[webdev] Web Design Update: August 14, 2014

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 13, Issue 07, August 14, 2014.

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

++ISSUE 07 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
05: JAVASCRIPT.
06: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
07: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Use the aria-label Property to Provide Additional Information to Users
By Denis Boudreau.
"Make sure the purpose of links is made meaningful using the
aria-label property..."
http://dboudreau.tumblr.com/post/93968506102/use-the-aria-label-property-to-provide-additional

Accessible HTML Heading Markup
By Sailesh Panchang.
"On this page, HTML heading markup h<n> tags are used for the titles
of each scenario I / Ii / III and for each of the two ARIA1 and ARIA2
techniques. This is good enough to comply with SC 1.3.1 (A) for the
three scenarios illustrated below. In Scenario I, these are the only
headings..."
http://www.deque.com/blog/accessible-html-heading-markup/

W3C Invites Implementations of HTML5 Image Description Extension
By W3C.
"The HTML Working Group has published a Candidate Recommendation of
the HTML5 Image Description Extension, which defines the 'longdesc'
attribute that enables web authors to provide longer textual
descriptions for complex images..."
http://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/4016

RE: Call for Implementations: HTML5 Image Description Extension (longdesc)
By John Foliot.
"...your contributions, as an author, user-agent implementer (or even
consumer - if you consume a  provided longdesc description - send an
email to the author and thank them!)"
will help move this useful attribute forward.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2014JulSep/0033.html

W3C WAI releases HTML5 Image Description Extension
By Tim Lohman.
"...According to the W3C WAI, HTML-longdesc is part of W3C's work to
ensure that the Open Web Platform is accessible to people with
disabilities..."
http://www.accessiq.org/news/news/2014/08/w3c-wai-releases-html5-image-description-extension

How Website Accessibility can Boost your SEO
By Kevin Rydberg.
"In case having a website that's accessible to all users wasn't enough
incentive on its own, here's another reason - it will help boost your
SEO rankings. Yeah, true story. On the surface it may not seem like
the two are connected, but behind the subtle scenes of your website's
code, proper accessibility practices are providing a major boost to
your SEO. What's that idiom about birds and stones?..."
http://blog.siteimprove.co.uk/how-website-accessibility-can-boost-your-seo

Celebrating the ADA's 20th/24th/25th Anniversary (Video)
By Karl Groves and Billy Gregory.
"Karl 'the Viking' Groves and Billy 'the Lumberjack'Gregory discuss
the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Field
reporter Eric Wright goes out on the street to see how America is
celebrating." To quote Léonie Watson "It's a funny (sometimes
irreverent) take on accessibility that genuinely made me laugh out
loud."
http://youtu.be/l3eb0DALdnA


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Beginner Concepts - How CSS Selectors Work
By Chris Coyier.
"Are you new to CSS? This article is for you! Perhaps the biggest key
to understanding CSS is understanding selectors. Selectors are what
allows you to target specific HTML elements and apply style to them.
Let's not think about style right now though, let's just focus on the
selecting..."
http://css-tricks.com/how-css-selectors-work/

How to Create a Fixed Navigation Bar
By Jacob Gube.
"...In this tutorial, I'll walk you through a simple CSS technique for
implementing a top horizontal fixed navigation bar..."
http://sixrevisions.com/css/fixed-navigation-bar/


+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

What To Do When You Can't Run a Usability Test
By Jeff Sauro.
In an ideal world, users would be involved in every stage of product
development, including requirements gathering, iterative prototype
testing and post release testing. But sometimes testing with users
just doesn't happen. Here are three alternatives we use to understand
the user experience without usability testing.
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/usability-alternatives.php

Usability vs Beta Testing (The What and When)
By UX Sisters.
"If you work in software and product development (or are stumbling
around a UX blog, you've probably heard about usability testing and
beta testing. They sound kind of useful and buzzwordy, but what do
they actually mean? Are they even different from each other in any
meaningful way? I'm asked this question quite often, so I wanted to
define what each one is - what each one is not - in the life of a UX
researcher at a SaaS software company"
http://www.uxsisters.com/2014/08/usability-vs-beta-testing/

A Closer Look At Personas - What They Are And How They Work (Part 1)
By Shlomo Goltz.
"In my experience as an interaction designer, I have come across many
strategies and approaches to increase the quality and consistency of
my work, but none more effective than the persona. Personas have been
in use since the mid-'90s and since then have gained widespread
awareness within the design community..."
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/06/a-closer-look-at-personas-part-1/

