[webdev] Web Design Update: January 24, 2013

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 10, Issue 31, January 24, 2013.

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

++ISSUE 31 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: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.
03: COLOR.
04: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
09: NAVIGATION.
10: PHP.
11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
12: TYPOGRAPHY.
13: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Accessibility Priority Tool
By Roger Hudson.
"The Accessibility Priority Tool is a suggested mechanism for helping
web content developers and organisations identify and correct issues
that could reduce the ability of some people to access web content..."
http://usability.com.au/2013/01/accessibility-priority-tool/

MYTH - Accessibility is Blind People
By A11Y Project.
"Accessibility is often viewed often viewed as making your site work
on a screen readers. In reality, web accessibility is a subset of UX
focused on making your websites usable by the widest range of people
possible, including those who have disabilities..."
http://a11yproject.com/posts/myth-accessibility-is-blind-people/

Quick Test - Navigate Using Just Your Keyboard
By A11Y Project.
"One quick way that you can check your accessibility is to navigate
through the site using nothing but your keyboard...
http://a11yproject.com/posts/navigate-using-just-your-keyboard/

Accessibility - Where are we now Mr Bowie?
By Leonie Watson.
"Dear David Bowie, You may be one of my music Heroes, but your new
website isn't so much Rock n Roll Suicide as inclusive design murder.
If the Pretty Things Are Going To Hell, your website is leading the
way..."
http://www.nomensa.com/blog/2013/accessibility-where-are-we-now-mr-bowie/

Writing Accessibility Into A Design Application
By Duane OBrien.
"... I guess there were two lessons really.  The first is that we were
a little backwards on our thinking.  We were saying 'It's a visual
design tool, therefore no blind users' when we probably should have
been saying 'Users could be blind, how can we make this design tool
useful to them.'  And the second is if we'd been thinking that way all
along, we wouldn't have needed to try and bolt the work on at the
end..."
http://duaneobrien.com/blobs/2013/01/23/writing-accessibility-into-a-design-application/

Cool URLs Don't Change
By John Foliot.
"...Christian was looking for some of the older resources we had
written on the topic of AccessKeys....at least the four articles that
Chris was looking for have a new and hopefully more permanent home..."
http://john.foliot.ca/cool-urls-dont-change/

Wireless Device Use by People with Disabilities
By Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for Wireless Technologies.
"This SUNspot addresses the following questions related to use and
usability of wireless technology by people with all types of
disabilities. The rate of ownership of wireless devices such as
cellphones, smartphones and tablets by people with any type of
disability. The types of devices that people with disabilities own..."
http://www.wirelessrerc.org/content/publications/sunspot-volume-2013-1-wireless-device-use-people-disabilities

Mobile Accessibility Survey
By Kelly Ford.
"If you have a disability, are a mobile user and have 5 minutes to
spare please take a moment to fill out this online survey on mobile
accessibility hosted by the The Paciello Group (TPG)..."
http://blog.kellyford.org/paciello-group-conducting-survey-on-mobile-accessibility/


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

CSS Cascading and Inheritance Level 3
Hakon Wium Lie, et al. editors.
"This CSS module describes how to collate style rules and assign
values to all properties on all elements. By way of cascading and
inheritance, values are propagated for all properties on all elements.
CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents
(such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc...
http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-cascade/

Quick Tip - Never Use maximum-scale=1.0
By A11Y Project.
"Using the viewport meta tag the wrong way can hinder users with
visual problems to use your website. By setting maximum-scale=1.0, you
are disabling the functionality to use pinch zoom on mobile devices,
and forcing users to view your page a certain way..."
http://a11yproject.com/posts/never-use-maximum-scale/

How To Hide Content
By A11Y Project.
"Developers commonly use display: none to hide content on the page.
Unfortunately, this simple and common action is a bit problematic for
screen readers..."
http://a11yproject.com/posts/how-to-hide-content/

Understanding the CSS Clip Property
By Hugo Giraudel.
"Learn about the underused and often misunderstood CSS clip property
and understand how to apply it for some nifty effects."
http://tympanus.net/codrops/2013/01/16/understanding-the-css-clip-property/

