In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn what questions to ask a business before taking on a new project, find out what’s in the latest WordPress 5.7 version, discover how to create responsive text based on image size, 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
An important reminder that it’s okay to say you don’t know something and you’re still learning. I have learned so much over the last five years about accessibility from admitting I don’t know something and then taking the time to learn it. And I’m still learning every day.
— Kristina England (@KristinaEngla15) March 12, 2021
User Experience
- While starting a new project with a new client is always exciting, laying a good foundation and setting expectations is crucial, says Manik Arora. In your initial meetings, ask businesses nine questions before taking on the project to set direction for a successful experience.
- A blast from the past. In honor of the 40th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. this week (I can hardly believe it’s been 40 years!), Media Temple re-posts Ward Andrews’ 2015 deep dive into the classic game and what it taught us about user experience.
- When you conduct unmoderated user research sessions, you don’t have the option to ask why a participant took a specific action. You can only guess.
Sloppy user research is NOT better than NO user research.
No user research costs nothing and gets zero results.
Sloppy user research costs money and is biased towards negative outcomes (and you can’t tell).
With zero research, you’re creating UX debt at a much slower rate.
— Jared Spool (@jmspool) March 9, 2021
- Over the past year, human rights movements, climate change, and the COVID pandemic brought opportunities for designers and companies to impact change. In her Five Positive Design Trends Informed by Crisis and Change UX Magazine article, Anna Voshkarina highlights how designers are adopting sustainable UX, augmented experiences, inclusive design, and other trends in their work.
Accessibility
- Can you imagine 17,000 people attending an accessibility conference? That’s what happened this week at the inaugural axe-con virtual conference hosted by Deque Systems. Shoutout to everyone on the team who made it happen.
- Sessions started at 9am in the morning and lasted til 8:30pm at night; the two-day axe-con virtual conference was incredible! I’ll be publishing recaps next week, but wanted to share my notes from The Future of Accessibility, Vint Cerf’s keynote address on day one.
- Emojis are fun to use on social media. But they can be overwhelming to screen reader users when you use too many.
Do you use emojis in your social media posts or emails?
Did you know that screen reader software reads out the literal image, like “winking face with stuck out tongue” every time?
Imagine how that gets in the way of your message
So use them sparingly#emoji #emojilove #a11y pic.twitter.com/dRGTUrFtCL— Dig Inclusion (@DigA11y) March 12, 2021
- In her role as the new disability policy director for the U.S. White House, Kimberly Knackstedt brings a wealth of experience and knowledge with a PhD in special education and policy, as well as a career as a special education teacher and disability policy advisor on a Senate committee.
WordPress
- It’s here! WordPress 5.7 has been released. Code named “Esperanza” to honor musical prodigy Esperanza Spalding, the version includes reusable block improvements, inserter drag-and-drop, simpler default color palette, and more.
- I admit, I miss blogrolls. Those lists of blogs on websites from long ago introduced me to a slew of designers, user experience professionals, and accessibility experts. Glad to learn about the new Blogroll Block which replicates many of the blogroll features of old.
- A change on the WordPress hosting page has people in the community talking. I agree, it seems to be a conflict of interest as WordPress.org gives priority to a handful of hosting providers. From what I can tell the WordPress hosting section rotates through their recommended hosts.
- In Kinsta’s 10 minute video, you’ll learn why you may need to do a search and replace on your WordPress site as well as five ways to do it. I’ve done this many times over the years. While you can do it with mySQL commands, I find it a lot easier to use a plugin.
CSS and HTML
- Have you seen the periodic table of semantics? Helpful for anyone wanting to learn more about HTML elements and ARIA.
- Who hasn’t tried to create a title above or below an image, that doesn’t exceed the width of the image? Thanks to Temani Afif for the helpful explanation of how to create responsive text based on image size with only a few lines of CSS.
- Can’t say this too often.
CSS architecture starts with accessible HTML.
— Stephanie Eckles (@5t3ph) March 12, 2021
- Great resource worth bookmarking: CSS Grid Cheat Sheet Illustrated.
What I Found Interesting
- As the web turns 32 years old, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Web Foundation co-founder Rosemary Leith reflect on its power and shine a light on nine young people around the world using the web to overcome the world’s challenges.
- Do you used time blocking to schedule and complete your tasks? While to-do lists can be prioritized, time-blocking is a better strategy for planning out yoru day in advance.
Time-blocking works since it helps us to focus on getting our work done right then.
- This week marks one year since the COVID pandemic was declared by the World Health Organization. To commemorate the year, Time magazine has published a photo journal of the past 12 months in the United States. Heartbreaking.
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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.
