+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 25, Issue 26, December 23, 2024. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 26 CONTENTS. SECTION ONE: New references. What's new at the Web Design Reference site? https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/ New links in these categories: 01: ACCESSIBILITY. 02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 03: EVALUATION & TESTING. 04: EVENTS. 05: HTML. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: TOOLS. 10: USABILITY. 11: WEBWASTE & SUSTAINABILITY. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. How Strict Should We Be When Testing for WCAG Conformance? (Video) By James Edwards. "The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are a curious blend of strictness and looseness. Some guidelines are precise, with clear objective requirements, while others are more far more subjective and open to interpretation. Why is that?…" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTw23HE2jeEs When to Use Audio Description on Your Content By Kelly Mahoney. "…The process of audio describing is highly nuanced, particularly when it comes to understanding what should/shouldn’t be described, when you should describe it, and how to describe it. Finding the right balance takes time, and we’ve compiled some key guidelines for understanding impactful and compliant descriptions…" https://www.3playmedia.com/blog/when-and-when-not-to-add-audio-description-to-content/ In which I discuss the gross insufficiency of this application with the Be My Eyes (BME) application itself By Gregory J. Rosmaita. "…and it tells me it cannot provide feedback to humans but it will definitely take note of my feedback…" https://kolektiva.social/@oedipusnj/113671165146355571 Exchange: https://share.bemyeyes.com/en-US/chat/EhHPC7ttnV AI and the Future of Accessibility with Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden (Podcast) By Josh Anderson. "Your weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist people with disabilities and special needs…" https://www.eastersealstech.com/2024/12/20/atu708-ai-and-the-future-of-accessibility-with-dr-gregg-vanderheiden/ Have an Accessible New Year With These 12 Resolutions By Sheri Byrne-Haber. "…New Year's. It's right around the corner, and there is no better time than right now to undertake some New Year's accessibility resolutions…" https://buttondown.com/access-ability/archive/63510474have-an-accessible-new-year-with/ Beyond the Minimum By Urszula Lechtenberg and Helene Gold. "New Rule Requires Web Content (I'm Looking at You, LibGuides) to Meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA Standards…" https://ital.corejournals.org/index.php/ital/article/view/17312 Screen Reader for Web Accessibility Tutorials, an Evaluation of Interactive Web Forms (PDF) By Wolfgang Helmut Bubich. "…The results of the user research provide relevant insights. The visually impaired interviewees addressed significantly more interactive elements with accessibility problems than the sighted user group. This mainly includes nested, fold-out, and non-native HTML web areas. While the sighted participants consider visual aspects, such as text contrasts or animations, to be problematic, the visually impaired participants often criticize unclear semantic labels and aspects of operability…" https://repositum.tuwien.at/bitstream/20.500.12708/205271/1/Bubich%20Wolfgang%20Helmut%20-%202024%20-%20Screen%20Reader%20for%20Web%20Accessibility%20Tutorials%20An...pdf What GDS Has Found From Public Sector Accessibility Monitoring By Chris Heathcote. "Government Digital Service (GDS) monitors the accessibility of public sector websites and mobile apps. We've published a report on our accessibility monitoring today outlining what we have found from the last 3 years…" https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2024/12/17/what-gds-has-found-from-public-sector-accessibility-monitoring/ 2024 U.S. Digital Accessibility Legal Update with Lainey Feingold (Video) By 3Play Media. "…this is the annual 3Play Digital Accessibility Legal Update for the United States, and subtitle, top title, is 'Accessibility is a Civil Right'…" https://www.3playmedia.com/resources/recorded-webinars/wbnr-12-12-2024-legal-update/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS box-decoration-break By Kilian Valkhof. "Deal with styling for elements that span multiple lines…" https://12daysofweb.dev/2024/css-box-decoration-break/ The Future of CSS: Construct custom-ident> and dashed-ident> values with ident() By Bramus Van Damme. "CSS uses a lot of so called idents to name things - think of the values that you put in for view-transition-name, view-timeline-name, container-name, etc…" https://www.bram.us/2024/12/18/the-future-of-css-construct-custom-idents-and-dashed-idents-with-ident/ A Progress Update on Reading-Flow By Rachel Andrew. "There's a First Public Working Draft of CSS Display 4, which includes the work on the new reading-flow property…" https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2024/12/20/a-progress-update-on-reading-flow/ The CSS Reset Contradiction By Jens Oliver Meiert. "Our field (of web and frontend development) has been using resets-which for simplicity here includes 'reboots' and 'normalizers'-for about 20 years. I say 'about' because it seems Tantek Çelik had it all started in 2004 (where you find yours truly, too), but other authors may have used similar techniques even earlier…" https://meiert.com/en/blog/the-css-reset-contradiction/ +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. How Many People Do You Need to See Trip on Your Carpet Before Fixing It? By Jim Lewis and Jeff Sauro. "…After reflection, the carpet parable fails to apply to formative usability testing because it's focused on a single known problem that has the potential for catastrophic consequences rather than the discovery of a set of unknown problems that vary in their likelihood, severity (observed and potential), and priority for fixing." https://measuringu.com/trip-on-carpet/ What is Eye Tracking in UX? By Mads Soegaard. "Eye tracking is-pretty much-just what it sounds like, and eye tracking technology measures and analyzes eye movements to show what captures visual attention when a person's being measured this way, so read on about this technique-including what it can help with, its limitations, and more-as it's a handy way to help you understand how you take what you find with it and then enhance user interfaces and product designs." https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/eye-tracking-ux +04: EVENTS. Global Accessibility Awareness Day Call for Proposals from the University of Minnesota Proposal Deadline: January 3, 2025. Online Conference: May 15, 2025. https://accessibility.umn.edu/gaad/2025-proposal-criteria From Standards to Support: Understanding the Access Board's Role in Accessibility January 9, 2025. Online https://www.accessibilityonline.org/ao/session?id=111148 SUC-O-Meter: A New Way of Measuring Accessibility With Aashutosh Kulkarni January 21, 2025. Online https://a11ytalks.com/posts/2025-jan Shift-left and Bake Accessibility into Your SDLC with Justin Stockton February 12, 2025. Online https://www.tpgi.com/webinar-shift-left-and-bake-accessibility-into-your-sdlc/ UX Virtual Training March 2-7, 2025. Online https://www.nngroup.com/training/march-asia-au/ Advancing Research March 11-13, 2025. Online https://rosenfeldmedia.com/advancing-research/2025/ State of the Browser March 29, 2025. Online and London, England, United Kingdom https://2025.stateofthebrowser.com/ +05: HTML. Grouping Form Fields By Matthias Kittsteiner. "When I first stumbled upon fieldset and legend, I didn’t know much about HTML and especially not about accessibility…" https://htmhell.dev/adventcalendar/2024/21/ Microdata for Books By Alan Dalton. "Dive into marking up books…" https://htmhell.dev/adventcalendar/2024/18/ Getting Oriented with HTML Video By Scott Jehl. "A couple years back, I was in a window seat on a flight from Amsterdam to New York…" https://htmhell.dev/adventcalendar/2024/19/ My Favourite Colour Is Chuck Norris Red By Declan Chidlow. "Setting the colour of text on a webpage is usually a simple affair involving whipping it out the good ol' CSS color property. But this is HTMHell…" https://htmhell.dev/adventcalendar/2024/20/ +06: JAVASCRIPT. State of JavaScript 2024 By Sacha Greif and Eric Burel. State of JavaScript 2024 results are out. https://2024.stateofjs.com/en-US +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Github's Updated Commits Page and the Interactive List Component By Eric W. Bailey. "…This post is about interactive lists on GitHub, and how to use them. It's also about: the responsibilities, pressures, and politics of creating complex components like the interactive list and ensuring they are accessible, how these types of components affect the larger, holistic experience of GitHub as a whole, the need to ensure these components actually work for the people they serve, and the value of providing feedback if they don't…" https://ericwbailey.website/published/githubs-updated-commits-page-and-the-interactive-list-component/ More Than a Third of World's Population Have Never Used Internet, Says UN By Betsy Reed. "Nearly 3bn people, or 37% of global population, have never been online despite rise in use during pandemic…" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/30/more-than-a-third-of-worlds-population-has-never-used-the-internet-says-un AI Goes Nuclear By Dawn Stover. "Big tech is turning to old reactors (and planning new ones) to power the energy-hungry data centers that artificial intelligence systems need. The downsides of nuclear power-including the potential for nuclear weapons proliferation-have been minimized or simply ignored." https://thebulletin.org/2024/12/ai-goes-nuclear/ +08: NAVIGATION. Don’t Hide Skip Links By Australian Web Accessibility Initiative. "…Having a skip link as the first focusable element on the page that takes the visitor to the main content is good practice. Ideally, the link should always be visible…" https://ozewai.org/blog/technical-articles/dont-hide-skip-links/ +09: TOOLS. WAI-ARIA Usage By Gez Lemon. "A bookmarklet to evaluate WAI-ARIA according to the ARIA in HTML specification…" https://github.com/gezlemon/WAI-ARIA-Usage?tab=readme-ov-file#wai-aria-usage +10: USABILITY. Content Dispersion: The Downside of Mobile-first Design (Video) By Kim Flaherty. "Content dispersion occurs when the content of a responsive webpage appears overly large and stretched out on large laptop or desktop screens. What negative affects can it create?" https://www.nngroup.com/videos/content-dispersion-in-mobile-first-design/ What I Learned About Design by Helping My Grandfather Send an Email By Andrew Spencer. "It started as a simple request, 'Can you help me send an email to a friend.'