[webdev] Web Design Update: February 18, 2015

Wed Feb 18 06:20:31 CST 2015

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 13, Issue 34, February 18, 2015.

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

++ISSUE 34 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: NAVIGATION.
09: TYPOGRAPHY.
10: USABILITY.
11: XML.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Accessibility is Usability in Context of Disability
By Jan Eric Hellbusch.
"In the ALA article, information about different ways that people with
disabilities use the technology is presented superficially.
Accessibility requirements are translated into technical criteria and
the user (with a disability) is referred to more or less incidentally.
In my view, such a cutback of accessibility to a technical
consideration is inadequate for the following reasons.."
http://www.chemnitzer-14.de/accessibility-is-usability-in-context-of-disability/

Your User-Centered Design Isn't Usable If It Isn't Accessible
By Deque Systems.
"While usability addresses questions of quality experience and user
enjoyment, accessibility is about making sure everyone can understand,
navigate and interact with websites and tools. In the end, no matter
how usable your web design is, if it's not accessible for users then
it's also not usable..."
http://www.deque.com/blog/your-user-centered-design-isnt-usable-isnt-accessible/

How Flipboard Chose Form Over Function For Their Web Version
By Faruk Ates.
"...I am dismayed that Accessibility was treated not even as a mere
afterthought, but as something worth sacrificing completely for the
sake of flashiness. I am dismayed that Flipboard's leadership chose
fancy but ultimately irrelevant animations over function, over
purpose. And I am dismayed that people like John Gruber now think this
solution by Flipboard is somehow 'a scathing condemnation of the
DOM/CSS web standards stack..."
http://farukat.es/journal/2015/02/708-how-flipboard-chose-form-over-function-their-web-version

Mobile Accessibility - Moving With the Times
By Chris Bailey.
"The popularity of mobile technologies has grown tremendously over the
past few years, and many of us now conduct a large proportion of our
web browsing on mobile devices. Apps allow you to do pretty much
anything from your smartphone these days...
http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=1095

Layout Tables
By Dennis Lembree.
It's 2015, so hopefully web developers know that table elements should
not be used for layout. There are many reasons why CSS for layout is
better but at the core, HTML tables are data tables; they've always
been meant for data.
http://www.webaxe.org/layout-tables/

Open Air and Heroes of Accessibility Winners
By Molly E. Holzschlag.
"Yesterday, the wonderful Knowbility - the Accessibility community's
non-profit champions of inclusive technology - held their Open Air
competition and announced several major awards related to achievements
in the field. This is a quickly gathered list of the honorees, with
some personal thoughts to recognize them individually..."
http://www.molly.com/2015/02/12/open-air-and-heroes-of-accessibility-winners/

508 Refresh May Have Passed Final Hurdle
By John Eric Brandt.
"The following was announced by a member of the US Access Board on
Saturday, February 14, 2015..."
http://jebswebs.net/blog/2015/02/508-refresh-may-passsed-final-hurdle/

NAD Sues Harvard and MIT for Discrimination in Public Online Content
By National Association of the Deaf.
"The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) and four deaf and hard of
hearing individuals filed two federal class action lawsuits today
against Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), charging that the schools discriminate against deaf
and hard of hearing people by failing to caption the vast and varied
array of online content they make available to the general public,
including massive open online courses (MOOCs)..."
http://nad.org/news/2015/2/nad-sues-harvard-and-mit-discrimination-public-online-content

Complaint Against Harvard:
http://ia601503.us.archive.org/6/items/gov.uscourts.mad.167459/gov.uscourts.mad.167459.1.0.pdf

Complaint Against MIT:
http://ia801500.us.archive.org/17/items/gov.uscourts.mad.167460/gov.uscourts.mad.167460.1.0.pdf

Harvard and MIT Face Lawsuit for Lack of Online Captioning
By Dian Schaffhauser.
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2015/02/12/harvard-and-mit-face-lawsuit-for-lack-of-online-captioning.aspx

Harvard and M.I.T. Are Sued Over Failing to Caption Online Courses
By Tamar Lewin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/education/harvard-and-mit-sued-over-failing-to-caption-online-courses.html

Deaf Advocates Sue Harvard, MIT For Better Webcast Captions
By Kurt Orzeck.
http://www.law360.com/articles/621255/deaf-advocates-sue-harvard-mit-for-better-webcast-captions

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Looking at the Next Generation of CSS with Jen Simmons
By Paul Boag.
"This week on the Boagworld Show we talk about advanced CSS techniques
with Jen Simmons..."
https://boagworld.com/season/11/episode/1105/

+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Personas Make Users Memorable for Product Team Members
By Aurora Bedford.
"When based on user research, personas support user-centered design
throughout a project's lifecycle by making characteristics of key user
segments more salient..."
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/persona/

+04: EVENTS.

Squares
March 25-27, 2015.
Grapevine, Texas, U.S.A.
http://squaresconference.com/

UXPA 2015
June 22, 2015.
San Diego, California, U.S.A.
http://uxpa.org/event/uxpa-2015

Drupal Camp
October 16, 2015.
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A.
http://drupalcampatlanta.com/

Ampersand
November 13, 2015.
Brighton, England, United Kingdom
http://2015.ampersandconf.com/

World Usability Day
November 13, 2015.
Everywhere
http://www.worldusabilityday.org/

+05: HTML5.

