+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 10, Issue 31, January 24, 2013. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 31 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: COLOR. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 12: TYPOGRAPHY. 13: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility Priority Tool By Roger Hudson. "The Accessibility Priority Tool is a suggested mechanism for helping web content developers and organisations identify and correct issues that could reduce the ability of some people to access web content..." http://usability.com.au/2013/01/accessibility-priority-tool/ MYTH - Accessibility is Blind People By A11Y Project. "Accessibility is often viewed often viewed as making your site work on a screen readers. In reality, web accessibility is a subset of UX focused on making your websites usable by the widest range of people possible, including those who have disabilities..." http://a11yproject.com/posts/myth-accessibility-is-blind-people/ Quick Test - Navigate Using Just Your Keyboard By A11Y Project. "One quick way that you can check your accessibility is to navigate through the site using nothing but your keyboard... http://a11yproject.com/posts/navigate-using-just-your-keyboard/ Accessibility - Where are we now Mr Bowie? By Leonie Watson. "Dear David Bowie, You may be one of my music Heroes, but your new website isn't so much Rock n Roll Suicide as inclusive design murder. If the Pretty Things Are Going To Hell, your website is leading the way..." http://www.nomensa.com/blog/2013/accessibility-where-are-we-now-mr-bowie/ Writing Accessibility Into A Design Application By Duane OBrien. "... I guess there were two lessons really. The first is that we were a little backwards on our thinking. We were saying 'It's a visual design tool, therefore no blind users' when we probably should have been saying 'Users could be blind, how can we make this design tool useful to them.' And the second is if we'd been thinking that way all along, we wouldn't have needed to try and bolt the work on at the end..." http://duaneobrien.com/blobs/2013/01/23/writing-accessibility-into-a-design-application/ Cool URLs Don't Change By John Foliot. "...Christian was looking for some of the older resources we had written on the topic of AccessKeys....at least the four articles that Chris was looking for have a new and hopefully more permanent home..." http://john.foliot.ca/cool-urls-dont-change/ Wireless Device Use by People with Disabilities By Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for Wireless Technologies. "This SUNspot addresses the following questions related to use and usability of wireless technology by people with all types of disabilities. The rate of ownership of wireless devices such as cellphones, smartphones and tablets by people with any type of disability. The types of devices that people with disabilities own..." http://www.wirelessrerc.org/content/publications/sunspot-volume-2013-1-wireless-device-use-people-disabilities Mobile Accessibility Survey By Kelly Ford. "If you have a disability, are a mobile user and have 5 minutes to spare please take a moment to fill out this online survey on mobile accessibility hosted by the The Paciello Group (TPG)..." http://blog.kellyford.org/paciello-group-conducting-survey-on-mobile-accessibility/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Cascading and Inheritance Level 3 Hakon Wium Lie, et al. editors. "This CSS module describes how to collate style rules and assign values to all properties on all elements. By way of cascading and inheritance, values are propagated for all properties on all elements. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc... http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css3-cascade/ Quick Tip - Never Use maximum-scale=1.0 By A11Y Project. "Using the viewport meta tag the wrong way can hinder users with visual problems to use your website. By setting maximum-scale=1.0, you are disabling the functionality to use pinch zoom on mobile devices, and forcing users to view your page a certain way..." http://a11yproject.com/posts/never-use-maximum-scale/ How To Hide Content By A11Y Project. "Developers commonly use display: none to hide content on the page. Unfortunately, this simple and common action is a bit problematic for screen readers..." http://a11yproject.com/posts/how-to-hide-content/ Understanding the CSS Clip Property By Hugo Giraudel. "Learn about the underused and often misunderstood CSS clip property and understand how to apply it for some nifty effects." http://tympanus.net/codrops/2013/01/16/understanding-the-css-clip-property/ On the Styling of Forms By Bruce Lawson. "The earliest incarnation of the specification that we now call HTML5 was an extension of HTML forms, called Web Forms 2.0 Working Draft 5 February 2004 almost nine years ago!). It contained lots of cool stuff, like , the required attribute that