In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about a practical approach to getting a UX education, find out why you should remove unused themes and plugins from your WordPress site, discover how to use variable fonts with a web fonts fallback, 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
Visualize yourself in the future as you want to be. Make that thought into a picture then step into the picture. Do this constantly.
— STOKED⚡ (@StokedDaily) November 2, 2018
User Experience
- When teams lack research experience they often resort to scrappy testing, says Zachary Walsh. And that can lead to basic mistakes. Walsh explains steps to better understand scrappy testing and gain a shared understanding among your team on what you want to accomplish.
- Find out what events are happening in southeast Michigan this month with my November 2018 User Experience and Web Professional Events calendar.
- Wonderful to see the legal community is opening up to plain language.
"Lawyers are in a cocoon, and we have to open up to practices that are standard in other industries.” – Alexandre Désy, on user-design thinking and legal accessibility #Clarity2018 #legalplainlanguage
— Zuula (@zuulaconsulting) October 27, 2018
- Aspiring to be a UX designer, but not sure what path to take? Join Mads Soegaard, founder of the Interaction Design Foundation, and UX Mastery on November 13 for A Practical Approach to Getting A UX Education on Google Hangouts/YouTube Live.
Accessibility
- Fascinating read: WebAim’s 2018 Low Vision #2 survey results are in. Interesting to note that of the 248 participants, 75 percent reported multiple types of visual impairment, with 31 percent reporting four or more different types.
- I remember when Microsoft first announced Eye Control a few years ago. Now you can use Eye Control with the Eye Drive library and additional software to operate a remote-control car or a wheelchair.
- Why make your website accessible? You may think only a small percentage of people with disabilities visit your website or that it takes too much time and effort to make your site accessible. Carie Fisher dispels those myths with her latest article, 5 Digital Accessibility Myths Busted.
- Web accessibility is not limited to only development.
Design and content are just as important as development when it comes to #web #accessibility
— Ala Khodari (@AlaKhodari) October 31, 2018
- It took 34 keyboard steps to change the font on selected text using the Gutenberg editor. That’s only one of the issues mentioned in the WordPress Accessibility Team’s report on the accessibility status of Gutenberg.
Their analysis: Gutenberg has usability and accessibility issues. If you rely on assistive technology, don’t use Gutenberg on any site.
WordPress
- Beta 2 of WordPress 5.0 is now available for download and testing. Note: don’t install the beta version on a live site, the software is still under development.
- Take steps to remove unused themes and plugins from your WordPress website. Otherwise,you leave yourself open to security issues.
- The new Activity feature from WordPress.com allows site owners to view a chronological list of all the changes and updates to your site. Available for WordPress.com and Jetpack-enabled sites. (Paid plans get more features, free plans can see last 20 sites changes.)
- John James Jacoby shares his thoughts on using the Gutenberg editor in WordPress 5.0 beta 1.
The more that I move the mouse to pick blocks and click on things, I’m noticing a lot of hidden UI reveal itself and then disappear in ways that don’t feel natural to me.
- Wondering how to add a script to the header of every website page? Here’s my tutorial on how to use the Insert Headers and Footers plugin. One of my favorite plugins!
CSS and HTML
- How did Caroussel’s team make the mobile experience three times faster? Their first step: creating a performance budget.
- Did you know you’re using
emwrong? You’re not alone, everyone else is too. - Bruce Lawson comments on screenreader support for text-level semantics, noting that
…browsers don’t expose the information to the Accessibility Tree that assistive technology hooks into.
His recommendation? Don’t overuse them.
- Oliver Schöndorfer explains how you can integrate variable fonts in your designs and provide web fonts as a fallback for browsers that don’t support them.
What I Found Interesting
- With SmugMug’s purchase of Flickr earlier this year, I knew there would be changes. And those Flickr changes were announced this week. Pro accounts will get more features and a return to the community-focused site Flickr once was. Free accounts will be limited to 1000 photos and videos on January 8, 2019 More storage is available via a Pro account.
- Halloween may be over, but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy seeing these premature babies in their superhero Halloween costumes. Handmade by 13-year-old Rachel Maretsky of Orlando, Florida, the costumes were made for babies at the neonatal intensive care unit of Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women & Children.
- The new Consumer Data Protection Act bill, introduced by Rep. Ron Widen, would allows consumers to take control of their privacy online.
Ideally, consumers would be given the power to “opt-out” of being tracked by visiting an FTC website, and, as “Do Not Track” intended, their browsers would notify websites that their information is not to be shared with third parties.
Finally.
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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.