HTML5 Attribute Change Reference for Web Developers
By Curtis Dicken.
"With each iteration of HTML you would expect to see new attributes
introduced. Well, HTML5 is no exception. In all there are over 40
attributes that have been added in HTML5, so far..."
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/html5/markup/html5-attribute-change-reference-for-web-developers_updated.html

+06: JAVASCRIPT.

The Incredible Accessible Modal Window, Version 3
By Greg Kraus.
"I've made a few minor updates to the Incredible Accessible Modal Window..."
http://accessibility.oit.ncsu.edu/blog/2015/02/13/the-incredible-accessible-modal-window-version-3/

Advanced ARIA Tip #2: Accessible Modal Dialogs
By Marco Zehe.
"One question that came up more and more in recent months is how to
create an accessible modal dialog with WAI-ARIA. So without further
ado, here's my take on the subject.."
https://www.marcozehe.de/2015/02/05/advanced-aria-tip-2-accessible-modal-dialogs/

Angular.js Accessibility - Deleting a Todo with the Keyboard
By Dylan Barrell.
"This is the fifth part of the blog series on angular.js
accessibility. In a prior post, we published a list of accessibility
issues in the Angular.js TodoMVC application. One of the issues is
that the delete button is not keyboard accessible and does not have an
accessible name. The code changes for this blog post are in my fork of
the TodoMVC repository..."
http://unobfuscated.blogspot.com/2015/02/angularjs-accessibility-deleting-todo.html

Angular.js Accessibility - Name, Role, State and Value
By Dylan Barrell.
"This is the sixth part of the blog series on angular.js
accessibility. In a prior post, we published a list of accessibility
issues in the Angular.js TodoMVC application. With the exception of
the color contrast and visual focus styling issues, the remainder of
the accessibility issues have to do with missing labels, missing role
information, missing accessible name information (or association) and
missing state information. These issues are not particularly unique to
Angular.js, but lets fix them anyway..."
http://unobfuscated.blogspot.com/2015/02/angularjs-accessibility-name-role-state.html

Angular.js Accessibility - Knocking Off My TodoMVCs, Accessibly
By Dylan Barrell.
"This is the final part of the blog series on making the TodoMVC
Angular.js application accessible..."
http://unobfuscated.blogspot.com/2015/02/angularjs-accessibility-knocking-off-my.html

Classes in ECMAScript 6 (Final Semantics)
By Axel Rauschmayer.
"Recently, TC39 decided on the final semantics of classes in
ECMAScript 6 [2]. This blog post explains how their final incarnation
works. The most significant recent changes were related to how
subclassing is handled..."
http://www.2ality.com/2015/02/es6-classes-final.html

+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

Flipboard and the 'Mobile Web' Dream...
By Christian Heilmann.
"According to the luminaries of the web design world, the 'mobile web'
doesn't exist. Stephen Hay said it, Smashing Magazine said so and
Jeremy Keith amongst many others. Except, it does. Not as a technical
reality, but as a dream of marketing and overly excited managers who
believe in magical powers of their engineers...
http://christianheilmann.com/2015/02/15/flipboard-and-the-mobile-web-dream/

Stop Calling It Responsive Design - It's Web Design
By Steven Bradley.
"If I ask what is responsive design what do you think about? Relative
measurements like % and em over absolute measurements like px? Do you
think of breakpoints? High resolution images, the picture element, and
srcset? Maybe you think about deliverables in the browser or site
performance on mobile devices..."
http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/responsive-design-is-web-design/

+08: NAVIGATION.

We Need a Measure for Customer Effort
By Gerry McGovern.
"What the text of a particular link means to someone will be
influenced by the task they are trying to complete..."
http://gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/we-need-measure-customer-effort

+09: TYPOGRAPHY.

Effective Web Typography - Rules, Techniques and Responsive Design
By Sam Norton.
"When it comes to content, we need to talk about web typography.
Looking at modern web design trends, having responsive typography is a
big factor every web designer and web developer shouldn't miss. Here,
we will discuss creating responsive web typography and factors you
need to know about it..."
http://designmodo.com/web-typography/

+10: USABILITY.

I am the Fold
By Iestyn Williams.
"An experiment to show how designing for The Fold can be treacherous.
Each line below is from a random sampling of past-visitors' viewport
heights. Take care when making assumptions about people's screen sizes
on the web."
http://www.iamthefold.com/

Designing For The Elderly - Ways Older People Use Digital Technology Differently
By Ollie Campbell.
"...By 2030, around 19% of people in the US will be over 65. Doesn't
sound like a lot? Well it happens to be about the same number of
people in the US who own an iPhone today. Which of these two groups do
you think Silicon Valley spends more time thinking about?..."
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/02/05/designing-digital-technology-for-the-elderly/

+11: XML.

XML and the Web: Drifting Farther Apart?
By Tom Johnson.
"...In this post, I want to dig a bit into XML and the web..."
http://idratherbewriting.com/2015/02/13/xml-and-the-web-drifting-farther-apart/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+12: 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.]