In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn strategies for managing difficult usability participants, find features and tools to create accessible content, discover how to use the accent-color CSS property, 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
Look — there’s always going to be something standing in your way.
But don’t ever believe for a minute that it can stop you, that you’re powerless.
Believe me when I tell you that the longer you live, the more times life teaches you that you are stronger than you realize.
👊
— Joe Natoli (@joenatoli) September 23, 2021
User Experience
- Announced this week, the Innovation by Design 2021 Awards recognizes designers and organizations solving problems of today and the future. Congrats to the over 35 winners and 500+ honorees, including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) for their live subway map.
- Smashing Magazine is hosting a free workshop on Frustrating Design Patterns in 2021 and How to Fix Them. The two and one-half hour long workshop on September 27, 2021 focuses on confusing design patterns we commonly see on websites and offers better alternatives. I’m attending, join me?
- Implementing a content management system for a client, using an omnichannel content strategy, caused team leader Mike Willis to realize a content model is not a design system. One key principle he needed the team to learn:
Content models must define semantics instead of layout.
- In part 2 of Wrangling Difficult Usability Testing Participants, Jim Ross describes nine more difficult types of usability participants and offers tips on how to manage them effectively.
Accessibility
- Discover what accessibility features and tools are available in Microsoft products to help you create content accessible to everyone (less than three-minute video). Did you know Microsoft Teams offers live captions and PowerPoint provides accessible templates as well as an accessibility checker?
- The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has released the updated Web Content Accessibility Guide Evaluation Methodology (WCAG-EM) Report Tool which turns your accessibility findings into a report.
- Have you used the built-in Reader Mode in Firefox?
Did you know in Firefox you can have an article read to you without an extension with ‘reader mode’?
Mac: ⌥⌘R
Windows: F9 pic.twitter.com/kHGBEZFyFl— Danh Hoang (@danhhoang) September 23, 2021
- If you use an Android phone, you’ll be happy to learn about two new tools that make your phone more accessible: Camera Switches and Project Activate. Note: Project Activate is available in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia and can be downloaded from the Google Play store.
- Make your online video meetings more accessible with these six tips from my friend Meryl Evans. One of my favorite tips: invite accommodation submissions. And let attendees know what accessibility options your meeting is providing.
WordPress
- Wondering what to expect in the upcoming WordPress 5.9 version, scheduled for release in December 2021? Josepha Haden Chomphosy gives a sneak peak of WordPress 5.8 in episode 16 of WP Briefing.
- For every user frustrated with the Widget block shipped in WordPress 5.8, the new Widget Group block allows you to add titles and move collections of blocks to new widget areas. Only available in the Gutenberg 11.5 plugin at this time.
- Glad to read Sarah Gooding’s story about the Sandhills Development acquisition with a focus on former Sandhill Development employees and how the announcement was made to employees. It confirmed what I heard from Sandhills Development staff (and what Syed Balkhi didn’t tell the truth about in his own announcement on WP Beginner): not all former staff moved to Balkhi’s company.
- In Is There a Future for Small WordPress Businesses? Mark Zahra raises many concerns and questions WordPress users and developers have about recent acquisitions in the WordPress community. Grateful for his opinion and what he says about access to information, which frankly, should worry every WordPress user.
- While the Jetpack plugin provides a feature to activate likes on your posts and pages, did you know you can deactivate Likes for a specific post?
CSS and HTML
- In Simplifying Form Styles With
accent-color, Michelle Barker explains how you can use the new CSS property to add quick styling to form elements. Note: available in Chrome, Edge, and enabled in Firefox with a flag. No current Safari support. - Looking for a color palette for your next project? Check out Actionable Color Palettes, which offers 30+ hand curated color palettes
- If you noticed your page title in Google search engine results isn’t what you coded it to be in the
titleelement, you’re not alone. Google is overwriting your page title with a new system to produce titles. My opinion? That’s not good.
What I Found Interesting
- Gorgeous. Oceanographic Magazine announced the winners of their 2021 Ocean Photography Awards, with Aimee Jan awarded Ocean Photographer of the year for their photo of an green sea turtle surrounded by glass fish.
- Expected to be launched December 18, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope is the largest space telescope in history, 100 times as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990.
- It’s still not clear what caused the deaths of songbirds in the eastern and midwestern portions of the United States, but feeder restrictions have been lifted in all affected states.
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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.