UX Without User Research Is Not UX
by Hoa Loranger.
"UX teams are responsible for creating desirable experiences for
users. Yet many organizations fail to include users in the development
process. Without customer input, organizations risk creating
interfaces that fail."
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-without-user-research/

A Closer Look At Personas: A Guide To Developing The Right Ones (Part 2)
By Shlomo Goltz.
"How can designers create experiences that are custom tailored to
people who are unlike themselves? As explained in part 1 of this
series, an effective way to gain knowledge of, build empathy for and
sharpen focus on users is to use a persona. This final part of the
series will explain an effective method of creating a persona..."
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/13/a-closer-look-at-personas-part-2/


+04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

How To Do a Content Audit - Step-by-Step
By Everett Sizemore.
"This is Inflow's process for doing content audits. It may not be the
"best" way to do them every time, but we've managed to keep it fairly
agile in terms of how you choose to analyze, interpret and make
recommendations on the data. The fundamental parts of the process
remain about the same across numerous types of websites no matter what
their business goals are: Collect all of the content URLs on the site
and fetch the data you need about each URL. Then analyze the data and
provide recommendations for each content URL. Theoretically it's
simple. In practice, however, it can be a daunting exercise if you
don't have a plan or process in place. By the end of this post we hope
you'll have a good start on both..."
http://moz.com/blog/content-audit-tutorial

Analyzing Card-Sorting Data Using Graph Visualization
By Celeste Lyn Paul.
"This paper describes a method for visualizing and analyzing
co-occurrence in card-sorting data. Card sorting is a popular
knowledge elicitation method used in information architecture and user
experience design. However, analyzing card-sorting data can be a
challenge. Detailed qualitative analysis is difficult and time
consuming, especially for larger studies. Quantitative analysis can be
automated and is scalable, but can be difficult to interpret."
http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_publications/jus/2014may/paul1.html


+05: JAVASCRIPT.

What ARIA does not do » ow.ly/3ogcUX #aria #a11y
By Steve Faulkner.
"ARIA is a set of attributes that can be added to HTML elements (and
other markup languages) to communicate accessibility role, state, name
and properties which are exposed by browsers via platform
accessibility APIs. This provides a common, interoperable method of
relaying the information to assistive technologies. That's it. It is
the same method used by browsers to convey the inbuilt (or default)
accessibility information of native HTML features. The difference
being that authors can wire up this information for themselves in the
DOM using ARIA, before they could not..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2014/08/what-aria-does-not-do/

JavaScript Coding Tips (Video)
By Axel Rauschmayer.
"The following video is a recording of the talk 'JavaScript coding
tips', which I held 2014-05-16 at the Sud Web Conference in Toulouse,
France."
http://www.2ality.com/2014/08/javascript-coding-tips.html

Asynchronicity
By Anne van Kesteren.
"There is ever more asynchronicity within the web platform.
Asynchronous being some set of steps that could be performed in
parallel with JavaScript running in a given environment such as a
window or worker..."
http://annevankesteren.nl/2014/08/asynchronicity


+06: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Standards for Web Applications on Mobile - Current State and Roadmap
By W3C.
"This document summarizes the various technologies developed in W3C
that increase the capabilities of Web applications, and how they apply
more specifically to the mobile context. A good subset of these
technologies are described and explained in the W3C on-line training
on programming Web applications...."
http://www.w3.org/2014/07/mobile-web-app-state/


+07: USABILITY.

The Pervasiveness of Text Advertising Blindness
By Justin W. Owens, Evan M. Palmer, and Barbara S. Chaparro.
"Users of websites tend to ignore text advertisements, especially when
they are on the right side of a web page, even when the advertisements
are useful for completing a task..."
http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_publications/jus/2014february/owens1.html

User Experience and Accessibility - An Analysis of County Web Portals
By Norman E. Youngblood and Susan A. Youngblood.
"...This study applies usability heuristics and automated analyses to
assess a state-wide population of county web portals and examines
whether population, per capita income, or median household income are
related to usability, accessibility, and coding practices..."
http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_publications/jus/2013november/youngblood1.html


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+08: 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

Drupal Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/drupal.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

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

WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription. For information on how
to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit:
http://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 at d.umn.edu


[Issue ends.]