[webdev] Web Design Update: August 21, 2014

Thu Aug 21 06:29:58 CDT 2014

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 13, Issue 08, August 21, 2014.

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

++ISSUE 08 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: HTML5.
05: JAVASCRIPT.
06: NAVIGATION.
07: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

7 Things You Should Know About IT Accessibility
By Terrill Thompson and the EDUCAUSE IT Accessibility Constituent Group.
"IT accessibility is the ongoing process by which an organization
ensures its current and future IT can be used effectively by everyone,
including individuals with disabilities. Higher education has ethical
and legal obligations to ensure that programs and services are
accessible to all learners and employees, and as IT plays an
increasingly integral role in higher education, whether IT is
accessible can have a major impact on student success. Accessible IT
works by complying with accessibility standards, enabling users with
disabilities to fully participate. The need to ensure accessible IT
has resulted in a greater focus on universal design-the process of
designing a product, service, course, or environment in a way that
works well for a broad spectrum of users..."
http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/7-things-you-should-know-about-it-accessibility

Creating Accessible Video
By Gian Wild.
"...Videos that include captions means that double the number of
people will finish watching your video (from 40% up to 80%) - and
remember your search ranking is directly related to how long people
spend on your site. LiveClicker found that pages with transcripts
earned 16% more revenue than pages that just had video-only content.
The catch, though, is that while simple text is pretty easy to make
accessible so long as you don't do anything too crazy, video is rather
more complicated. People who are blind can hear the audio, but not see
what is happening. People who are deaf can see what's happening but
not hear the audio. The video itself may be too fast-paced for people
with cognitive impairments. And so on. Also consider that a lot of
video players simply can't be controlled via the keyboard, which is
often a necessity for many people with disabilities..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/accessible-video/

Improving the Accessibility of Social Media in Government
By Digital Gov.
"...This Toolkit is your guide to Improving the Accessibility of
Social Media in Government. Created with the input of social media
leaders and users across government and the private sector, this
living document contains helpful tips, real-life examples and best
practices to ensure that your social media content is usable and
accessible to all citizens, including those with disabilities..."
https://www.digitalgov.gov/resources/improving-the-accessibility-of-social-media-in-government/

Orca Now Supports longdesc
By Joanmarie Diggs.
"Orca now explicitly supports longdesc for Gecko. In particular..."
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2014-August/msg00327.html

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Managing Hyphenation with CSS
By Nicolas Hoffmann, Coralie Mercier.
"In this article, you will start from Ancient Greek to the CSS4 text
module, so a loooong 'cutting' edge story."
http://openweb.eu.org/articles/managing-hyphenation-with-css

Enduring CSS - Writing Style Sheets for Rapidly Changing, Long-Lived Projects
By  Ben Frain.
"When architecting CSS for a large scale project it's a common aim to
abstract visual patterns for re-use, DRY out code and normalise our
designs as much as possible. However, for rapidly changing projects,
I'm no longer convinced those principles should necessarily be
followed to the nth degree, nor that they offer the biggest wins..."
http://benfrain.com/enduring-css-writing-style-sheets-rapidly-changing-long-lived-projects/

CSS Guidelines
By Harry Roberts.
"High-level advice and guidelines for writing sane, manageable, scalable CSS..."
http://cssguidelin.es/

5 Uses for Vertical Media Queries
By Craig Buckler.
"Media queries are the core technology behind Responsive Web Design
yet, despite a plethora of options, few of us dare venture beyond
min-width (and possibly max-width)..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/5-uses-vertical-media-queries/

+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

The Role of Iterative Usability Evaluation in Agile Development - A Case Study
By Yanfei Ma, Yunhui Lu, and Dinara Saparova.
"To better understand the role of iterative usability evaluation
during agile development, we recently conducted a study whose focus
was the usability evaluation of a personal health-management
system..."
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2014/08/the-role-of-iterative-usability-evaluation-in-agile-development-a-case-study.php

+04: HTML5.

Native Responsive Images
By Yoav Weiss.
"...Responsive images have been a pain point when developing
responsive websites for quite some time. Now, finally, a native
solution is getting close. You can start using it today, with or
without picturefill, and start savings your users' time and money!."
http://dev.opera.com/articles/native-responsive-images/

HTML5 with Steve Faulkner
By Sarah Horton.
"Web accessibility takes place on a foundation of technologies, the
most common of which are developed and maintained by the Worldwide Web
Consortium, or W3C. Its success is dependent on how well these
underlying technologies support accessible user experiences.
Fortunately for us, people like Steve Faulkner devote much of their
time to ensure technology specifications, such as HTML5, include the
hooks that make it possible to build an accessible and enjoyable user
experience for everyone, including people who use assistive
technologies, such as screen reader and screen magnification software,
and different display and interaction modalities, such as user
stylesheets and keyboard navigation."
http://rosenfeldmedia.com/blogs/a-web-for-everyone/html-5-0-with-steve-faulkner/

+05: JAVASCRIPT.

DOM - Attributes Sadness
By Anne van Kesteren.
"I have been reinstating 'features' related to attribute handling in
DOM. We thought we could get rid of them, but usage counters from
Chrome and compatibility data from Gecko showed we could not. This is
very sad so I thought I would share the pain..."
http://annevankesteren.nl/2014/08/attributes

+06: NAVIGATION.

The Anchor Button - Bad for Accessibility, Bad for Usability
By Matt Long.
"<a href="#">I'm a button, click me</a> - this is the anchor button.
Designers and developers have been creating buttons interchangeably
with the <div>, <span>, and <a> elements instead of button and input.
Who cares-on the surface things look great, right? Well, the easy
answer is, wrong-incorrectly using HTML elements is a bad thing, and
usually creates additional work to then add the expected default
behaviors of the correct elements..."
http://itstiredinhere.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-anchor-button-bad-for-accessibility.html

+08: USABILITY.

Icon Classification: Resemblance, Reference, and Arbitrary Icons
By Jakob Nielsen.
"The tighter the mapping between icons and the thing they represent,
the easier they are to understand, but standardization can also make
an icon easy."
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/classifying-icons/

[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.]