[webdev] Web Design Update: February 20, 2014

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 12, Issue 35, February 20, 2014.

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

++ISSUE 35 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: DRUPAL.
04: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
09: NAVIGATION.
10: TOOLS.
11: USABILITY.
12: XML.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Future of Accessibility and Video Captions According to Google and YouTube
By Shannon K. Murphy.
"Making video accessible to people who need captions is really
important. And I want to encourage everybody who has power over this
to make their videos accessible, to add captions, and to focus not on
excuses or reasons why not to do it or what's required, but how you
can have the biggest impact and reach the most people..."
http://www.3playmedia.com/2014/01/10/future-accessibility-video-captions-according-google-youtube/

Accessible Forms for Deaf People?
By Sveta.
"...the form may look normal, but many people who cannot use phone or
don't like using it are at disadvantage. It is the main issue with
deaf and hard of hearing visitors. Even though many of them can talk
on phone via a relay service operator, they can do that only within
their country and also get frustrated with many businesses hanging up
on them..."
http://audio-accessibility.com/news/2012/12/accessible-forms-for-deaf-people/

Avoid Triggering Unexpected Context Changes on Keyboard Focus
By Denis Boudreau.
"Make sure major content changes are not unexpectedly triggered by
simply moving focus..."
http://dboudreau.tumblr.com/post/76249035567/avoid-triggering-unexpected-context-changes-on-keyboard

Simple Accessibility Updates to Improve New York Times New Redesign - Part 2
By John F Croston III.
"For those following along, this is Part 2 of my series on how the New
York Times can make simple updates to improve their website's
accessibility. 'Part 1 - Simple Accessibility Updates to Improve New
York Times New Redesign' is available for those that missed reading
it."
http://www.jfciii.com/blog/2014/02/10/simple-accessibility-updates-to-improve-new-york-times-new-redesign-part-2/

Include Accessibility in Your Company's Style Guide - Part 1
By Paul J. Adam.
"The Style Guide is the PERFECT place to promote standards-compliant,
accessible code and user-centered design/usability best practices! In
Part 1 of this series I'll post a few inaccessible code examples from
Yelp's style guide which gave me the idea for this topic..."
http://pauljadam.com/blog/accessibility/include-accessibility-in-your-companys-style-guide/

New Accessibility Agreement - WCAG 2.0 AA Standard for Web and Mobile
By Law Office of Lainey Feingold.
"...WellPoint, one of the largest health benefits companies in the
United States, announced a comprehensive plan to increase
accessibility of its print and digital information. The company will
be using WCAG 2.0 AA as its standard for web and mobile apps, and will
be expanding its system for providing braille, large print,
electronic, and audio versions of print information..."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2014JanMar/0063.html

Podcast #99: Jennison Powers Up Silicon Valley
By Dennis Lembree.
"Dennis speaks with @Jennison Asuncion about his big move to Silicon
Valley from Toronto, new Meetup groups and camps, CSUN14 and other fun
things."
http://www.webaxe.org/podcast-99-jennison-powers-up-silicon-valley/

EPUB Makes Mobile Content Inclusive and Accessible
By Rich Schwerdtfeger.
"Throughout the history of computing, software has typically advanced
more quickly than the hardware on which it runs. But that's not the
case when it comes to documents and mobile devices. All too often,
things like PDF documents and HTML pages are laborious to operate on a
mobile device or limited in capability. When you consider the
widespread and unrelenting proliferation of mobile devices, from smart
phones to tablets, the problem was only going to get worse."
http://asmarterplanet.com/blog/2014/02/epub-mobile.html


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Use CSS to Change the Presentation of Elements on Keyboard Focus
By Denis Boudreau.
"Make sure CSS enhances visual feedback when an element receives
keyboard focus..."
http://dboudreau.tumblr.com/post/76641389813/use-css-to-change-the-presentation-of-elements-on