are in the spec today, and cool stuff that never made it to the final spec like , and repeating templates subsequently removed in 2010)..." http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2013/on-the-styling-of-forms/ What No One Told You About Z-Index By Philip Walton. "The problem with z-index is that very few people understand how it really works. It's not complicated, but it if you've never taken the time to read its specification, there are almost certainly crucial aspects that you're completely unaware of. Don't believe me? Well, see if you can solve this problem:" http://philipwalton.com/articles/what-no-one-told-you-about-z-index/ +03: COLOR. Quick Test - Check Contrast with Your Mobile Device By A11Y Project. "Having good contrast and readability are an important part of creating an accessible website. One trick you can do to test whether or not your contrast is sufficient enough is by using your phone or mobile device." http://a11yproject.com/posts/check-contrast-with-mobile-device/ +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Are Personas Still Relevant to UX Strategy? By Paul Bryan. "There have been some who have proclaimed the impending demise of personas as a UX design approach since shortly after their introduction. While the optimal approach to creating and employing personas is still evolving-thanks to more useful data becoming available to design teams and new project-management methods-their usefulness has not yet diminished. If anything, personas have become even more useful because they put a human face on aggregated data and foster a user-centered design approach even within the context of efficiency-driven development processes..." http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/01/are-personas-still-relevant-to-ux-strategy.php +05: EVENTS. W3Conf 2013 February 21-22, 2013. San Francisco, California, U.S.A. http://www.w3.org/conf/ ConveyUX March 4-6, 2013. Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. http://conveyux.com/ MAX 2013 May 4-8, 2013. Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. http://max.adobe.com/ Mobilism 2013 May 16-17, 2013. Amsterdam, Netherlands http://mobilism.nl/2013 WebVisions May 22-24, 2013. Portland, Oregon, U.S.A http://www.webvisionsevent.com/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Putting IA Theory into Practice By Nathaniel Davis. "Many practitioners of information architecture have come to understand the fundamentals of creating an information architecture through direct training, text books about practical methods, or real-world experience. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find documentation on the formal theory of information architecture." http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/01/putting-ia-theory-into-practice.php +07: JAVASCRIPT. Introduction to Functions in JavaScript By Jake Bresnehan. "The aim of this post is to introduce people quickly into the wonderful world of JavaScript functions. Functions are one of the core aspects in JavaScript." http://web-design-weekly.com/2013/01/20/introduction-to-functions-in-javascript/ An Introduction to JavaScript Debugging By Phil Ballard. "Novice programmers, or those migrating from other languages, usually find the JavaScript language fairly accessible, with plenty of available help and advice on how to get started developing programs. Unfortunately, the many articles and tutorials on coding rarely give much advice on what to do when code doesn't run correctly..." http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2012740 +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Making the Business Case for the Web By Gerry McGovern. "What do web professionals think is by far the most important principle when managing an online presence?..." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/making-business-case-web My Viewport Sizes By Adrian Roselli. " During the last rebuild of my site at least two years ago I started to track the viewport sizes of my visitors via Google Analytics. Since I don't care much about screen resolution (screen size), I don't bother to track it..." http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2013/01/my-viewport-sizes.html The Post-PSD Era By Brad Frost. "...Use what tools you're comfortable with, but know when those tools stop making sense. Play the tools in your toolkit to their respective strengths, and sort out a way to communicate your design ideas to clients without forcing them to envision what a fully-polished final printed out product could look like. Perhaps this post should have been named Death to the Waterfall." http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/post/the-post-psd-era/ +09: NAVIGATION. Quick Tip - ARIA Landmark Roles By A11Y Project. "ARIA Landmark Roles help assistive devices navigate your site. Important roles to be aware of include..." http://a11yproject.com/posts/aria-landmark-roles/ Organizing