…" https://thoughtbot.com/blog/what-i-learned-about-design-by-helping-my-grandfather-send-an-email What Does User Friendly Actually Mean? By Proactive Paul. "…The next time you have issues with something ask the vendor to consider the 'no hindrance, no hesitation, no questions' approach to being user friendly. Point them to Jeffrey Rubin's book." https://www.dontreadmyblog.com/news/?p=755 The U.S. Navy's $100 Million Checkbox - How Bad Design Killed 10 Sailors and Wrecked a Destroyer By Adrian Hanft, III. "…Good design isn't simply choosing the right buttons or checkboxes. Creating a strong interface requires an understanding of the users and their environment. By empathizing with the person using the interface, a designer can prevent errors, reduce cognitive strain, and help people recognize and recover from mistakes if they should happen. This empathetic approach is called human-centered design…" https://adrian3.com/blog/2019/2019-09-28-The-US-Navys-100-million-dollar-checkbox.php +11: WEBWASTE & SUSTAINABILITY. Sustainable Hardware Choices By Michelle Barker. "I'm pretty proud that I managed to keep my iPhone 8 going for over five years (with one battery replacement in that time)…" https://css-irl.info/sustainable-hardware-choices/ The Cloud and the Climate: Navigating AI-Powered Futures (Podcast) By Environment Variables. "…Chris Adams is joined by Jo Lindsay Walton, a senior research fellow at the Sussex Digital Humanities Lab and co-author of the report The Cloud and the Climate: Navigating AI-Powered Futures. They delve into the intersection of climate and AI, exploring the environmental impact of AI technologies and the challenges of decarbonizing the ICT sector…" https://podcasts.castplus.fm/e/68rr7238-the-cloud-and-the-climate-navigating-ai-powered-futures [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? Accessibility Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/accessibility.html Association Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/associations.html Book Listings. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/books.html Cascading Style Sheets Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/css.html Color Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/color.html Drupal Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/drupal.html Evaluation & Testing Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/testing.html Event Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/events.html HTML Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/html.html Information Architecture Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/architecture.html JavaScript Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/javascript.html Miscellaneous Web Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/misc.html Navigation Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/navigation.html PHP Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/php.html Sites & Blogs Listing. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/sites.html Standards, Guidelines & Pattern Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/standards.html Tool Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/tools.html Typography Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/type.html Usability Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/usability.html WebWaste & Sustainability Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/webwaste.html XML Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/xml.html [Section two ends.] ++END NOTES. + SUBSCRIPTION INFO. WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription. For information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit: https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/webdev_listserv.html The Web Design Reference Site also has a RSS 2.0 feed for site updates. + TEXT EMAIL NEWSLETTER (TEN). As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to the accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) guidelines. Please let me know if there is anything else we can do to make navigation easier. For TEN guideline information please visit: http://www.headstar.com/ten + SIGN OFF. Until next time, Laura L. Carlson Information Technology Systems and Services University of Minnesota Duluth Duluth, MN U.S.A. 55812-3009 mailto:lcarlson@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]