November 12, 2021: Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development News

In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about the scale CSS property, find a new 10-hour user experience design course for beginners, discover the importance of creating effective accessible names for interactive controls, 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

What the world needs more than sympathy and empathy is compassion.

Sympathy: I’m sorry you’re in pain
Empathy: I feel your pain
Compassion: I’ll do whatever I can to alleviate your pain

You don’t have to feel other people’s feelings. You just have to care about their feelings.

— Adam Grant (@AdamMGrant) November 11, 2021

User Experience

• On the 17th anniversary of World Usability Day, one of my favorite blog posts was Happy World Usability Day, published by Per Axbom. In his short, less than two-minute video, Axbom explains what this year’s theme, Design of our Online World: Trust, Ethics and Integrity, means.
  

  Ethics means doing and making things with the wellbeing of others in mind.

• Looking to add a new user experience design book to your library? Susan Weinschenk updated her list of 7 best UX design books. I have 5 of the 7 books she recommends! I met Susan 11 years ago when she presented at our Michigan UXPA (User Experience Professionals Association) group.
• Join UXPA International on November 30 for a free webinar presented by Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong, Make Meaningful Work to Lead Healthy Cultures. The webinar is free, but you’ll need to pre-register.
• Create content that everyone can access easily.
  

  Design your digital content for someone with a bad wifi connection, low mobile data or a limited time slot in a local library, and you’ll not only support them but make the user journey easier for all your users.#ContentDesign #AccessForAll #DigitalInclusivity

  — Lizzie Bruce (@CakeContent) November 10, 2021

• Congrats to my friend and Refresh Detroit co-organizer Nick DeNardis! His 10-hour video course, Introduction to User Experience Design has been published.
• Carolyn Jarrett explains why a preliminary sift can streamline your card-sorts: it helps to focus on what matters.

Accessibility

• News spread quickly when the accessibility community learned disability rights advocate Engracia Figueroa died from sores associated with the loss of her $30,000 wheelchair destroyed during a United Airlines flight. Sadly, thousands of wheelchairs are broken every year by airlines in the U.S.
• Did you know you can improve the accessibility of the “more” link on your WordPress archives? Rather than the default “more”, you can change the link to include the title of the post. Which provides more context. And makes sense when read out loud.
  
• A good followup to my post is Eric Bailey’s blog post The endless search for “here” in the unhelpful “click here” button, explaining the importance of creating effective accessible names for interactive controls.
  

  The best thing you can do is consider who your audience is, and balance being technically accurate with effectively communicating.

• What happens to a company who chooses to believe misinformation from an accessibility overlay company? Eyebobs used artificial intelligence software from AccessiBe and ended up in court, facing a lawsuit for an inaccessible website.  Eyebobs settled the lawsuit in October 2021.

WordPress

• The WordPress 5.8.2 security and maintenance version has been released. If your sites support automatic background updates, it’s likely the update has already completed.
• And the acquisitions keep coming! GoDaddy bought Pagely, the well-known managed WordPress company. Josh Strebel explains some background about Pagely and why we did it.
  

  We proved to ourselves that we could win the game by sticking to a simple set of values summed up as “Business is personal”.

• Whether you have a blog or a business site, you want to quickly diagnose and fix the 500 server error that displays on your site. One of the troubleshooting steps not included in Elegant Themes recommendations: load the site with a different Internet connection.
• If you’re using post formats on your site, you’ll be happy to learn there’s a new block plugin to display post formats. Keep in mind: not all themes support post formats.
• Missed sharing this earlier: have you found your way to Find It WP? It’s a searchable resource archive for the WordPress community. The resources listed on the home page are the most recent submissions. Have a favorite WordPress resource, plugin, or theme? Submit it!

CSS and HTML

• Christian Heilmann offers a quick browser Developer Tools tip: define and test interaction states in CSS using state simulation. Which allows you to test hover, focus, and other states quickly. Though I’ve been using this tip for several years, I know many others aren’t aware of it.
• Knowing CSS is helpful beyond coding.
  

  Beyond layout, CSS is a critical skill to know for writing UX tests. Particularly to help you figure out the best selector to use (you probably could be using pseudo selectors like :not() more) or to discover why a testing library thinks an element isn’t clickable or visible.

  — Stephanie Eckles (@5t3ph) November 11, 2021

• Did you catch any of the Chrome Dev Summit? If not, Una Kravets shares Chrome Dev Summit highlights in this almost six-minute video recap.
  
• Learn about the scale CSS property, how you can use it, and how it affects an element’s descendents. Looks promising, but it’s only currently supported in Firefox.

What I Found Interesting

• I scored 12 out of 12 on Merriam-Webster’s autumn words and colors online quiz. Do you know why we call the season “fall?”
• It’s back! Detroit’s drive-in movie theater reopens tonight in downtown Detroit and will run thru spring. The drive-in has showtimes Thursday thru Sunday evenings, offering parking for 62 vehicles and 26 outdoor seats.
• Interesting! A tern can read the water (1:37 minute audio) to find where to catch its next fish. The surface of the water is a map to the tern’s next meal.

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.