+03: COLOR

Color Theory Tutorial, Concepts, Essays and Color Basics
By Janet Shallbetter.
"If you are involved in the creation or design of visual documents, an
understanding of color will help when incorporating it into your own
designs. Choices regarding color often seem rather mystical, as many
seem to base decisions on nothing other than "it looks right."
Although often told I had an eye for color, the reason why some colors
worked together while others did not always intrigued me and I found
the study of color theory fascinating..."
http://worqx.com/color/


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Everything You Know About Accessibility Testing is Wrong (part 1)
By Karl Groves.
"My first experience with accessibility and, therefore, accessibility
testing, came from Bobby..."
http://www.karlgroves.com/2014/02/13/everything-you-know-about-accessibility-testing-is-wrong-part-1/

10 Things That Can Go Wrong in a Usability Test
By Jeff Sauro.
"Here are the ten most common problems we encounter in usability
testing and some ideas for how to avoid or manage them when they
inevitably occur..."
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/wrong-usability-test.php

10 Ways to Get a Horrible Survey Response Rate
By Jeff Sauro.
"Enevitably one or a few of these response rate killers will creep
into your next survey project. Knowing more about them should improve
your next survey response rate..."
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/horrible-responserate.php

Business-Value Metrics for Field Studies
By Nicki L. Davis.
"Demonstrating business value is a continual challenge for the UX
community, as Lis Hubert and Paul Callee noted in their recent series
of articles on UXmatters. I'd like to contribute to the discussion
about business value by presenting a case study that offers hard
numbers on the business value of field studies..."
http://uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2014/02/business-value-metrics-for-field-studies.php


+05: EVENTS.

W3C JavaScript Course
March 17-April 14, 2014.
Online
http://www.w3devcampus.com/javascript-for-beginners-w3c-course/

Drupal Camp
April 18-19, 2014.
Stanford, California, U.S.A.
https://drupalcamp.stanford.edu/

Global Accessibility Awareness Day
May 9, 2014.
Everywhere.
https://www.facebook.com/globalaccessibilityawarenessday

DrupalCon
June 2-6, 2014.
Austin, Texas, U.S.A.
https://austin2014.drupal.org/

CSS Day 2014
June 4, 2014.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://cssday.nl/


+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Adopting a Professional Compass for Information Architecture
By Nathaniel Davis.
"It is...beneficial to adopt a compass that dictates what is good and
right in information architecture- in essence, a professional compass
for information architecture..."
http://uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2014/02/adopting-a-professional-compass-for-information-architecture.php


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

ARIA-busy
By Rakesh Paladugula.
"...ARIA-busy state should be used by the content authors when a
portion on a web page has auto updating content..."
http://www.maxability.co.in/2014/02/aria-busy/

JavaScript Time Values - Dates as Milliseconds Since 1970-01-01
By Axel Rauschmayer.
"This blog post explains how JavaScript dates are stored internally as
time values, milliseconds since 1970-01-01."
http://www.2ality.com/2014/02/time-values.html


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

What Does It Mean To Design Websites Responsively?
By Steven Bradley.
"How do you define what is and isn't a responsive design..."
http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/what-is-responsive/

Grid
By Adam Kaplan.
"A simple guide to responsive design..."
http://www.adamkaplan.me/grid/

An Interview with Derek Featherstone
By Sarah Horton.
"Derek Featherstone is founder and lead of Simply Accessible, a
consultancy that works to bring accessibility into organizations
through consulting, training, workshops, and support. Derek is a
well-known and well-respected advocate for accessible user experience,
moving beyond technical accessibility to support good and successful
experiences for everyone..."
http://rosenfeldmedia.com/blogs/a-web-for-everyone/accessible-interaction-an-interview-with-derek-featherstone/


+09: NAVIGATION.

