[webdev] Web Design Update: February 12, 2015

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 13, Issue 33, February 12, 2015.

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

++ISSUE 33 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: EVENTS.
05: HTML5.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: MISCELLANEOUS.
08: TYPOGRAPHY.
09: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Math is Hard. People with Disabilities Matter
By Sarah Horton.
"When I first started advocating for web accessibility in design and
development projects I was drawn to the argument that accessibility
wasn't about people with disabilities, but rather about people, and
that designing to meet the needs of people with disabilities would
improve things for everyone..."
https://medium.com/@gradualclearing/math-is-hard-people-with-disabilities-matter-a393812d2927#45ef

Why Do We Need WCAG Level AAA?
By Luke McGrath.
"My philosophy for complying with WCAG is always the same - aim for
Level AA plus all Level AAA guidelines you can reasonably meet.
Really, claiming a certain level is meaningless. What matters is your
website is the best it can be for all your users..."
https://www.wuhcag.com/wcag-level-aaa/

Keyboard Accessibility with the Space Bar
By Ted Drake.
"Keyboard accessibility is critical for your users that depend on
voice recognition, onscreen keyboards, screen readers, ergonomic
accessories, and your power users that prefer to avoid grabbing the
mouse for every task. Most people test to make sure every interactive
element can receive focus via the tab key and that buttons and links
work with the enter key. We've gotten pretty good at making sure links
have href attributes and using role='button' on our pseudo-buttons..."
http://www.last-child.com/keyboard-accessibility-with-the-space-bar/

Mobile Application and Web Accessibility
By Tim Lohman.
"Smartphone, tablet and other mobile device usage has soared, but the
standards to make mobile apps accessible are lagging behind..."
http://www.accessiq.org/news/features/2015/02/mobile-application-and-web-accessibility

Mobile Accessibility - How WCAG 2.0 and Other W3C-WAI Guidelines Apply to Mobile
By Kim Patch, Jeanne Spellman, and Kathy Wahlbin Editors
"This document, 'Mobile Accessibility: How WCAG 2.0 and Other W3C-WAI
Guidelines Apply to Mobile' describes how the Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 [WCAG20] and its principles,
guidelines, and success criteria can be applied to mobile web content,
mobile web apps, native apps, and hybrid apps using web components
inside native apps. It provides informative guidance, but does not set
requirements. It also highlights the relevance of the User Agent
Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 [UAAG20] in the mobile context. This
document is intended to become a Working Group Note and is part of a
series of technical and educational documents published by the W3C Web
Accessibility Initiative (WAI)..."
http://w3c.github.io/Mobile-A11y-TF-Note/

Making Real Progress in Digital Accessibility in Higher Education
By David Sloan.
"We were delighted to see the University of Colorado at Boulder
recently announce the appointment of a Chief Digital Accessibility
Officer, and also announce recruitment for an IT Accessibility
Manager. The TPG UX team has been working with CU-Boulder for the past
few months to help them create a roadmap and strategy towards a
culture and practice of excellence in digital accessibility, and we're
really excited to see their thoughtfulness, enthusiasm and
determination in taking such a progressive approach, documented on
their Accessible Technology web site..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2015/02/making-progress-in-digital-accessibility-in-higher-education/

Is Accessibility a Supply or Demand Issue?
By Mike Paciello.
"Jim Tobias has me thinking....Is the 508 Refresh delay a Supply
(Industry) or a Demand (Government) issue? For years I've been
advocating for economic stimulus and price subsidies - Federal/State
sponsored rebates, grants, and refundable credits. Long term
investment in the underlying technology, open source systems,
applications and architecture to improve cost structure thereby
generating organic market competition..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2015/02/is-accessibility-a-supply-or-demand-issue/

Captioning Videos in Facebook
By Facebook.
"You can include captions with your video by uploading a SubRip (.srt)
file with it. To add captions in other languages, you can edit your
video and upload an additional SubRip file for each new language. Each
SubRip file must be saved using the format.."
https://www.facebook.com/help/261764017354370


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Easy Textures with CSS Masks
By Jeremy Frank.
"...There are a few different ways to achieve this effect in today's
browsers, from CSS background-clip and mask-image, to SVG <clippath>,
<pattern> and <mask>, and even canvas. Each have their own varying
levels of support and implementation peculiarities; however, one of
these rises above the rest in terms of its ease of implementation and
flexibility of use..."
http://viget.com/inspire/easy-textures-with-css-masks

Gradient List Bullets
By Eric A. Meyer.
"CSS gradients are kind of fun. I know, they're a little clumsy at
first, but I've found that with just a little practice, you can
hand-author them without more than a brief refresher course on exactly
how to structure the first part. At least for me, as long as I can get
the setup right, the color stops are a breeze..."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/02/09/gradient-list-bullets/

Why I Don't Use Compass Anymore
Hugo Giraudel.
"Yet, about a year ago or so, I stopped using Compass altogether. I
removed it from our project at work. I removed it from my own site. I
removed it from most of my side projects. So what happened? How could
I move from "Compass is the best" to "I don't need it anymore"? I
think I just got better and more confident with Sass, to a point where
Compass did not bring much to the table anymore. At least, it was not
enough to be worth including it in a project, especially given that it
slows Ruby Sass, already quite slow in itself..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/dont-use-compass-anymore/