On the Styling of Forms
By Bruce Lawson.
"The earliest incarnation of the specification that we now call HTML5
was an extension of HTML forms, called Web Forms 2.0 Working Draft 5
February 2004 almost nine years ago!). It contained lots of cool
stuff, like <input type="date">, <input type="email"> the required
attribute that are in the spec today, and cool stuff that never made
it to the final spec like <input type="location">, and repeating
templates subsequently removed in 2010)..."
http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2013/on-the-styling-of-forms/

What No One Told You About Z-Index
By Philip Walton.
"The problem with z-index is that very few people understand how it
really works. It's not complicated, but it if you've never taken the
time to read its specification, there are almost certainly crucial
aspects that you're completely unaware of. Don't believe me? Well, see
if you can solve this problem:"
http://philipwalton.com/articles/what-no-one-told-you-about-z-index/


+03: COLOR.

Quick Test - Check Contrast with Your Mobile Device
By A11Y Project.
"Having good contrast and readability are an important part of
creating an accessible website. One trick you can do to test whether
or not your contrast is sufficient enough is by using your phone or
mobile device."
http://a11yproject.com/posts/check-contrast-with-mobile-device/


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Are Personas Still Relevant to UX Strategy?
By Paul Bryan.
"There have been some who have proclaimed the impending demise of
personas as a UX design approach since shortly after their
introduction. While the optimal approach to creating and employing
personas is still evolving-thanks to more useful data becoming
available to design teams and new project-management methods-their
usefulness has not yet diminished. If anything, personas have become
even more useful because they put a human face on aggregated data and
foster a user-centered design approach even within the context of
efficiency-driven development processes..."
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/01/are-personas-still-relevant-to-ux-strategy.php


+05: EVENTS.

W3Conf 2013
February 21-22, 2013.
San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
http://www.w3.org/conf/

ConveyUX
March 4-6, 2013.
Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.
http://conveyux.com/

MAX 2013
May 4-8, 2013.
Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
http://max.adobe.com/

Mobilism 2013
May 16-17, 2013.
Amsterdam, Netherlands
http://mobilism.nl/2013

WebVisions
May 22-24, 2013.
Portland, Oregon, U.S.A
http://www.webvisionsevent.com/


+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Putting IA Theory into Practice
By Nathaniel Davis.
"Many practitioners of information architecture have come to
understand the fundamentals of creating an information architecture
through direct training, text books about practical methods, or
real-world experience. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find
documentation on the formal theory of information architecture."
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/01/putting-ia-theory-into-practice.php


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

Introduction to Functions in JavaScript
By Jake Bresnehan.
"The aim of this post is to introduce people quickly into the
wonderful world of JavaScript functions. Functions are one of the core
aspects in JavaScript."
http://web-design-weekly.com/2013/01/20/introduction-to-functions-in-javascript/

An Introduction to JavaScript Debugging
By Phil Ballard.
"Novice programmers, or those migrating from other languages, usually
find the JavaScript language fairly accessible, with plenty of
available help and advice on how to get started developing programs.
Unfortunately, the many articles and tutorials on coding rarely give
much advice on what to do when code doesn't run correctly..."
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2012740


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Making the Business Case for the Web
By Gerry McGovern.
"What do web professionals think is by far the most important
principle when managing an online presence?..."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/making-business-case-web

My Viewport Sizes
By Adrian Roselli.
" During the last rebuild of my site at least two years ago I started
to track the viewport sizes of my visitors via Google Analytics. Since
I don't care much about screen resolution (screen size), I don't
bother to track it..."
http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2013/01/my-viewport-sizes.html

The Post-PSD Era
By Brad Frost.
"...Use what tools you're comfortable with, but know when those tools
stop making sense. Play the tools in your toolkit to their respective
strengths, and sort out a way to communicate your design ideas to
clients without forcing them to envision what a fully-polished final
printed out product could look like. Perhaps this post should have
been named Death to the Waterfall."
http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/post/the-post-psd-era/


+09: NAVIGATION.

