+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 12, Issue 49, May 29, 2014. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 49 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: EVENTS. 05: HTML5. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: TYPOGRAPHY. 11: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. ARIA-describedby By Rakesh Paladugula. "ARIA-describedby property is used when the content provided by the HTML tags is not sufficient to explain complete information to the user..." http://www.maxability.co.in/2014/05/aria-describedby-property/ 10 Things Everyone Can Do to Improve Access to Media By Media Access Australia. "...we have compiled a list of tips that everyone can use to make someone's experience of media a little better. Accessibility is for all of us - it benefits everyone, and everyone can do their part." http://www.mediaaccess.org.au/latest_news/digital-technology/global-accessibility-awareness-day-10-things-everyone-can-do-to-improve-access-to-media Rely on CSS and Not Images of Text to Present Section Headings By Denis Boudreau. "Make sure section headings are set using the CSS font-face property and not images of text..." http://dboudreau.tumblr.com/post/86955003347/rely-on-css-and-not-images-of-text-to-present-section LSAC Agrees To Pay Over $9 Million To Settle Lawsuit Over Testing Accommodations And Commits To Substantial Injunctive Relief By Seyfarth Shaw. "...After two years of costly litigation, on May 20, 2014, the parties announced an agreement to resolve the matter and filed a proposed Consent Decree with the court. The Consent Decree includes a permanent injunction specifying a number of affirmative steps that LSAC must take to ensure the LSAT is accessible to persons with disabilities..." http://www.adatitleiii.com/2014/05/lsac-agrees-to-pay-over-9-million-to-settle-lawsuit-over-testing-accommodations-and-commits-to-substantial-injunctive-relief/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Getting to Know CSS Blend Modes By Shwetank Dixit. "CSS Blend Modes provide a way to specify how one layer will interact or 'blend' with the one underneath. Until now, this was the domain of photo editing applications, but now they are available on the web using CSS itself..." http://dev.opera.com/articles/getting-to-know-css-blend-modes/ HTML5 Forms - CSS By Craig Buckler. "In the second article of this three-part series about HTML5 forms, we're going to look at styling or - more specifically - the pseudo-class selectors you can use to target input fields in various states. If you haven't read it already, please refer to part one to ensure you understand the basic markup concepts..." http://www.sitepoint.com/html5-forms-css/ +03: DRUPAL. How to Create Your Own Drush Command By Daniel Sipos. "Drush is a command line tool built to assist you in working with Drupal from the terminal. It comes by default with a bunch of useful commands, such as downloading, enabling or even updating modules. But modules can define their own commands to have Drush perform operations using their code..." http://www.sitepoint.com/drupal-create-drush-command/ Light-Weight Solution to Provide Custom View Modes and Suggest Related Templates in Drupal 7 By Jeff Beeman. "When it comes to providing custom view modes for entities in Drupal, most developers turn immediately to Display Suite or Entity View Modes. Display Suite is very powerful, but I've found it to be far too "heavy" for most of my use cases. In this case, by "heavy" I mean that the module days way more than I need it to. It does a lot of things I simply don't want on my site. Entity view modes is a lighter-weight approach to supplying additional view modes, but I found that even it was cumbersome when it came to managing my view mode configuration in an easily-deployable way..." http://jeffbeeman.com/node/326 +04: EVENTS. AbilityNet Webinars AbilityNet provides "accessibility webinars (to) help make the web a more accessible place." http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/advice-info/webinars +05: HTML5. HTML5 Developer Conference Slides - Selfish Accessibility By Adrian Roselli. "Today I had the pleasure of speaking at the HTML5 Developer Conference in lovely San Francisco. I presented on accessibility and how it relates to you as a current and future user with my presentation Selfish Accessibility..." http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2014/05/html5-developer-conference-slides.html Sections and Articles are Not Generic Containers By Virginia DeBolt. "he proper use of section and article elements in HTML5 is one of the sticking points to good implementation. If you're teaching HTML5, or just learning about HTML5, here's a tip for you..." http://www.webteacher.ws/2014/05/26/sections-articles-generic-containers/ HTML5 Forms - The Markup By Craig Buckler. "This is the first in a three-part series about web forms. We'll cover the basic markup in this article before progressing to styling and the client-side JavaScript validation APIs. I recommend you read this even if you're already familiar with forms -- there are many new attributes and gotchas! HTML forms may be mundane but they're essential for the majority of web sites and apps. In HTML4, input fields were limited to.." http://www.sitepoint.com/html5-forms-markup/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. HTML Wireframes By Brad Frost. "or the first few years of my career, I didn't know that wireframes existed. It wasn't until I started working at a larger agency that I first encountered a strange new black-and-white InDesign world, where multiple rounds of 100+ page PDFs were generated and presented to clients..." http://bradfrostweb.com/blog/post/html-wireframes/ Exploring the Phase-Space of Information Architecture By Marsha Haverty. "I introduced the phase-space of information architecture, a mapping of the semantic neighborhoods created when we run through all the permutations of the two flavors of information: perceptual and linguistic...Here we will look in detail at the facets of each flavor of information. Now that we've detailed the facets of our stuff of design, let's situate ourselves in a design problem and visualize how we may engage the phase-space of information architecture to strategically turn the dials of perceptual and linguistic information..." http://praxicum.com/home/2014/5/12/exploring-the-phase-space-of-information-architecture-part-2 IA is the New (Old) UX By Elisabeth Hubert. "Information architecture relates to science as its models draw on insights and theories of cognition. And its models relate to art as they aim to create a meaningful experience." http://www.elisabethhubert.com/2014/05/ia-is-the-new-old-ux/ The Present and Future of Information Architecture By Timothy Jaeger. Interview with Peter Morville."We're in an era of service ecosystems. This means we must wrangle with the challenges of digital strategy and cross-channel user experience." https://medium.com/information-architecture/4fc07ac9fe7f +07: JAVASCRIPT. WTF-ARIA By Karl Groves. "...So on the topic of 'Use ARIA first' vs. 