+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Choosing Your Usability Tests and Participants
By Jerry Cao.
"...Once your goals are clear, you're ready to hone your test planning
to meet those specific goals..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/choosing-usability-tests-participants/

Getting to Know Your Data Types
By Jeff Sauro.
"... In practice, we've found that once you identify your data as
quantitative, you need to know mainly whether you're working with
continuous or discrete binary data to determine the best statistical
test and method for finding the sample size. So while it's good to
understand how data can get classified, especially when having
discussions with other numerically minded stakeholders, don't get too
caught up in the measurement classifications. Make sure that more
effort is spent on doing something about the data you collect than on
just classifying it..."
http://www.measuringu.com/blog/data-types.php


+05: EVENTS.

Usability Week San Diego
February 23-27, 2015.
San Diego, California, U.S.A.
http://www.nngroup.com/training/san-diego/

Usability Week Washington, DC
March 15-20, 2015.
Washington, DC, U.S.A.
http://www.nngroup.com/training/DC/

Usability Week San Francisco
April 18-24, 2015.
http://www.nngroup.com/training/san-francisco/
San Francisco, California, U.S.A.

Usability Week London
May 16-22, 2015.
London, England, United Kingdom
http://www.nngroup.com/training/london/


+05: HTML5.

HTML5 Canvas Sub DOM
By Steve Faulkner.
"All modern browser implement the HTML5 specification's canvas element
fallback concept. This means that the content inside a canvas elements
start and end tags is exposed to assistive technology users even when
the browser supports canvas. It also means that any interactive
elements, inside a canvas elements start and end tags such as links or
form controls will be included in a documents default tab order even
when the browser supports canvas..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2015/02/html5-canvas-sub-dom/

Flipboard - React Canvas Accessibility
By Steve Faulkner.
"Flipboard announced yesterday that they are using HTML5 canvas to
improve performance on mobile devices. This has accessibility
ramifications..."
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2015/02/flipboard-react-canvas-accessibility/

HTML Plan
By Sam Ruby, Paul Cotton, Philippe Le Hegaret, and Robin Berjon.
"...the time has come to reorganise the HTML WG's operation in the
manner most conducive to improving the Web. The core ideas behind this
reorganisation were published in the 'After5' plan, much of which has
already been deployed..."
http://darobin.github.io/after5/html-plan.html


+06: JAVASCRIPT.

Variables and Scoping in ECMAScript 6
By Axel Rauschmayer.
"This blog post examines how variables and scoping are handled in
ECMAScript 6..."
http://www.2ality.com/2015/02/es6-scoping.html


+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

Why You Need to Know About Online Accessibility with Dennis Lembree
By Nicole Krug.
"Every once in a while a story surfaces involving a company that is
forced to pay out big bucks because their website isn't accessible to
people with disabilities. People shake their heads and say 'bad
company,' but may not actually understand what online accessibility is
and what they need to do to make their own websites more accessible.
To remedy that, I asked online accessibility expert, Dennis Lembree,
to be a guest and talk about what it means to be accessible..."
http://sociallight.net/online-accessibility-dennis-lembree/

Experience Development pt. 1: Universal Access with Sarah Horton and
Whitney Quesenbery
By Tim Wright.
"This week we kick off the start of a new series entitled Experience
Development where we look at the coding side of UX. This week's topic
is: Universal Access. We sit down with the co-authors of Rosenfeld
Media's A Web for Everyone, Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery to
talk about digital accessibility..."
http://www.freshtilledsoil.com/experience-dev-universal-access/

Why do We Need PDFs?
By Tom Johnson.
"I've never been a fan of PDFs, but PDF output is usually a
requirement someone invariably brings up for documentation. In some
cases, often for unstated reasons, users will ask for a PDF, and
product managers expect technical writers to deliver one.."
http://idratherbewriting.com/2015/02/05/why-do-we-need-pdfs/


+08: TYPOGRAPHY.

Windows Substitutes Helvetica for Arial
By Jonathan Snook.
"I just ran into this issue today and honestly a little surprised I
haven't run into it before..."
http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/windows-subs-helvetica-arial


+09: USABILITY.

Radical Redesign or Incremental Change?
By Hoa Loranger.
"Before you throw out the old and bring in the new, make sure you have
solid evidence that doing so is necessary to achieve user-centered
goals..."
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/radical-incremental-redesign/

Improve Validation Errors with Adaptive Messages
By Jamie Appleseed.
"Form validation errors are inevitable. Yes, they can (and should) be
minimized, but validation errors won't ever be eliminated - they are a
natural part of complex forms and user's data input. The key question
then is how to make it easy for the user to recover from form
errors..."
http://baymard.com/blog/adaptive-validation-error-messages

Does Agile Methodology Lead to Poor Interface Design?
By Marcus Lillington.
"There has been a lot of finger pointing at frameworks such as
Bootstrap for an apparent depreciation in design standards lately.
But, I think that Agile methodologies have something to answer for as
well..."
http://headscape.co.uk/design/agile-methodology-design/


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+10: 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.


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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.]