In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn how to make sure UX and Agile work together successfully, find out what improvements are expected in the WordPress Gallery Block , discover how to browse with a desktop screen reader, 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
Someone you meet today is just barely hanging on. You ARE responsible for your own words.
Speak life.
Speak hope.
Speak value.Please:
Think before you speak.
— Heather Thompson Day (@HeatherTDay) September 29, 2021
User Experience
- Mention UX design and Agile working together and you’re likely to get a a lot of people replying with frustrating stories of failed implementations. Paul Boag explains what the causes are and offers tips on how to make sure UX and Agile work successfully together in your organization.
- If you have a site with a small number of products, invest in good navigation and product info before considering an on-site search tool, says Baymard Institute in their testing of on-site search and improving return on investment for product findings.
- In her Online Glossaries presentation at the 2021 Federal Plain Language Summit, Alison Kohler discussed how online glossaries can serve audiences with different understandings of the language used on your site.
- Focus on the message is one of the top rules for ethical web design, says Renee Fleck. Think carefully about your choices, since small design decisions can have far-reaching consequences.
Ethical design communication refers to the practice of conveying honest information in a way that’s not misleading.
- Nielsen Norman Group’s study guide for UX mapping methods includes links to their articles and videos. If you’re new to UX mapping, check out their three-minute UX Mapping Methods: When to Use Which video.
Accessibility
- I’ve been using Markdown since it launched in 2004; I love the syntax. But that doesn’t mean I know everything about it. Glad to read Eric Bailey’s post on how you can improve the accessibility of the Markdown you write.
- It’s been a year since YouTube removed the community contributions feature from videos, and there’s still no replacement for people to submit video captions and translations.
- Michele Williams used the part-to-hole vs. whole-to-part approach in explaining how a sighted person and someone who is blind navigates a page in her How Sighted and Blind Web Navigation Differs presentation for A11y Talks.
- Despite no official notice or announcement from the two social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram appear to have removed the image alternative text character limit. It was limited to 100 characters.
- In the first post of the Browsing with Assistive Technologies series, Henny Swan discusses browsing with a desktop screen reader. Swan highlights popular desktop screen readers as well as how to navigate with desktop screen readers.
- For anyone who has used survey tools, you know it’s been a challenge to find an accessible survey solution. Thanks to Terrill Thompson for publishing an accessibility review of five popular tools. I wasn’t surprised by their recommendations, are you?
WordPress
- Have you registered? The 2021 WordCamp US kicks off online at 11:45AM Eastern Time (time zone converter) today, with two tracks for WordPress users. I’m attending, join me?
- With all the changes and acquisitions in the past year, should you worry when a WordPress plugin changes ownership? It can be overwhelming, says Eric Karkovack. His recommendation? Take a step back to gain perspective.
- Hard to believe it’s been 10 years! WooCommerce celebrates its 10-year birthday this week. I remember when the plugin first launched!
- Upcoming Gallery Block improvements will allow you to style individual images, add custom styles, provide better keyboard navigation, and allow you to add alternative text within the block sidebar.
CSS and HTML
- Wondering if you can include one HTML element inside another? Use the Can Include online browser tool.
- Addy Osmani takes a closer look at AVIF and WebP modern image formats, how they improve image compression and flexibility over JPEG and PNG file formats.
- Who doesn’t like helper sites that list tools for your web design and development? I didn’t know there were so many! I’ve added Tiny Helpers to my bookmarks. It’s a collection of free online tools, which includes CSS, color, accessibility, animations, and more.
- The Next Web reviewed their database of job postings from over 6,000 tech companies to find the top programming languages of 2021. Guess where CSS came in?
What I Found Interesting
- I admit it, I confuse every one and everyone frequently. What words do you commonly think twice about before using them in your writing? Here’s some help on knowing when to use homonyms you’re probably mixing up all the time.
- Need some inspiration for your projects? Web Designer Depot shares their collection of the 20 best new sites that capture the brand identity and personality of the brand.
- Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet have some competition: Brave adds privacy-focused video chat feature that’s supported on rival browsers. No time limit on the call.
- Wow, over 14,000 members participated, submitting over 33,000 photos. Congrats to all the winners in Flickr’s World Photography Day contest! Grand prize went to Joris Vegter for their Bee Sleepover photo.
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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.
