Ensuring technology is accessible and inclusive relies heavily on receiving feedback directly from disabled users. You cannot rely solely on checklists, guidelines, and good-faith guesses to get things right. This is often hindered, however, by a lack of accessible prototypes available to use during testing. Rather than wait for the digital landscape to change, researchers should leverage all the available tools they can use to create and replicate the testing environments they need to get this important research completed. Without it, we will continue to have a primarily inaccessible and not ..read more

In 1998, Judy Singer, an Australian sociologist working on biodiversity, coined the term “neurodiversity.” It means every individual is unique, but sometimes this uniqueness is considered a deficit in the eyes of neuro-typicals because it is uncommon. However, neurodiversity is the inclusivity of these unique ways of thinking, behaving, or learning. Humans have an innate ability to classify things and make them simple to understand, so neurodivergence is classified as something different, making it much harder to accept as normal. “Why not propose that just as biodiversity is essential to ecos ..read more

We rarely read on the web. We mostly scan. That’s a reliable strategy to quickly find what we need in times when we’re confronted with more information than we can handle. But scanning also means that we often skip key details. This is not only inefficient but can also be very damaging to your business. Let’s explore how users read — or scan — on the web and how we can prevent harmful scanning patterns. This article is part of our ongoing series on design patterns. It’s also an upcoming part of the 10h-video library on Smart Interface Design Patterns ? and the upcoming live UX training as ..read more

Three years ago, I published “Making GraphQL Work In WordPress,” where I compared the two leading GraphQL servers available for WordPress at the time: WPGraphQL and Gato GraphQL. In the article, I aimed to delineate the scenarios best suited for each. Full disclosure: I created Gato GraphQL, originally known as GraphQL API for WordPress, as referenced in the article. A lot of new developments have happened in this space since my article was published, and it’s a good time to consider what’s changed and how it impacts the way we work with GraphQL data in WordPress today. This time, though, let ..read more

This is the 3rd post in a small series we are doing on form accessibility. If you missed the 2nd post, check out Managing User Focus with :focus-visible. In this post we are going to look at using a screen reader when navigating a form, and also some best practices. What is a Screen Reader? You may have heard the term “screen reader” as you have been moving around the web. You might even be using a screen reader at this moment to run manual accessibility tests on the experiences you are building. A screen reader is a type of AT or assistive technology. A screen reader converts digital text int ..read more

When copying text from a website to your device’s clipboard, there’s a good chance that you will get the formatted HTML when pasting it. Some apps and operating systems have a “Paste Special” feature that will strip those tags out for you to maintain the current style, but what do you do if that’s unavailable? Same goes for converting plain text into formatted HTML. One of the closest ways we can convert plain text into HTML is writing in Markdown as an abstraction. You may have seen examples of this in many comment forms in articles just like this one. Write the comment in Markdown and it is ..read more

This article is a sponsored by DebugBear Google’s Core Web Vitals initiative has increased the attention website owners need to pay to user experience. You can now more easily see when users have poor experiences on your website, and poor UX also has a bigger impact on SEO. That means you need to test your website to identify optimizations. Beyond that, monitoring ensures that you can stay ahead of your Core Web Vitals scores for the long term. Let’s find out how to work with different types of Core Web Vitals data and how monitoring can help you gain a deeper insight into user experiences and ..read more

In a previous article, we played with CSS masks to create cool hover effects where the main challenge was to rely only on the <img> tag as our markup. In this article, pick up where we left off by “revealing” the image from behind a sliding door sort of thing — like opening up a box and finding a photograph in it. This is because the padding has a transition that goes from s - 2*b to 0. Meanwhile, the background transitions from 100% (equivalent to --s) to 0. There’s a difference equal to 2*b. The background covers the entire area, while the padding covers less of it. We need to account ..read more

This article is a sponsored by Penpot It was less than a year ago when I first had a chance to use Penpot and instantly got excited about it. They managed to build something that designers haven’t yet seen before — a modern, open-source tool for everyone. In the world of technology, that might not sound groundbreaking. After all, open-source tools and software are being taken for granted as a cornerstone of modern web development. But for some reason, not for design — until now. Penpot’s approach to building design software comes with a lot of good arguments. And it gathered a strong community ..read more

Communication is in everything we do. We communicate with users through our research, our design, and, ultimately, the products and services we offer. UX practitioners and those working on digital product teams benefit from understanding principles of communication and their application to our craft. Treating our UX processes as a mode of communication between users and the digital environment can help unveil in-depth, actionable insights. In this article, I’ll focus on UX research. Communication is a core component of UX research, as it serves to bridge the gap between research insights, desi ..read more