In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll discover design principles for voice user interfaces, learn about a new form design patterns book, discover what’s involved with adding new HTML elements, 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
Do and build things so good and selfless that it surprises people. Be unbelievable.
In the times we live in, we've gotten so used to exploitation and greed, that's it become the norm.
Change the norm. Make goodness become normal and make exploitation unbelievable.
— André Staltz (@andrestaltz) October 8, 2018
User Experience
- One of the first things I learned in my user experience classes was to always provide a text link to the home page. Do you offer both text link and linked logo for the home page?
- It’s not the technology, the website, or the application, says Gerry McGovern. It’s that change is hard, but not impossible.
Why is design thinking seen as so novel, so important these days? Because most organizations never had to think too much about design from the perspective of the customer, the user.
- Low-fidelity for the win!
Was going to start a form prototype today. Leaving the software alone and starting in notepad instead helped me realise how simple we could make it. Probably saved weeks of work. Reminder to self: start lo-fi! #govdesign
— Dean A Smith (@local_man_31) October 10, 2018
- Fascinating read. While designing Chattie, a Voice User Interface (VUI) that helps language learners practice real-world conversation, Pallavi Benawri, Puhe Liang, Ruchi Ookalkar and Sonali Tandon identified six design principles to guide designers creating conversational VUIs.
Accessibility
- Lots of talk in the accessibility community this week of the new book published by Smashing Magazine, Form Design Patterns written by Adam Silver. The 384-page book (available in print/ebook) guides you through designing simple, lightweight, responsive, and accessible forms.
- In his 5 things you need to know about diversity and inclusion in design post, Oliver Lindberg highlights his takeaways from the IxDA London chapter’s World Interaction Design Day event.
- With vs. for, it’s an important difference.
“Design WITH people@with disabilities, not FOR people with disabilities.” @feather #AEAORL #inclusivedesign #a11y
— zeldman (@zeldman) October 10, 2018
- Do you know the difference between captions and transcripts? And is transcription enough to meet accessibility laws?
WordPress
- My friend Rian Rietveld made a difficult decision this week when she resigned as the WordPress accessibility team lead. Please give her your support and understanding.
- In his WordPress, accessibility, and Gutenberg post, Joe Dolson shares his concerns and hopes for Gutenberg. And recommends anyone using assistive technology to manage their WordPress site to install the Classic Editor plugin prior to upgrading to WordPress 5.0.
- Plugins can make it a lot easier to customize WordPress without touching PHP or knowing any other code.
- If you haven’t already set it up, here are 7 things you should be tracking in your WordPress activity log to help you track down changes. Especially important when you have multiple users on your site.
CSS and HTML
- What do you think? Would you like an nth-letter selector in CSS that would allow you to style the third character of an element?
- Stop saying websites need to look the same in all browsers.
After almost 20 years of explaining websites don't need to look the same in all browsers I think I'm done. You have the ability to make progressively enhanced websites, more so than ever before. Use it. Don't use it. Just don't argue with me about it!
— Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) October 8, 2018
- Explain the use case, says Bruce Lawson as he delves into why it’s so hard to add new HTML elements. His post offers a good background about the thought process behind adding HTML elements.
- You’ve probably used the
contentproperty to create generated content with the::beforeand::afterpseudo selectors. But did you know there are some values that aren’t valid CSS content?
What I Found Interesting
- Inspiring to read how Code for America Brigades joined forces in crisis and evolved their work of providing hurricane response sites for four hurricanes.
- Can you believe it’s been 40 years?
VisiCalc, the world's first spreadsheet, was prototyped on this day 40 years ago @DanB @BobFrankston https://t.co/w52NUMfpqX
— Joe Williams (@rikerjoe) October 9, 2018
- Shoutout to Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist, for his $50,000 donation to support the open web.
I’m proud to support the Web Foundation and its work to help ensure there’s a web that works for and is inclusive of everyone.
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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.
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