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WordPress, Web Accessibility and Web Development Roundup for December 18-31 2016

This one covers a rather long period of time, (see: the holidays), and there’s also a lot of heavy reading in it. Not all of these posts are technically recent, and I’ve made a point of including things that are a bit more out-of-the-way and that aren’t featured on the big sites like Smashing Magazine or CSSTricks. Not that I don’t like those sites. It’s just that I assume that most of us already have their content coming to us through their feeds or social profiles. And, like music, the best content isn’t the stuff that gets released for air play. It’s everything else on the album. Enjoy.

WordPress

Why WordPress removed the underline button from the visual editor.

BobWP on WooCommerce Connect, a neat little plugin I haven’t yet had the chance to play with yet.

Pagely has a guide for the WordPress community on SSL, which is becoming rather more important now that Google’s seriously gunning for plain old http. Tim Nash has an even more in-depth guide to SSL that’s suitable regardless of whether or not you use WordPress, and has become my favorite to pass around.

There’s a cool little plugin that clones sites within a WordPress multisite network.

Carrie Dils with a pretty neat guide to using staging sites on WP Engine, which I’ve used for the last two years and still managed to learn from this guide. Maybe it helps when someone else writes it down. 🙂

You can, and therefore should, control the activation of your WooCommerce extensions so that you don’t confuse users of your plugin.

Web Development

Some pretty epic criticism of that “best-developers-are-always-hacking” tweet:

Joe, people are angry at this tweet. Can you guess why? Perhaps it’s the implication by you, as a CEO, that anyone not working over the holidays is not good enough?

A really enjoyable read about building a really fast website from the developer’s perspective. Lots of ego in here, but also lots of humor.

Improving site performance while using gifs gives a brief history of the file format, as well as the promised site performance tweeks.

Creating shapes with CSS, and then going further to create more advanced shapes.

Upload files to your raspberry pi from anywhere using a browser.

An introduction to local and session storage in JavaScript.

Web Accessibility

Dennis Lembree has a few things to say about parallax design, the issues it can cause for a slightly-larger-than-WordPress-sized market share of people, ending with a reading list of further resources on just about everything he covers in the short article that I would encourage everyone to read, especially designers.

Cristopher Broyles offers some insight on how data analytics can be used by businesses to improve their digital accessibility.

Some well-deserved praise for the W3C for leading the charge toward a fully inclusive web from the American Foundation for the Blind.

A tutorial on building accessible modal dialogs by Paul J. Adam on the Deque Systems blog. Definitely keep this in your toolbox.

Mailchimp has some quick tips for creating accessible email newsletters, and I for one hope that this means they’ll start working on the user interface they provide to create those newsletters so that it’s accessible too.

WooCommerce has a post about the importance of accessibility for online stores, which includes some tips and links to free tools you can use to get started with making your store more accessible, thus potentially gaining more customers.

Some very useful information on accessible emoji by Léonie Watson with a solution for displaying the contents of the aria-label attribute to users with vision by Adrian Roselli, who wanted to make sure the playing field was level and included people who don’t always understand what the emojis mean.

I’ve covered a lot in this week’s round-up, but if you think there’s something not included that should be, feel free to leave it in the comments below.


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