September 16, 2022 Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development Resources

In this week’s web design and development resources roundup, you’ll learn that information architecture is more than navigation, find a helpful accessible voting resource guide, discover the power of CSS blend modes, 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

Picard management tip: Error is the great teacher, memorable and valuable. Embrace it. Let it educate you.

— Picard Tips (@PicardTips) September 15, 2022

User Experience

• Investing time in observing users in their work context will generate more key insights than interviews and usability tests, says Aarti Bhatnagar. Generating powerful insights through contextual inquiry allows you to spend less time preparing and help you build rapport with users.

• Information architecture is much more than navigation. Information architecture (IA) includes labeling, taxonomy, and searchability to help users find what they need on the website, app, or other product.

• Helpful writing tip from the Associated Press:

  We prefer terms such as older adults or older people over the terms senior citizens, seniors or elderly as general descriptions when appropriate and relevant. Be specific when possible: discounts for people 62 and older; the risk of stroke among women in their 70s.

  — APStylebook (@APStylebook) September 13, 2022

• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported this week a rise in sophisticated dark patterns designed to trick and trap consumers. From ads to descriptions to hidden terms, companies are using strategies to trick and deceive consumers. (Note: many people have transitioned to calling them deceptive design, rather than dark patterns.)

• First I’ve heard of it! Did you know about the Content Strategy Knowledge Base, an Open Educational Resource? It’s a growing collection of knowledge about content strategy, content design, content operations, and content marketing. Useful!

Accessibility

• Worth bookmarking. In making sense of WAI-ARIA: a comprehensive guide, Kate Kalcevich explains when to use ARIA and how to use it properly so using assistive technology can navigate the web.

• Everyone benefits from accessibility.

  I’ve been using quite a few accessibility features on my phone & laptop for weeks now (high contrast, large fonts, & other features that relieve eye strain). I love them.🥹
  
  Accessible design helps everyone, including the majority of people who don’t identify as disabled.#a11y

  — Sara Soueidan (@SaraSoueidan) September 10, 2022

• To celebrate Disability Voting Rights Week in the United States, Microsoft Accessibility and Center for Civic Design launched a new resource guide that makes it easier to find info about voting with a disability at Accessible Voting.

• Want to learn more about video accessibility? 3PlayMedia has relaunched their free Video Accessibility 101 course. Whether you’re a content creator, video producer, or work with video publishing, you’ll learn the importance of media accessibility, how to build accessibility into your process, and best practices for publishing accessible video.

WordPress

• If you missed it earlier this week, the WordPress 6.1 product walkthrough video is now available. I attended the live walkthrough and was thrilled to learn 6.1 will include the ability to next blocks in quotes and lists. Which is only available now through the SuperList plugin.

• Running into strange errors after installing plugins, themes, or uploading images? File permissions may be the issue. Learn how to correctly set up file permissions on your WordPress site.

• If you want to expand your global audience on your WordPress site, you’ll need to learn the difference between localization and translation.

  The major idea is to meet your target audience’s cultural expectations at all levels. Achieving this can affect every part of the website.

• Starting December 1, 2022, the WordPress Security Team will drop security updates for WordPress versions 3.7 through 4.0 (versions released eight or more years ago). If you our your clients haven’t updated WordPress to the latest version in years, this is another reminder to do it now.

CSS and HTML

• The first batch of color fonts arrives on Google Fonts. You can now customize color palettes, add gradients, and more with COLRv1. If you’re not familiar, COLRv1 is a binary vector format, which means fonts can scale without pixellation.

• Did you know you can create engraving or halftone photo filters with only a few lines of CSS? Check out the power of CSS blend modes to learn how.

• Nice! I’m a fan of quick overviews of CSS properties. Which is what Marko Denic provides in CSS line-height.

• With the release of Safari 16.0 this week, you’ll find a slew of new supports including AVIF image format, text-align-last CSS property, and full support for the resolution media query.

• Not one, but two articles this week about details and summary. First up, Scott O’Hara takes another look at details and summary elements. O’Hara covers what’s changed since 2018 when he first wrote about them. Second, Geoff Graham gets into more details on ‘details’ as he connects the dots about what’s possible with, answering questions in an FAQ format.

• I’ve never been a fan of pop-ups, due to their usability and accessibility issues. Nonetheless, pop-ups are making a comeback. Jhey Thompkins explains how problematic issues with pop-ups can be resolved with the built-in pop-up API. Which provides an accessible pop-up and doesn’t require JavaScript (for most behaviors). Currently only in Canary Chrome.

What I Found Interesting

• After 24 years as a professional tennis player, Roger Federer announced his retirement. Speaking for myself, I will miss him on court and as a spokesperson for tennis. As a huge tennis fan, I watched his matches in person for 10+ years at the Western & Southern Open tournament in Cincinnati as well as dozens of matches on TV.

• The design world has been abuzz with Adobe’s announcement they will be acquiring the popular design and prototyping tool Figma for $20 billion. The response hasn’t been all positive for people who turned to Figma after getting frustrated with Adobe’s product pricing and licensing.

• With news that Zoom could be launching its own email app, Microsoft and Google might face even more competition from the video conferencing company. Would you use Zmail?

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