March 11, 2022 Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development News

In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about a business case for accessibility webinar, find out how to personalize the block editor, discover why you should say no to carousels, 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!

Tweet of the Week

It’s about being #grateful for what you do have instead of what you do not have. pic.twitter.com/h6dH3oglNl

— Dave Dame ♿️ (@DDame) March 10, 2022

User Experience

• When it comes to designing software and applications, there’s a fine balance of design requirements and technical constraints. Often those constraints are out of your control. Tyler Berg discusses how you can navigate those situations and continue to work effectively.

• My notes from Defeating Deceptive Design: Getting Control of Our Lives MozFest 2022 presentation by Ame Elliott of Simply Secure, Carlos Iglesias from the World Wide Web Foundation, and Kaushalya Gupta of the World Wide Web Foundation who shared initial research findings from their Tech Policy Design Lab on deceptive design.

• In his latest edition, Marc Andrew collects 36 of his tips into UI & UX Micro-Tips (8-bit edition) with an added bonus: leave a donation and all proceeds go to Save the Children’s Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal.

• Like Joni Halabi says: Carousels: no one likes you. Say no to carousels. No one is selecting the links in a carousel. I never thought we’d be saying this for the past 10 years. Yet, here we are.

  Carousels are a desperate attempt to give the same level of importance to multiple pieces of content.

• Win one of four free passes to the online Mobile UX London conference, which will be held March 21, 2022 to March 25, 2022. The conference features interactive workshops, talks, and live panels for a week’s worth of opportunities for UX and design folks to improve theirs skills, network, and find inspiration.

Accessibility

• When it comes to session timeouts on your website, Patrick Lauke advises you to avoid using any form of time limit. If you must have a time limit, make sure it’s generous enough that a person doesn’t feel pressured.

  It’s a good idea to provide a visible indication on the page about any session timeouts.

• Join Intopia on March 24, 2022 for their webinar The Business Case for Accessibility presented by Intopia co-founder and Managing Director Stewart Hay. The webinar is free and registration is not required.

• Last week when I was searching YouTube, I found two ways to find closed captioned videos on YouTube. The options may have been available in the past and I only discovered them this month.

  

• Woohoo! This week Twitter announced they are testing exposed image descriptions (alternative text for images) on tweets. I didn’t have the option when they announced it, but I do now! I’ll share more of my experience in a future blog post.

  We’ve gotten a lot of feedback about how to improve the image description (or alt text) experience on Twitter. Today, we’re launching 2 features to 3% of Twitter across Android, iOS, and Web: the public ALT badge and exposed image descriptions. 🧵 (1 of 6) pic.twitter.com/HCYzIYEdal

  — Twitter Accessibility (@TwitterA11y) March 9, 2022

• Finally. Los Angeles Community College District dropped its plans to petition the U.S. Supreme Court and decided to settle case involving rights of blind students. The case was filed in 2017 by two blind students who claimed the district discriminated against them. Thousands of people signed the petition telling the community college district to drop the case.

WordPress

• The Performance Lab plugin has been released by the WordPress performance team. The plugin offers modules to improve performance for WordPress core. Each module can be enabled individually and tested in isolation or in combination.

• Learn how to personalize the block editor in this short, less than three-minute video, from WordPress.com. From talking with other WordPress users, few are aware of the Preferences section to customize your Publishing options and panels. I recommend watching the video for beginner and veteran block editor users alike.

• What a generous offer! This is the kind of support and help that I love to see in our WordPress community.

  I’m thinking of helping people by testing their plugins and themes Free of cost and will give my insights based on my experience (UAT). If you have any plugins that need to be tested, comment here or DM me.
  
  Please retweet so we can reach the maximum number of people.

  — Gobinda Tarafdar ⓦ (@Gtarafdarr) March 9, 2022

• It’s back! Vote for your favorite plugin in Torque’s 2022 Plugin Madness competition. For seven years, Torque has created a bracket competition where you vote for the best WordPress plugins in the community.

• Shoutout to Allie Nimmons for writing the excellent post on how to get started as a WordPress contributor. There are many ways to contribute, not only in design or development. From blogging to organizing events to podcasting and more, your contributions will help move WordPress forward.

CSS and HTML

• Daniel Schwarz takes a closer look at HTML and CSS in emails to find out what works in 2022. Good to learn that internal CSS (styles written within the style element) works in 84.85% of today’s email clients.

• Looking to improve your Core Web Vitals? John Lewis explains how 7 ways to achieve a faster Core Web Vitals Score. One tip I share with every new client with an existing website: optimize your images. One recent client had a 17MB video on their home page along with 33MB of imagery. None of the images were sized correctly or used the correct file format. And the video was self-hosted.

• Love Heydon Pickering’s new Is HTML A Programming Language? video. Take six minutes out of your day and watch it. Loved the comment about punch cards, brought back lots of memories.

What I Found Interesting

• To establish its Artemis program (long-term presence of humans on the moon) NASA needs help and will pay you to help transmit power on the moon. So they’ve started a crowdsourcing competition for lunar surface power systems to deliver reliable power.

• Share your technical expertise at Women Who Code’s Connect Recharge virtual developer conference on May 26, 2022. Call for speakers is open until April 25, 2022.

• As part of Dev.to’s trend of annual Nevertheless, She Coded posts, Sarah Withee shares her thoughts in Nevertheless, Sarah Coded, highlighting her technical achievements, her pledge to break the bias in tech, and what she has overcome in her career.

  I’m reminded of conferences where I walk in the door and people are shocked that I was the one that gave the most popular technical talk at the event.

• Rather than blurring your sensitive information in screenshots with tools that pixelate or add swirls, use a better tool to hide your info with a solid color rectangle.

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.

Did I miss some resources you found this week? I’d love to see them! Post them in the comments below.