[webdev] Web Design Update: November 29, 2014

Laura Carlson lcarlson at d.umn.edu
Sat Nov 29 09:39:21 CST 2014 

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 13, Issue 22, November 29, 2014.

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

++ISSUE 22 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: HTML5.
07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
08: JAVASCRIPT.
09: MISCELLANEOUS.
10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
11: TYPOGRAPHY.
12: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Heading Structure - Accessibility for Designers
By Access iQ.
"One useful way to help people with disabilities is to ensure that
headings are organised into a logical, linear hierarchy..."
http://www.accessiq.org/create/content/heading-structure-accessibility-for-designers

Cognitive Accessibility User Research
W3C Editor's Draft 29 November 2014
Lisa Seeman and Michael Cooper, editors.
"This document provides background research about user groups with
cognitive disabilities and the challenges that they face when using
Web technologies. We aim to identify and describe the current
situation so that, at a later stage, we will be able to contrast it to
what we want to happen. This later work will include identifying gaps
and potentials strategies for improving accessibility, suggesting
authoring techniques and creating a road-map for improving
accessibility for people with learning disabilities and cognitive
disabilities..."
https://rawgit.com/w3c/wcag/coga-gap-analysis-2014-fpwd/coga/user-research.html

Web Accessibility and Dyslexia
By Rakesh Paladugula.
"Dyslexia is a language processing disorder or a learning difficulty.
It is rather a processing and learning difficulty than a
disability..."
http://www.maxability.co.in/2014/11/web-accessibility-dyslexia/

Justice Department Further Delays Website Regulations
By Minh Vu and Kristina Launey.
"The Justice Department (DOJ) just officially announced in the federal
government's Unified Regulatory Agenda that it is again pushing back
the target date for publishing its proposed website regulations for
state/local governments and public accommodations to December 2014 and
June 2015, respectively..."
http://www.adatitleiii.com/2014/11/justice-department-further-delays-website-regulations/

The ALTernative Debate
By John Eric Brandt.
"...I don't know if the new Google service will ever come to fruition,
but like so many other things in the Googleverse, it is something we
just will have to wait to see."
http://jebswebs.net/blog/2014/11/alternative-debate/

Accessible Google Maps with Search Field
By Dylan Barrell.
"After a question by Dylan Nicholson, I decided to update the
accessible google maps example to include a search field. I did not
make any specific accessibility changes to the example, I simply
wanted to allow Dylan to answer his question as to whether the search
is usable for someone using a screen reader..."
http://unobfuscated.blogspot.com/2014/11/accessible-google-maps-with-search-field.html

How I Hear
By Andrew Walker.
Andrew Walker a developer at Made by Many made a prototype to demo his
hearing loss. Press play on the clip and then toggle to configure
severity.
http://howihear.herokuapp.com/


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

CSS and Specificity
By Jens Meiert.
"From using graphs for better understanding to confirming fundamentals
for saner coding."
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20141127/css-and-specificity/

Write CSS3 without Worrying about Prefixes
By James Steinbach.
"...CSS3 properties are awesome and you do not need to waste time
writing prefixes for them. Whether a mixin library or a postprocessing
tool fits your workflow better, you can automate this part of your
coding and get more done."
http://www.sitepoint.com/write-css3-without-worrying-prefixes/

Fix Your Flexbox Web Site
By Karl Dubost.
"Web compatibility issues takes many forms. Some are really hard to
solve and there are sound business reasons behind them. On the other
hand, some Web compatibility issues are really easy to fix with the
benefits of allowing more potential market shares for the Web site.
CSS Flexbox is one of those. I have written about it in the past.
Let's make another practical demonstration on how to fix some of the
flexbox issues..."
http://www.otsukare.info/2014/11/26/howto-fix-flexbox-css


+03: COLOR.

Colour Blindness Accessibility Community Group
By W3C.
"The aim of our project is to build new HTML5 specifications that can
be used later by developers who wish to create more accessible
websites for colour-blind people. The goal is that the specifications,
that we are going to suggest, will one day become a standard of
HTML5."
http://www.w3.org/community/colourblindness/

Colour and Colour Contrast - Accessibility for Designers
By Access iQ.
"Colour and colour contrast are some of the easier accessibility
requirements to comply with, as elements have numeric targets that are
easier to measure against..."
http://www.accessiq.org/create/content/colour-and-colour-contrast-accessibility-for-designers


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Better User Research Through Surveys
By Chris Gray.
"...Surveys are increasingly becoming a more accepted tool for UX
practitioners. Creating a great survey is like designing a great user
experience-they are a waste of time and money if the audience, or
user, is not at the centre of the process. Designing for your user
leads to the gathering of more useful and reliable information..."
http://uxmastery.com/better-user-research-through-surveys/

Easy Internet Explorer Testing with RemoteIE
By Craig Buckler.
"...Microsoft has created a faster, slicker option. RemoteIE allows
you to run the latest version of Internet Explorer from the cloud on
Windows, Mac, iOS, or Android without having to install or manage a
virtual machine. The free service is currently in beta but it works
and is technically stunning..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/easy-internet-explorer-testing-remoteie/


+05: EVENTS.

