Additional UX/UI Resources

Last update: 2024.08.29

 

Accessibility

Accessibility Resources by A11Y Project

Resources from Google

• Building for accessibility
• Newsletter, Twitter, videos
• You can also participate in their Trusted Tester or User Research programs.
  

Figma plugins

• Include by eBay - accessibility annotations tool
• A11y Annotation Kit by Indeed
• [defunct?] Accessibility bluelines by GitLab - annotation tools for content and behavior
  
  From How accessibility bluelines shaped Adobe Fresco:
  
  Accessibility bluelines are the design specifications that define and describe an application's wayfinding (focus order, keyboard shortcuts, content structure and annotations) so it can be engineered for assistive technology (screen readers, keyboards).

Tools

• Tanaguru contrast finder
  

Design Systems

• Codex - Wikimedia Design System
  

Website audit

Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. You can run it against any web page, public or requiring authentication. It has audits for performance, accessibility, progressive web apps, SEO, and more.

Usability

• Microsoft Clarity - Free Heatmaps & Session Recordings
  
  Understand your users. Improve your products. Better your business. Clarity is a free tool that captures how people use your site. Setup is easy and you'll start getting data in minutes. 

 

SEO Meta Description AI finally available in the official WordPress Plugin Directory

I'm thrilled to announce that my very first WordPress plugin is now available in the official WordPress Plugin Directory! While I initially wrote it back in late May, the approval process took a precise four months and fifteen days – a testament to the world of WordPress development.

Allow me to introduce you to SEO Meta Description AI. As the name suggests, this plugin leverages AI to analyze the content of your WordPress posts and pages, generating SEO-optimized meta descriptions. It's language-agnostic, offered for free (with reasonable usage), and ready for download from Plugin Directory or its official page.

I've also created a brief video tutorial demonstrating how to install and use the plugin, and I genuinely enjoyed putting it together.

The inspiration behind this project? I needed a tool like this, and it provided the perfect opportunity to delve into WordPress plugin development while exploring the OpenAI API for the first time.

To give credit where it's due, ChatGPT assisted in crafting the initial source code and content for the plugin info page, and the eye-catching icon and banner images were the creative work of DALL-E.

My journey with this project has been an enriching experience, even though the direct financial reward is uncertain, much like many other personal ventures. 😁

If you operate a WordPress site and aim to boost your search engine ranking, I invite you to download the plugin and share your feedback.

And, as promised, here's the demo video - I hope you find it as enjoyable as I did creating it.

The Emperor's New Climate Scenarios

The Emperor's New Climate Scenarios report is published in July 2023 by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) and the University of Exeter. The report examines the limitations and assumptions in relation to climate-change scenario modelling practices in financial services, focusing on hot-house world scenarios of 3°C or more of warming.

The report finds that many climate-scenario models in financial services are significantly underestimating climate risk, showing benign, or even positive, economic impacts from a hot-house world in which we fail to limit global warming. This is because current techniques exclude many of the most severe impacts we can expect from climate change, such as tipping points and second order impacts.

The report also finds that there is considerable uncertainty around how much and how quickly we expect the climate to warm. This translates to uncertainty in carbon budgets, with a real chance that the carbon budgets for 1.5°C of warming are now negative.

The report concludes that there is an urgent need to develop more realistic climate-scenario models, and that financial institutions and regulators need to be aware of the limitations of current models. It also calls for a race to net zero emissions, with an intentional focus on accelerating a range of positive tipping points in socio-economic systems.

The report has been widely praised by climate scientists and economists, and has been described as a "wake-up call" for the financial sector. It is hoped that the report will lead to a more realistic assessment of climate risk, and to more ambitious action to reduce emissions.

Links:

• Report (PDF) [archive]
• Institute and Faculty of Actuaries [report web page] [blog post]