Mobile Navigation Based on Information-Seeking Behavior By Brent Jackson. "When opening an application, a user should be able to understand its functionality, see relevant content, and get to where they want to go. Applications that obscure navigation with the intent of focusing on content can make finding specific information difficult. On the other hand, skewing towards too much navigation can overwhelm the user. Mobile apps should balance navigation for users with different information needs..." http://jxnblk.tumblr.com/post/40693165132/organizing-mobile-navigation-based-on +10: PHP. Functional Programming in PHP By Lars Strojny. PHP has traditionally been a simple, procedural language that took a lot of inspiration from C and Perl. Both syntax wise and making sure function signatures are as convoluted as possible. PHP 5.0 introduced a proper object model but you know all of that already. PHP 5.3 introduced closures and PHP 5.4 improved closures very much (hint: $this is available per default). http://usrportage.de/archives/941-Functional-programming-in-PHP.html +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 2012 Into 2013 - Web Standards in Perspective By Chris Mills. "Chris Mills looks back at most exciting web standards developments of 2012, and looks ahead to what we can expect in 2013..." http://www.netmagazine.com/features/2012-2013-web-standards-perspective +12: TYPOGRAPHY. Can I Still Use Px? By Steven Bradley. "Moving from static to flexible layouts involves a move from absolute to relative measurements. That generally means giving up px in favor of ems for vertical measurements and % for horizontal measurements. A question that continues to get asked is whether or not it's ok to still use px here or there. The short answer is no..." http://www.vanseodesign.com/css/em-px/ +13: USABILITY. Auto-Forwarding Carousels and Accordions Annoy Users and Reduce Visibility By Jakob Nielsen. "The user's target was at the top of the page in 98-point font. But she failed to find it because the panel auto-forwarded instead of staying still." http://www.nngroup.com/articles/auto-forwarding/ Carousel Interaction Stats By Erik Runyon. "Carousels. That gem of a web feature that clients love, and many developers hate. One thing is certain, they are the darling of HigherEd..." http://weedygarden.net/2013/01/carousel-stats/ Carousels By Brad Frost. "...despite being so omnipresent, little is said about our splashy little auto-rotating frenemies. Let's fix that." http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/post/carousels/ Stop Misusing Select Menus By UX Movement. "A form has many user interface elements. If you don't know how to use them all properly, you could make filling out forms difficult for your users. One interface element that's commonly misused is the select menu..." http://uxmovement.com/forms/stop-misusing-select-menus/ App Store Meta Tags By Adrian A. Roselli. "...One of the most offensive experience I have when surfing a site on my mobile devices is being forced to click through an advertisement for the site's app in the iTunes store (even moreso when I am surfing on a non-iOS device)..." http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2013/01/app-store-meta-tags.html Internet Users Demand Less Interactivity By The Onion. "Tired of being bombarded with constant requests to share content on social media, bestow ratings, leave comments, and generally 'join in on the discussion,' the nation's Internet users demanded substantially less interactivity this week..." http://www.theonion.com/articles/internet-users-demand-less-interactivity,30920/ Mobile Sign Up Forms Must Die By Luke Wroblewski. "It's hard to get people to download your mobile application. But if they do, what greets them when they open it up for the first time? A step by step tour? A sign up form? Both might be missed opportunities to get people engaged and interested in your service. In fact, you might want to consider a gradual engagement approach instead. Here's why... " http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1678 Functional Beauty and User Experience By Catalina Butnaru. "Beauty is one of the oldest and most powerful concepts in human history-inspiring artists and lighting up cultural movements, philosophical debates, and, in modern times, curious scientific interest. Beauty is a desirable feature of the products we buy, with the power to shape consumer choices and preferences..." http://uxmag.com/articles/functional-beauty-and-user-experience [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +14: 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 Dreamweaver Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/dreamweaver.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 Flash Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/flash.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@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]