In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about the importance of information architecture on UX design, find a three-part webinar series on document accessibility, discover how to progressively enhance a radio button with SVG, 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
“You know you can always help to make each day a special day by just your being yourself. You grow in your own way; everyone does. That’s one reason each one of us is different and special and people can like us exactly as we are.”
— MisterRogersQuotes (@MisterRogersSay) May 8, 2020
User Experience
- With the move to remote user experience research, UX Zoom offers guidance from experts on seven remote UX research questions. First up: plan for extra time to handle tech questions during remote sessions.
- I long for the day when all stakeholders understand the importance of information architecture to UX design.
A well-designed, user-friendly information architecture ensures that users spend less time and effort searching for information and are successful in finding what they need.
- In the downside of health care design, Chris Kiess discusses how
familiarity accentuates the imperfections
and the difficulty designers have in seeing the impact of their work on patients. - How can you test the usability of documents? Ginny Redish and Caroline Jarrett explain three techniques for testing documents to discover whether they are working for the people who use them. My favorite: ask people to tell you in their own words what the document said.
Accessibility
- Open Access Technologies kicks off a free three-part series on document accessibility on May 19,2020 with their COVID-19 and Access to Information webinar about inaccessible PDFs.
- In this week’s 13 Letters First to the Party episode, Cordelia McGee-Tubb and Will Butler interview Victor Tsaran, the first blind Yahoo employee and one of the people who worked on Google’s first screen reader.
- The WordPress Accessibility Team announced the first WordPress Accessibility Day, a 24-hour online event to be held October 2, 2020.
- While I’ll never know if my tweet made a difference, I was thrilled to share an accessibility win for the Hope video about Detroit.
WordPress
- Useful! Nick Hamze has created the Find My Blocks plugin which lists all the blocks used on a WordPress site.
- Learn two strategies for setting up Google Translate on your site so you can offer your site’s content in different languages.
- Over a million websites using Elementor Pro or Ultimate Addons for Elementor are at risk due to active exploitation of vulnerabilities. Thankfully, Elementor quickly released a new version that fixes the vulnerability.
- My friend Claire Brotherton wrote about how to create a fresh WordPress install from an old database backup. Hopefully you never find yourself in a position where you only have a database backup, rather than a full site backup.
CSS and HTML
- One of the common questions about email newsletters is whether to send a nicely formatted HTML newsletter or a plain text version. For a recent fundraising campaign, Seattle-based NPR station KUOW tested whether a less designed text based email would lead to more donations. Fascinating results.
- Do you understand HTML replaced and voided elements? Catalin Rosu takes a closer look at both and provides a helpful Venn diagram to visualize the intersection.
- Shoutout to Michele Barker for summarizing CSS updates we can expect in the near future. I’m always interested in learning what’s on the horizon for CSS layout.
- I can’t remember the last time I read a good radio button tutorial. Christian Heilman explains how to progressively enhance radio buttons with SVG while staying accessible.
What I Found Interesting
- With their latest updates, the iOS and Android SmugMug apps now allow you to edit photos directly in the app.
- That was fun! I scored 3360 out of 4200 on Spell It! the online spelling game from Merriam-Webster.
- Have you noticed an increase in the number of shops offering contactless payment? Find out how contactless payments work.
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.
