In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll find seven tips for conducting research interviews, learn how to fix six common website accessibility issues, discover a free online HTML course, 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
You have value.
— Brad Frost (@brad_frost) September 28, 2022
You are important.
The world is better with you in it.
Take good care of yourself.
User Experience
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Wow! This week celebrates the 25th anniversary of the publication of Jakob Nielsen’s How Users Read on the Web. It was one of the first articles I remember reading when I started my user experience courses. In how to make your designs scannable (and why you should) Ben Moss discusses how Nielsen’s article is still relevant for today’s website designs.
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Looking to advance your UX research role? Join IXDA Atlanta on October 18 for their UX discussion: How to Transition from an Entry to Senior Level Role. The free event is online, registration is required.
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When it comes to conducting research interviews, you’re interested in getting an understanding of your participants’ goals, perceptions, and needs. As a facilitator, it’s easy to forget what it’s like to be a participant on the other side. Learn 7 helpful tips for researchers conducting interviews.
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Interviewing for a new position?
When you’re interviewing at a design agency, an important question to ask would be how they resource their projects.
— Natalie Armendariz ☻ (@natalievi) September 28, 2022
Because the answer will determine how much they actually invest in a designer’s growth. -
If you’re worried about Adobe’s purchase of Figma, many people are now looking at Penpot, which just raised $8 million in funding. An open-source design and prototyping platform, Penpot is currently available for free as a beta version.
Accessibility
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The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has updated the Curricula on Web Accessibility with new content author modules. You’ll find six modules primarily designed for teaching tech writers, editors, content creators, and content publishers.
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GAconf (Game Accessibility Conference) announced their speakers schedule this week. Dedicated to making games accessible to disabled players, the conference is October 24-25, 2022. (The conference is hybrid, offering in-person and online attendance.)
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On October 4, 2022 AbilityNet hosts episode two of the Accessibility Insights series with Heather Dowdy, Accessibility Change Agent at Netflix and Robin Christopherson MBE, Head of Digital Inclusion at AbilityNet discussing accessibility at Netflix. Free webinar, requires pre-registration.
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In the latest WP Tavern Jukebox, Joe Dolson talks with Nathan Wrigley about how to fix the six most common accessibility errors on your website. Not surprised low contrast text is a common error.
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Chris Wu wrote about his first WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) accessibility lab, highlighting custom fonts, tips, and other apps he shared.
WordPress
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The second beta version of WordPress 6.1 is available for download and testing.
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People with sites hosted on WordPress.com are getting an early taste of some features in the upcoming 6.1 release, including nested lists. Find out what else is new in the WordPress.com editor.
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Lots of buzz in the WordPress community about Mark Zahra’s post on deceptive marketing and whether it’s ruining WordPress’s reputation. One of the examples Zahra shared is WordPress.org’s hosting recommendations, which I’ve had issues with for years. Your thoughts?
How about we go from being ambiguous and speaking down to people, to being clear and speaking of ways we can help each other?
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Learn how redirects happen, how they can be configured, what they mean, and how to resolve the too many redirects error message in this guide from iThemes.
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Do you schedule posts in WordPress? I do, which is why I appreciate Kinsta’s helpful tips for scheduling posts, as well as how to schedule changes to a published post.
CSS and HTML
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I was excited this week to discover Learn HTML, a new course written by Estelle Weyl, is now available online. For web developers, from novice to expert level HTML. The first five modules are available now; more modules to be released in the coming months. (I met Estelle 15 years ago at the TODCon conference in Orlando.)
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Join Smashing Hour on November 8, 2022 when Sara Soueidan and Vitaly Friedman from Smashing Magazine talk about what front-end developments they’re exciting about and status of their projects. The events is free, pre-registration is requested.
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In the HTTP Archive’s annual state of the web report for 2022, the Web Almanac, you’ll find 22 chapters comprising page content, user experience (my favorite!), publishing, and distribution.
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Manuel Matuzović launched his new 100 Days of More or Less Modern CSS this week, a daily short post about what’s new in CSS. The logical properties post really helped me to better understand them.
What I Found Interesting
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Woohoo! Congrats to Léonie Watson, Director at TetraLogical, who was elected to the first Board of Directors of the W3C.
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Rolling Stone updated their list of the best 100 TV shows of all time. Did your favorite shows make the list?
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Did you know can still get DVDs from Netflix? Who knew? Not me. The number of DVDs you can get are limited by which plan you purchase.
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