{"id":10094,"date":"2024-02-11T12:58:22","date_gmt":"2024-02-11T11:58:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stephaniewalter.design\/?p=10094"},"modified":"2024-02-11T13:35:33","modified_gmt":"2024-02-11T12:35:33","slug":"pixels-of-the-week-february-11-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stephaniewalter.design\/blog\/pixels-of-the-week-february-11-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Pixels of the Week \u2013 February 11, 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"

My curated weekly-ish online newsletter, where I share interesting articles, tools, and resources I found during the week. You can expect content about UX, design, user research, accessibility & tech, but also some processes, some inspiration, sometimes books, and a couple of videos and podcasts. Also, don’t forget to, subscribe to the newsletter<\/a> to get notified, you will get the weekly links directly in your mailbox, and be notified when I publish other articles.<\/p>\n

Now: what I’m currently up to<\/h2>\n

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Following a couple of weeks ago’s book recommendation, I’ve got myself the color print version of House of Leaves<\/a>. I haven’t started yet, just got a small look, but, it indeed sounds like a fun experience to read. I’ll keep you posted.<\/p>\n

I’ve also finished preparing a whole new talk on user diary studies, and how we used them on a complex enterprise project, to better understand how people used the new interface over time. It’s in French, but, if you are interesting for such a talk in a meetup, I’d be happy to translate it to English. Meanwhile, you can also read my article on the topic on Condens<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Interesting frameworks and concepts<\/h2>\n

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The Web Accessibility Framework<\/a> is a framework to help be more strategic about accessibility in your organization. Cores is a list of accessibility outcomes, you can do to improve accessibility. Implementation tiers help you understand your organization\u2019s current and desired state for responding to and managing web accessibility. Profiles take an organization\u2019s requirements, objectives, risk appetite, and resources and compare them with the desired outcomes of the Core. Popetech explains how to use this framework in a short video<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Popular content this week<\/h2>\n

Why you should stop using placeholders in text boxes<\/a> (10min) monthly reminder that HTML placeholders are not labels, and shouldn\u2019t be used as such. Here are a couple of issues with them: they disappear upon input, so, you are forcing people to remember what they are supposed to fill. They might be confused with pre-populated data, so the user might wonder \u201cwait do I need to fill this?\u201d or skip it, thinking it\u2019s filled. They are also not universally adopted by assistive technology (AT), so some might read those, some might not. Not only that, but they have poor color contrast, so, some users might not be able to read them (and if you make them darker, people might think it\u2019s filled data). Without a label, the clickable area of a text box is decreased. They are also obscured after validation, since user filled content, so, users have to delete their content to get to see them again.<\/p>\n

Based on this, according to Daniel Berryhill, placeholders are essentially pointless. I tend to agree here, to the point where I kind of wonder why this ever made it to the browser. But, here we are. So, what to do instead? Use labels, have hints and form instructions outside the field (and link it to the field with some aria).<\/p>\n

You can participate in the discussion on LinkedIn<\/a> , Mastodon<\/a> and Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Interesting articles that caught my attention<\/h2>\n

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