[webdev] Web Design Update: June 14, 2012

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 10, Issue 51, June 14, 2012.

An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web
design and development.

++ISSUE 51 CONTENTS.

SECTION ONE: New references.
What's new at the Web Design Reference site?
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/
New links in these categories:

01: ACCESSIBILITY.
02: BOOKS.
03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.
04: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: MISCELLANEOUS.
07: NAVIGATION.
08: TOOLS.
09: USABILITY.

SECTION TWO:
10: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

A Little Deaf Education
By Meryl Evans.
"...I want to open the door to your questions about deafness. Ask
anything. I know how hard it is to ask someone such questions - unless
you know the person very well - because you don't know whether that
person is sensitive or open. Ask away..."
http://www.meryl.net/2012/06/07/a-little-deaf-education/

Closed-Captioned Video Examples
By Meryl Evans.
"...examples showing how the following types of videos differ: no
captions, basic captions (built-in video), captions (turn on/off),
transcripts, audio descriptions, ASL / sign-language...
http://shelaza.com/links/closed-caption-video-examples/

About WebAIM Screen Reader Survey 4
By Dennis E. Lembree.
"...WebAIM reports that problematic items have changed little over the
last 2 years. The top ten are..."
http://webaxe.blogspot.com/2012/06/about-webaim-screen-reader-survey-4.html

My Take on the WebAIM Survey
By Terrill Thompson.
"The report includes a summary of key findings in the Conclusion, but
I thought I'd take a moment to share my takeaways as well..."
http://terrillthompson.com/blog/262

HTML5 Accessibility Chops: When to Use an ARIA Role
By Steve Faulkner.
"There has been discussion of late on whether authors should be
allowed to include an ARIA role value on an HTML element that matches
the default implicit ARIA role as defined in HTML5.  The divergent
opinions are mirrored in the differing author conformance requirements
between the W3C HTML5 specification and the WHATWG living standard."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2012/06/html5-accessibility-chops-when-to-use-an-aria-role/

Image alt Exception Change Re-Re-Requested
By Adrian Roselli.
"Late last week the latest change request (Issue 31c Meta Generator
Updated) was handed in for removing the meta name=generator exception.
If you look at the table of contents you can see that it has been
batted down twice before, though without addressing all the points
raised. This of course left the meta name=generator exception open to
be challenged again..."
http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2012/06/image-alt-exception-change-re-re.html


+02: BOOKS.

Kline, Jeff. Strategic IT Accessibility: Enabling the Organization,
Live Oak Book Company, 2011.

Jehl, Scott et. al. Designing with Progressive Enhancement: Building
the web that works for everyone, New Riders Press, 2011.


+03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Principles of Writing Consistent, Idiomatic CSS
By Nicolas Gallagher.
"The following document outlines a reasonable style guide for CSS
development. It is not meant to be prescriptive and I do not wish to
impose my style preferences on other people's code. However, these
guidelines do strongly encourage the use of existing, common, sensible
patterns."
https://github.com/necolas/idiomatic-css#readme

Setting Breakpoints in Responsive Design
By Nick La.
"Lately, I've been blogging a lot about Responsive Design. I've
covered the technical side of media queries, basic implementation,
full design tutorial, some CSS tricks, and a list of awesome
responsive sites. Today, I want to talk about setting breakpoints in
responsive design. How should you set the breakpoints?..."
http://webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/setting-breakpoints-in-responsive-design

Building Books with CSS3
By Nellie McKesson.
"While historically, it's been difficult at best to create
print-quality PDF books from markup alone, CSS3 now brings us the
Paged Media Module, which targets print book formatting. 'Paged' media
exists as finite pages, like books and magazines, rather than as long
scrolling stretches of text, like most websites. With a single CSS
stylesheet, publishers can take XHTML source content and turn it into
a laid-out, print-ready PDF. You can take your XHTML source, bypass
desktop page layout software like Adobe InDesign, and package it as an
ePub file. It's a lightweight and adaptable workflow, which gets you
beautiful books faster. Nellie McKesson, eBook Operations Manager at
O'Reilly Media, explains how to build books with CSS3."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/building-books-with-css3/

A Case for Responsive Resumes
By Andrew Hoffman.
"Learn how to author a clean resume in HTML5/CSS3 that scales well to
different viewport sizes, is easy to update and maintain, and will
never grow obsolete."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/a-case-for-responsive-resumes/

12 CSS3 Vendor Prefix Crisis Myths
By Craig Buckler.
"The issues are widely misunderstood - which is why we find ourselves
in this mess. Hopefully, this article will shatter several vendor
prefix crisis myths..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/12-css3-vendor-prefix-crisis-myths/


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Report Usability Issues in a User by Problem Matrix
By Jeff Sauro.
"...usability issues should be described and usually accompanied by a
screen shot or short video clip to illustrate their impact.  But don't
stop there. Usability issues should be converted into a user by
problem matrix..."
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/problem-matrix.php


+05: EVENTS.

