Our WooCommerce configurator passed the automated audits and still stopped a screen reader user at step one. Accessible UX research, and Michele A. Williams’ new book on it, is what got us out of the patch-and-move-on habit.
A client’s WooCommerce site shipped a JavaScript bundle whose main job was resizing a textarea. field-sizing does it in one line. Here are the modern CSS features that are baseline now, and the code they let you delete.
Console logging the Gamepad API at 60 frames per second tells you nothing useful. Here is the visual debugger I built instead, with its styles isolated in a CSS cascade layer so they stop fighting the theme.
CSS still has no :nth-letter selector, so letter-by-letter text effects mean splitting a header into spans, which screen readers then read out one letter at a time. Here is the ARIA markup and the PHP helper that avoid that.
A client kept flagging link underlines that ran a couple of pixels past the letters. The CSS property text-decoration-inset clips them without pseudo-element hacks, and it animates on hover. Firefox only for now.
A Meet the Team row of overlapping avatars broke every time the client added a person. Here is the CSS that works out the negative margin itself, using sibling-count() and container query units.
A JavaScript library added for smooth page transitions hijacked every internal link on a WooCommerce store. Pulling it out and using View Transitions, namespaced classes and accessibility tokens fixed more than it broke.
A WooCommerce site was choking on jQuery and Intersection Observers just to run a hover gallery and a filter menu. CSS Wrapped 2025 covers the native features that made most of that script unnecessary.
I once wrote 60 lines of ResizeObserver JavaScript so one hero headline would fill its container. Chrome Canary is prototyping text-grow and text-shrink, which do the same job in CSS, with one accessibility catch.
We shipped a Quick Reorder button for a WooCommerce client and the conversion rate never moved. The problem was the metric, not the button. TARS breaks feature success into target audience, adoption, retention and satisfaction.