This article is a case study of how a UX audit affects a UI. It explains how a famous educational platform can be analyzed edX against Jakob Nielsen’s usability guidelines. To get started, Mark Lankmiller shares all of the criteria and metrics he used for his UX audit.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/ux-audit-edtech-platform-case-study/

Frontend and design are remarkably complex these days. That’s why we invite kind, smart folks from the community to run [online workshops](https://smashingconf.com/online-workshops/) for all of us to learn together. And we have new ones coming up, and we’d like to kindly welcome you to join in.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/new-smashing-online-workshops-frontend-ux-design/

Automated testing is an important part of any software project, including testing for accessibility. There are already tools for linting and integration testing accessibility, but what about end-to-end testing with real assistive technology? Since I hadn’t seen this before, I set out to build Auto VO, a driver for the VoiceOver screen reader.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/automating-screen-reader-testing-macos-autovo/

After years of innovation in both tools and processes, the struggle between design and development is still real. This article focuses on the best practices for improving the design to development processes and how cutting-edge solutions, such as UXPin powered by Merge technology, can help in facilitating the change.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/design-code-modern-approach-development-challenges/

Do you have to process data manually because it is served through images or scanned documents? An image-to-text conversion makes it possible to extract text from images to automate the processing of texts on images, videos, and scanned documents. In this article, we look at how to convert an image to text with React and Tesseract.js(OCR), preprocess images, and deal with the limitations of Tesseract (OCR).

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/image-text-conversion-react-tesseract-js-ocr/

Voice assistants are currently the most popular use case for voice user interfaces. However, due to the bad feedback loop resulting from voice assistants can only solve simple user tasks such as setting an alarm or playing music. In order for voice user interfaces to really break through, feedback to the user must be visual, not auditive.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/alternative-voice-ui-voice-assistants/

Next.js has a file-based routing system in which each page automatically becomes a route based on its file name. This article will guide you through almost everything you need to know about Routing in Next.js and point you in the direction of related topics and concepts.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/client-side-routing-next-js/

Image placement on the modern web is highly intentional, helping to communicate the overall purpose of a page or view. This means that nearly every image you declare needs to have an alternate description.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/img-alt-attribute-alternate-description-decorative/

In a new short series of posts, we highlight some of the useful tools and techniques for developers and designers. Recently we’ve covered HTML Emails and SVG Generators. This time we look into different kinds of tools to help you streamline your accessibility testing process. Don’t miss the next one.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/complete-guide-accessibility-tooling/

When developing themes and plugins for WordPress, we need to test them in different environments. How can we create multiple testing sites on our computer, quickly and easily, without having to become a sysadmin?

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/multiple-wordpress-sites-locally-devkinsta/

In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about image optimization. What steps should we follow for performant images in 2021? We talk to expert Addy Osmani to find out.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/smashing-podcast-episode-39/

Spoiler alert: tooltips, modals, tabs, carousels, and dropdown menus are some of the user interface components that require more than CSS. To ensure accessibility of your interface, JavaScript is a necessary addition to accomplish focus management, respond to keyboard events, and toggle ARIA attributes.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/css-javascript-requirements-accessible-components/

Design often revolves around visuals, but the other senses deserve love too. In this article, we tune in to audio features that are making sites sing.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/web-design-done-well-audio/

We don’t need to write everything from scratch every single time. With boilerplates and starter kits, we can set up our projects faster, and get to work immediately.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/useful-frontend-boilerplates-starter-kits/

Building a faster website can be a rocket task these days. There are so many things to consider, so it’s challenging to get everything right. Here are some less-known tools that might help you get there.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/three-frontend-auditing-tools/

What makes relational selector one of the most requested features and how are we, as developers, working around not having it? In this article, we’re going to check the early spec of the :has selector, and see how it should improve the CSS workflow once it’s released.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/has-native-css-parent-selector/

It’s here! For the last year, we’ve been working with Addy Osmani on a new Smashing Book all around image optimization. And now it’s here. Meet “Image Optimization”, our deep-dive guide to understand how to deliver high-quality images on the web fast.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/image-optimization-book-release/

In this guide, we’ll be taking a general look at the concepts of forward geocoding and reverse geocoding, and will build a mini-app that applies these concepts to display specific locations, using Mapbox and Vue.js 2.6.11 to achieve this.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/building-geocoding-app-vue-mapbox/

Modern browsers provide good support for JavaScript modules, but module bundlers such as webpack stay a critical part of the JavaScript toolchain. Let’s take a deep dive into what webpack is and how to use it in your development workflow.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/getting-started-webpack/

Writing large-scale Vue applications can be a challenge. In this article, Shawn Wildermuth dives into the pros and cons of approaches like factories, shared objects, and using Vuex. He also explains what is coming in Vuex 5.0 that might change how we all use shared state in Vue 3.

https://smashingmagazine.com/2021/06/managing-shared-state-vue3/