Mobile Accessibility
June 25, 2012.
Online Symposium
http://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2012/mobile/


+06: MISCELLANEOUS.

Responsive Images: What's the Problem, and How Do We Fix It?
By Matt Wilcox.
"...This article aims to give an overview of the problem itself, and
show the different proposals in the works to address it..."
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/responsive-images-problem/


+07: NAVIGATION.

An Alternative to Select Elements as Navigation in Narrow Viewports
By Roger Johansson.
"A recurring problem when making sites fit in a narrow viewport is
navigation. The most common approach on larger screens is to use a
horisontal navigation for the top level items. Sometimes such menus
are complicated/complemented by drop-downs listing sub-items, but I'll
leave that out of this post and focus on how to handle just the
horisontal navigation bar..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201206/an_alternative_to_select_elements_as_navigation_in_narrow_viewports/

Build a Smart Mobile Navigation Without Hacks
By Aaron Gustafson.
"Aaron Gustafson explains how to build a progressively-enhanced,
CSS-based dropdown that works as part of a responsive design..."
http://www.netmagazine.com/tutorials/build-smart-mobile-navigation-without-hacks


+08: TOOLS.

Nu Markup Validation Service Bookmarklets
By Steve Faulkner.
"I noticed that the W3C Nu Markup Validation Service did not have any
bookmarklets to provide quick validation of a page currently being
viewed. So I made some using the existing W3C validator bookmarklets
as the basis..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2012/06/nu-markup-validation-service-bookmarklets/


+09: USABILITY.

Flow, Mastery and Ease-of-Use
By Christina Wodtke.
"Because this state is so desirable, both for productivity and for
pleasure, many application (web and mobile) designers are starting to
try to design for it as well. This is a daunting task. First, all
humans are different. This means in identical situations I hit flow at
a very different moment in the ease-to-difficulty continuum than you
do. Secondly, flow is extremely easily to disrupt."
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/flow-mastery-and

Does Your Home Page Answer These 5 Questions ASAP?
By Joanna Wiebe.
"Unless you've been living under a rock - which is not a very comfy
existence, so I doubt you have - you probably already know that you
have, like, no time to get your first-time visitors' attention once
they land on your home page or other entry page (e.g., PPC, email)..."
http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/copywriting/does-your-home-page-answer-these-5-questions-asap/

Women On Top - Inappropriate Dropdowns
By Kate Roberts.
"...Alphabetical order wouldn't be very helpful in a list of items
that all begin with the same letter. And I don’t accept that there is
any 'natural order' to the categories of men, married women, unmarried
women, and women-who-don't-think-it's-any-of-your-business-thank-you-very-much.
So on what other basis might one order the list?..."
http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/women-on-top-inappropriate-dropdowns/

Designing For the Obvious, the Boring, the "Of Course"
By Gerry McGovern.
"Making things that are simple and useful is often the result of a lot
of boring and tedious work."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2012/nt-2012-06-10-Obvious-boring.htm


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+10: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

Accessibility Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/accessibility.html

Association Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/associations.html

Book Listings.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/books.html

Cascading Style Sheets Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/css.html

Color Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/color.html

Dreamweaver Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/dreamweaver.html

Evaluation & Testing Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/testing.html

Event Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/events.html

Flash Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/flash.html

Information Architecture Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/architecture.html

JavaScript Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/javascript.html

Miscellaneous Web Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/misc.html

Navigation Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/navigation.html

PHP Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/php.html

Sites & Blogs Listing.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/sites.html

Standards, Guidelines & Pattern Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/standards.html

Tool Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/tools.html

Typography Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/type.html

Usability Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/usability.html

XML Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/xml.html

[Section two ends.]


++END NOTES.


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+ 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 at d.umn.edu


[Issue ends.]