Text Links - Best Practices for Screen Readers
By Sailesh Panchang.
"Sometimes, the visible anchor text as mandated by the user interface
design is not very meaningful to vision impaired users. One could use
aria-label or the title attribute or even off-screen text on text
links. But what's the best practice based on current assistive
technology support?"
http://www.deque.com/blog/text-links-practices-screen-readers/

The Accessible Current Page Link Conundrum
By Heydon Pickering.
"The problem with 'current page' links is there's no interoperable
(read: accessible) way of communicating them. Unlike links to page
fragments, which are identified as 'same page link' (or similar) by
popular screen readers, the mechanism by which a link points to the
current location is not exposed via browsers to assistive
technologies..."
http://www.heydonworks.com/article/the-accessible-current-page-link-conundrum

The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet 2.0
By Danny Dover.
"...It is my honor and privilege today to introduce the brand-new
version of The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet."
http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition


+10: TOOLS.

YouDescribe
By Smith-Kettlewell Video Description Research and Development Center.
"An experimental platform for adding extended audio description to
YouTube videos. Describe your favorite YouTube videos for the benefit
of blind friends and strangers alike. Choose a video, pause it to
insert brief descriptions, and tell us what you see! When viewed with
YouDescribe, your voice is inserted into those spots in the video. Be
descriptive, be brief, be part of the solution..."
http://youdescribe.ski.org/rel/

W3Schools Hider (Firefox Extension)
By Aaron J Spetner.
"Hides W3Schools (and other) results from Google Searches. No longer
will web developers find incorrect information when searching. With
this extension, search results for W3Schools.com are automatically
blocked, preventing you from stumbling across one of the most
misleading and aggravating sites on the internet."
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/w3schools-hider/


+11: USABILITY.

Don't Use Automatic Image Sliders or Carousels, Ignore the Fad
By conversionXL.
"I'm sure you've come across dozens, if not hundreds of image sliders
or carousels (also called 'rotating offers'). You might even like
them. But the truth is that they're conversion killers. So if they're
not effective, why do people use them? 2 reasons: (1) Some people
think they're cool. But cool does not make you money - at least not
this way. (2) Different departments and managers want to get their
message on the home page. Design by committee never fails to fail..."
http://conversionxl.com/dont-use-automatic-image-sliders-or-carousels-ignore-the-fad/

6 Usability Mistakes That Kill Conversions
By Lisa Barone.
"1.) You Aren't Keeping it Simple...2.) You Tried to be Pretty, Not
Useful... 3.) You Forgot Words (or Spelled Them Wrong)...4.) You Give
Too Many Options...5). You Didn't Make the Action Obvious...6.)
There's No Communication..."
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2327233/6-Usability-Mistakes-That-Kill-Conversions

Instructional Overlays and Coach Marks for Mobile Apps
By Aurora Bedford.
Instructions in mobile applications must be designed for optimal
scannability, as users tend to dismiss them quickly and do not read
thoroughly.
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/mobile-instructional-overlay/

Protecting Against Link Rot While Embracing the Future
By Tim Murtaugh.
"...If cool URLs don't change, cool content anticipates un-cool URLs..."
http://alistapart.com/blog/post/protecting-against-link-rot-while-embracing-the-future

Definitions of User Experience and Usability
By User Experience Professionals Association.
"Below are various definitions of common user experience terms. Visit
these resources to find out more..."
https://uxpa.org/resources/definitions-user-experience-and-usability


+12: XML.

How SVG Line Animation Works
By Chris Coyier.
"I bet all of you have seen that little trick where an SVG path is
animated to look like it's drawing itself. It's super cool. Jake
Archibald pioneered the technique and has a super good interactive
blog post on how it works. Brian Suda wrote about it on 24 Ways.
Polygon used it to great effect on a custom designed article and wrote
about it. Codrops has some neat examples. I have very little to add,
except my brain just kinda figured it out, so I thought I would
explain it one more time the way it clicked for me..."
http://css-tricks.com/svg-line-animation-works/


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+13: 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.]