it’s already shipping! -
Nick Schäferhoff explains the 8 ways to declare colors in CSS with code examples. I’ve used four of the 8 methods, how many have you used?
-
In his latest post of the HTML concepts series, Jens Oliver Meiert takes a closer look at focusable areas. While many people identify anchors and form elements as focusable, there’s more to know (specifically,
tabindexand DOM anchors.
What I Found Interesting
-
Not good news for Tweetdeck users, Twitter will be shutting down Tweetdeck for Mac on July 1, 2022.
-
This is one use of artificial intelligence (AI) I didn’t think of: Oral-B’s toothbrush uses AI to grade your teeth brushing habits. Will you spend $299.99 to get a grade on your teeth brushing?
-
Join the Smithsonian American Art Museum for Fifty Women Sculptors: A Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on June 9, 2022 to close the gender gap and increase representation of women sculptors on Wikipedia.
If you like what you’ve read today, share the post with your colleagues and friends.
Want to make sure you don’t miss out on updates? Subscribe to get notified when new posts are published.