Web Accessibility Training
April 14-15, 2015.
Logan, Utah, U.S.A.
http://webaim.org/training/

SmashingConf LA
April 14-15, 2015.
Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
http://smashingconf.com/la-2015/


+06: HTML5.

10 Typical HTML Interview Exercises
By Aurelio De Rosa.
"...In this article I've discussed ten potential interview questions
that you can use to test your knowledge of HTML. The questions you may
be asked in your next interview may include one or more of these..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/10-typical-html-interview-exercises/

Accessibility of Web Components
By Marcy Sutton.
"A Marklar walks into a Marklar. Marklar asks the marklar, 'do you
have any Marklar?' The Marklar shakes his Marklar and says 'No, we
only have Marklar'..."
http://marcysutton.github.io/accessibility-of-web-components/slides.html

Terms Defined in the W3C HTML5 Recommendation
By Webplatform.org.
"This document contains the full list of documents being managed as
'Web Platform Specs', each with a minimal abstract and links to their
variants. "
https://specs.webplatform.org/html-aria/webspecs/master/examples/html5definitions.html


+07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

How to Plan Site Architecture, The Right Way
By Ryan Gittings.
"If making a website is like building a house, then planning the
content is like laying the foundations. You may end up with a
beautiful, desirable house in the short term, but if you've cut
corners, or failed to plan your foundations properly, your building is
at risk of falling down. And so it is with your website. If you don't
spend time planning how your audience will interact with your content
in the most intuitive possible way, you're not going to benefit from
the best possible sales or conversions. Worse still, if you get it
really wrong, you could alienate a large portion of your audience..."
http://www.onextrapixel.com/2014/11/27/how-to-plan-site-architecture-the-right-way/


+08: JAVASCRIPT.

ARIA-haspopup (property)
By Rakesh Paladugula.
"ARIA-haspopup is used to indicate the presence of submenus and
context menus on the web page. In general aria-haspopup property is
used with links and buttons. Though it sounds like haspopup need to be
used for dialog boxes, popup windows, ARIA 1.0 specification
recommends use of aria-haspopup property for submenus and context
menus. Different assistive technologies react differently with the use
of aria-haspopup property..."
http://www.maxability.co.in/2014/11/aria-haspopup-property/

Using the aria-controls Attribute
By Leone Watson.
"There are a handful of ARIA1.0 attributes that can be used to
indicate relationships between elements, when those relationships
can't be ascertained easily from the DOM. One such attribute is
aria-controls..."
http://tink.co.uk/2014/11/using-the-aria-controls-attribute/

Ridiculously Easy Trick for Keyboard Accessibility
By Karl Groves.
"One of the more frustrating things about accessibility is how
ridiculously easy most things are to do. While most developers tend to
see accessibility as nebulous and time consuming, the truth is some of
the most impactful issues are actually easy to deal with..."
http://www.karlgroves.com/2014/11/24/ridiculously-easy-trick-for-keyboard-accessibility/

Using ngAria: The Accessibility Module in Angular 1.3
By Marcy Sutton.
"...A new feature released in Angular 1.3.0 is the accessibility
module, ngAria. As someone involved in delivering this
community-driven effort, I thought it might be helpful to introduce
ngAria, a module which can improve the user experience for many people
with disabilities."
http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2014/11/using-ngaria.html

Understanding ECMAScript 6
By Nicholas C Zakas.
Online book: "The JavaScript core language features are defined in a
standard called ECMA-262. The language defined in this standard is
called ECMAScript, of which the JavaScript in the browser and Node.js
environments are a superset. While browsers and Node.js may add more
capabilities through additional objects and methods, the core of the
language remains as defined in ECMAScript, which is why the ongoing
development of ECMA-262 is vital to the success of JavaScript as a
whole..."
https://leanpub.com/understandinges6/read


+09: MISCELLANEOUS.

Device Detection vs Responsive Web Design
By Bruce Lawson.
"..I'd like to see proper A/B testing: a well-made responsive version
of a site versus its 'm-dot' equivalent, redirected from its canonical
URL and assembled after a device look-up, across a variety of devices
and network conditions. If we're going to argue, it might as well be
about data."
http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2014/device-detection-responsive-web-design/

+10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

WHATWG/W3C Collaboration
By Sam Ruby.
"I've been having fun working on the URL Living Standard. The first
change I landed was to convert the spec from Anolis to Bikeshed.
Here's the before and after after. And just for fun, here is the
beginning on 2014 and beginning of 2013. The point being that
arbitrary snapshots of living standards do exist."
http://intertwingly.net/blog/2014/11/20/WHATWG-W3C-Collaboration


+11: TYPOGRAPHY.

Typographer's Typefaces
By Jamie Clarke.
"The 25 most admired typefaces by typographers, type designers and letterers."
http://blog.8faces.com/post/103548341771/typographers-typefaces


+12: USABILITY.

The 'Liking' Principle in User Interface Design
By Jennifer Cardello.
"People prefer to say 'yes' to individuals and organizations they know
and like. Same goes for websites and other user interfaces."
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/liking-principle-ui-design/

User Involvement for User Adoption: An Intranet Strategy
By Amy Schade.
"Involving employees early and often in intranet design projects can
not only improve usability, but also encourage user adoption."
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/intranet-user-involvement/


[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

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.]

More information about the Webdev mailing list