'Use ARIA last', neither is right. The right answer is to use ARIA whenever ARIA is the best tool for the task at hand. That might be for a progressive enhancement scenario when the user's browser doesn't support a specific feature, or to enhance accessibility under certain use cases, or to create an accessible widget that doesn't exist in native semantics. Blanket statements don't help, but constructive guidance does." http://www.karlgroves.com/2014/05/21/wtf-aria/ The Curious Case of JavaScript NaN By Ariya Hidayat. "NaN (meaning Not a Number) is a special value in JavaScript that denotes an undefined or unrepresentable value. However, it can also feel like it means 'Not a NaN' because NaN === NaN is false. Confused? Ariya lays it out..." http://ariya.ofilabs.com/2014/05/the-curious-case-of-javascript-nan.html Checking Whether a Value is an Integer in JavaScript By Axel Rauschmayer. "Integers lead an odd life in JavaScript. In the ECMAScript specification, they only exist conceptually: All numbers are always floating point and integers are ranges of numbers without decimal fractions (for details, consult 'Integers in JavaScript' in 'Speaking JavaScript'). In this blog post, I explain how to check whether a value is an integer..." http://www.2ality.com/2014/05/is-integer.html +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Live Stream - Global Accessibility Awareness Day - May 15, 2014 By Yahoo. "This is the live stream from the Global Accessibility Awareness Day event at Yahoo! in Santa Monica, CA. The purpose of the day is to get people talking, thinking and learning about digital accessibility and users with different disabilities. The event kicked off with a special introduction by Tommy Edison..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJNkvLGLPnk +09: NAVIGATION. WAI-ARIA Landmark Roles Cheatsheet By Nicolas Barrera. "In practice, WAI-ARIA gives us more attributes to assign to elements. There are two kinds of attributes, the role attribute and the aria-.* attributes ('.*' meaning that what follows 'aria-' is variable).." http://mcdlr.com/wai-aria-cheatsheet/ Mobile Navigation Menus and Great User Experience By Page Laubheimer. "But here's the thing: not nearly as many people as you might think understand the nav burger convention." http://www.newfangled.com/user_experience_mobile_menus_and_nav_burgers SEO Study - Discovery Digital Networks Gets Boost by Adding Closed Captions to YouTube Videos By Lily Bond. "Based on the results of this study, Discovery Digital Networks decided to roll out captioning for the rest of their video content. They were very pleased with the demonstrated increase in views, and believe that the projected gains will be profitable for their channels. Discovery Digital Networks - study shows that adding closed captions to YouTube videos can have a dramatic immediate impact on views, as well as a solid positive impact over time." http://www.3playmedia.com/2014/05/19/seo-study-discovery-digital-networks-gets-boost-adding-closed-captions-youtube-videos/ +10: TYPOGRAPHY. How Typography Affects Readers By Ankit Oberoi. "Often times we find ourselves spending hours crafting articles, making sure that each word we select is the perfect one to project the story we are trying to paint. But there is another factor, often overlooked, that is just as important as writing great content: Typography. Let's delve a little into the world of typography and see how it affects readers. If you are someone who despite getting traffic and producing quality content, just can’t seem to get your readers to stay, you will want to read this till the end." http://www.adpushup.com/blog/how-typography-affects-readers/ +11: USABILITY. Automatic Infinite Scrolling and Accessibility By Derek Featherstone. "Automated infinite scrolling is a popular web design technique even though it creates difficult accessibility problems for keyboard users..." http://simplyaccessible.com/article/infinite-scrolling/ The Scroll Up Bar By Dmitry Fadeyev. "While these bars may be useful, they take up vertical space, reducing the reading space the user has chosen for themselves by picking the size of their browser window. Additionally, information displayed on these bars does not do anything to aid the reading of the actual content, making the bar more of a nuisance than help." http://usabilitypost.com/2014/05/24/the-scroll-up-bar/ Why It's Still Important To Design 'Above The Fold' By Steven Bradley. "When I was first learning to design websites, a frequent topic of conversation was the fold. I remember it being part of the very first class I took and it found it's way into the discussion of several that came after. Is it still relevant? I think so..." http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/above-the-fold/ Usability Moves Beyond the Screen By Jason Deign. "Web designers have long been aware of the need to make things easy for Internet users. Now usability is increasingly an issue for other technology areas." http://newsroom.cisco.com/feature-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1415749 Writing for the Web #5: Paragraphs By Linnea Ann Williams. "This is the fifth post in my series on Writing for the Web. In this post, I'll talk about how to write a good paragraph for the web." https://swsblog.stanford.edu/blog/writing-web-5-paragraphs 10 Surprisingly Common But Painful User Experiences By Jeff Sauro. "...Inspired by some more general frustrations, we've quantified 10 surprisingly common but generally painful experiences you've almost certainly encountered...." http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/common-pain.php [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 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.]