A sighted user puts himself in the shoes of a non-sighted user. In this series, Chris Ashton attempts to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. I hope to raise the profile of difficulties faced by real people, which are avoidable if we design and develop in a way that is sympathetic to their needs. Today, Chris experiences first-hand difficulties that visually impaired users face and describes what we can do as web developers to help.
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We’re at the dawn of a UI revolution. Not only will multimodal interfaces give users more power, but they will also change the way users interact with systems. In this article, Nick Babich will show you how to build your own multimodal UI using Adobe XD. You will explore the concept of a voice-enabled interface and review different types of voice-enabled interfaces; find out why voice-enabled, multimodal user interfaces will be the preferred user experience; see how you can build a multimodal UI using Adobe XD.
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The state of commercial web conferences is utterly broken. Setting up a conference isn’t an easy undertaking. It takes time and attention to all the little details that make up a truly memorable experience. It’s not something one can take lightly, and it’s often a major personal and financial commitment. But what lurks behind the scenes of such events is a widely spread, toxic culture despite the hefty ticket price. And more often than not, speakers bear the burden of all of their conference-related expenses, flights, and accommodation from their own pockets. This isn’t right, and it shouldn’t be acceptable in our industry.
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For his last monthly update in 2018, Anselm summarized what has happened in the web development community in the past few weeks. Get ready for browser news, handy tools, lessons learned, and thought-provoking reads. Let’s recap that and remind us of what each of us learned this year: What was the most useful feature, API, library we used? And how have we personally changed?
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For years, marketers have relied on images, videos, and infographics to better sell products and services. The importance of visual media has increased further with the rise of the Internet and consequently, of social media. Gifographics are the next step in the evolution of infographics. In this article, Manish Dudharejia will take a closer look at the evolution of infographics and how a static infographic can be animated using Adobe Photoshop, so some Photoshop knowledge (at least the basics) is required.
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It’s not just micro-moment design problems that can cause trouble. Designers often spend a lot of time on macro design issues, and sometimes less so on critical micro-moment design issues. That might be a mistake. Macro design issues can result in massive UX problems, too. In this article, Susan Weinschenk will take a closer look at how to avoid such failures and why they are critical to the UX success of any product.
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The aim of Feature Policy is for us, as web developers, to be able to state our usage of a web platform feature, explicitly to the browser. By doing so, we make an agreement about our use, or non-use of this particular feature. Based on this the browser can act to block certain features, or report back to us that a feature it did not expect to see is being used. In this article, Rachel Andrew will show you how Feature Policy can help protect your site from third parties using APIs that have security and privacy implications, and also from your own team adding outdated APIs or poorly optimized images.
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Whenever project managers try to manage their team using spreadsheets alone, they usually face some problems. Reporting and documenting with spreadsheets can become quite a time-consuming task. Today, Nick Babich will like to introduce Float, an app that makes it so much easier for product managers to keep a good overview on the tasks of the entire team and everyone involved. Float makes it easy to see everything you need to know about your team’s projects in a single place, giving project managers the information and functionality they need to handle the fast-paced world of digital design and development. Let’s get started!
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Building real-time applications is hard. However, GraphQL is rapidly upending this status-quo. In three simple steps you can quickly wire-up a fully-functional real-time app, without getting mired in unnecessary details such as setting up a websocket connection. That right there is the power of community tooling backing an abstraction like GraphQL. In this article, Sandip Devarkonda will explore what GraphQL is, and then take it for a spin by building a poll app in which users can vote and on-screen aggregated results are updated in real time.
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WordPress has a brand new content editor called “Gutenberg” that is going to shape WordPress for years to come, and it should allow more designers and front-end developers into the ecosystem. This should be welcomed with open arms. Well, if and when it is fully accessible, anyway. In this article, Andy Bell explains why it’s a movement (not just a new editor) and what’s happened and how this sort of situation might be avoided by others in the future.
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