Quick Tip - ARIA Landmark Roles
By A11Y Project.
"ARIA Landmark Roles help assistive devices navigate your site.
Important roles to be aware of include..."
http://a11yproject.com/posts/aria-landmark-roles/

Organizing Mobile Navigation Based on Information-Seeking Behavior
By Brent Jackson.
"When opening an application, a user should be able to understand its
functionality, see relevant content, and get to where they want to go.
Applications that obscure navigation with the intent of focusing on
content can make finding specific information difficult. On the other
hand, skewing towards too much navigation can overwhelm the user.
Mobile apps should balance navigation for users with different
information needs..."
http://jxnblk.tumblr.com/post/40693165132/organizing-mobile-navigation-based-on


+10: PHP.

Functional Programming in PHP
By Lars Strojny.
PHP has traditionally been a simple, procedural language that took a
lot of inspiration from C and Perl. Both syntax wise and making sure
function signatures are as convoluted as possible. PHP 5.0 introduced
a proper object model but you know all of that already. PHP 5.3
introduced closures and PHP 5.4 improved closures very much (hint:
$this is available per default).
http://usrportage.de/archives/941-Functional-programming-in-PHP.html


+11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

2012 Into 2013 - Web Standards in Perspective
By Chris Mills.
"Chris Mills looks back at most exciting web standards developments of
2012, and looks ahead to what we can expect in 2013..."
http://www.netmagazine.com/features/2012-2013-web-standards-perspective


+12: TYPOGRAPHY.

Can I Still Use Px?
By Steven Bradley.
"Moving from static to flexible layouts involves a move from absolute
to relative measurements. That generally means giving up px in favor
of ems for vertical measurements and % for horizontal measurements. A
question that continues to get asked is whether or not it's ok to
still use px here or there. The short answer is no..."
http://www.vanseodesign.com/css/em-px/


+13: USABILITY.

Auto-Forwarding Carousels and Accordions Annoy Users and Reduce Visibility
By Jakob Nielsen.
"The user's target was at the top of the page in 98-point font. But
she failed to find it because the panel auto-forwarded instead of
staying still."
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/auto-forwarding/

Carousel Interaction Stats
By Erik Runyon.
"Carousels. That gem of a web feature that clients love, and many
developers hate. One thing is certain, they are the darling of
HigherEd..."
http://weedygarden.net/2013/01/carousel-stats/

Carousels
By Brad Frost.
"...despite being so omnipresent, little is said about our splashy
little auto-rotating frenemies. Let's fix that."
http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/post/carousels/

Stop Misusing Select Menus
By UX Movement.
"A form has many user interface elements. If you don't know how to use
them all properly, you could make filling out forms difficult for your
users. One interface element that's commonly misused is the select
menu..."
http://uxmovement.com/forms/stop-misusing-select-menus/

App Store Meta Tags
By Adrian A. Roselli.
"...One of the most offensive experience I have when surfing a site on
my mobile devices is being forced to click through an advertisement
for the site's app in the iTunes store (even moreso when I am surfing
on a non-iOS device)..."
http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2013/01/app-store-meta-tags.html

Internet Users Demand Less Interactivity
By The Onion.
"Tired of being bombarded with constant requests to share content on
social media, bestow ratings, leave comments, and generally 'join in
on the discussion,' the nation's Internet users demanded substantially
less interactivity this week..."
http://www.theonion.com/articles/internet-users-demand-less-interactivity,30920/

Mobile Sign Up Forms Must Die
By Luke Wroblewski.
"It's hard to get people to download your mobile application. But if
they do, what greets them when they open it up for the first time? A
step by step tour? A sign up form? Both might be missed opportunities
to get people engaged and interested in your service. In fact, you
might want to consider a gradual engagement approach instead. Here's
why... "
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1678

Functional Beauty and User Experience
By Catalina Butnaru.
"Beauty is one of the oldest and most powerful concepts in human
history-inspiring artists and lighting up cultural movements,
philosophical debates, and, in modern times, curious scientific
interest. Beauty is a desirable feature of the products we buy, with
the power to shape consumer choices and preferences..."
http://uxmag.com/articles/functional-beauty-and-user-experience


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+14: 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.


+ SUBSCRIPTION INFO.

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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
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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.]