+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 13, Issue 08, August 21, 2014. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 08 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: HTML5. 05: JAVASCRIPT. 06: NAVIGATION. 07: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 08: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. 7 Things You Should Know About IT Accessibility By Terrill Thompson and the EDUCAUSE IT Accessibility Constituent Group. "IT accessibility is the ongoing process by which an organization ensures its current and future IT can be used effectively by everyone, including individuals with disabilities. Higher education has ethical and legal obligations to ensure that programs and services are accessible to all learners and employees, and as IT plays an increasingly integral role in higher education, whether IT is accessible can have a major impact on student success. Accessible IT works by complying with accessibility standards, enabling users with disabilities to fully participate. The need to ensure accessible IT has resulted in a greater focus on universal design-the process of designing a product, service, course, or environment in a way that works well for a broad spectrum of users..." http://www.educause.edu/library/resources/7-things-you-should-know-about-it-accessibility Creating Accessible Video By Gian Wild. "...Videos that include captions means that double the number of people will finish watching your video (from 40% up to 80%) Ð and remember your search ranking is directly related to how long people spend on your site. LiveClicker found that pages with transcripts earned 16% more revenue than pages that just had video-only content. The catch, though, is that while simple text is pretty easy to make accessible so long as you don't do anything too crazy, video is rather more complicated. People who are blind can hear the audio, but not see what is happening. People who are deaf can see what's happening but not hear the audio. The video itself may be too fast-paced for people with cognitive impairments. And so on. Also consider that a lot of video players simply can't be controlled via the keyboard, which is often a necessity for many people with disabilities..." http://www.sitepoint.com/accessible-video/ Improving the Accessibility of Social Media in Government By Digital Gov. "...This Toolkit is your guide to Improving the Accessibility of Social Media in Government. Created with the input of social media leaders and users across government and the private sector, this living document contains helpful tips, real-life examples and best practices to ensure that your social media content is usable and accessible to all citizens, including those with disabilities..." https://www.digitalgov.gov/resources/improving-the-accessibility-of-social-media-in-government/ Orca Now Supports longdesc By Joanmarie Diggs. "Orca now explicitly supports longdesc for Gecko. In particular..." https://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2014-August/msg00327.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Managing Hyphenation with CSS By Nicolas Hoffmann, Coralie Mercier. "In this article, you will start from Ancient Greek to the CSS4 text module, so a loooong 'cutting' edge story." http://openweb.eu.org/articles/managing-hyphenation-with-css Enduring CSS - Writing Style Sheets for Rapidly Changing, Long-Lived Projects By Ben Frain. "When architecting CSS for a large scale project it's a common aim to abstract visual patterns for re-use, DRY out code and normalise our designs as much as possible. However, for rapidly changing projects, I'm no longer convinced those principles should necessarily be followed to the nth degree, nor that they offer the biggest wins..." http://benfrain.com/enduring-css-writing-style-sheets-rapidly-changing-long-lived-projects/ CSS Guidelines By Harry Roberts. "High-level advice and guidelines for writing sane, manageable, scalable CSS..." http://cssguidelin.es/ 5 Uses for Vertical Media Queries By Craig Buckler. "Media queries are the core technology behind Responsive Web Design yet, despite a plethora of options, few of us dare venture beyond min-width (and possibly max-width)..." http://www.sitepoint.com/5-uses-vertical-media-queries/ +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. The Role of Iterative Usability Evaluation in Agile Development - A Case Study By Yanfei Ma, Yunhui Lu, and Dinara Saparova. "To better understand the role of iterative usability evaluation during agile development, we recently conducted a study whose focus was the usability evaluation of a personal healthÐmanagement system..." http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2014/08/the-role-of-iterative-usability-evaluation-in-agile-development-a-case-study.php +04: HTML5. Native Responsive Images By Yoav Weiss. "...Responsive images have been a pain point when developing responsive websites for quite some time. Now, finally, a native solution is getting close. You can start using it today, with or without picturefill, and start savings your users' time and money!." http://dev.opera.com/articles/native-responsive-images/ HTML5 with Steve Faulkner By Sarah Horton. "Web accessibility takes place on a foundation of technologies, the most common of which are developed and maintained by the Worldwide Web Consortium, or W3C. Its success is dependent on how well these underlying technologies support accessible user experiences. Fortunately for us, people like Steve Faulkner devote much of their time to ensure technology specifications, such as HTML5, include the hooks that make it possible to build an accessible and enjoyable user experience for everyone, including people who use assistive technologies, such as screen reader and screen magnification software, and different display and interaction modalities, such as user stylesheets and keyboard navigation." http://rosenfeldmedia.com/blogs/a-web-for-everyone/html-5-0-with-steve-faulkner/ +05: JAVASCRIPT. DOM - Attributes Sadness By Anne van Kesteren. "I have been reinstating 'features' related to attribute handling in DOM. We thought we could get rid of them, but usage counters from Chrome and compatibility data from Gecko showed we could not. This is very sad so I thought I would share the pain..." http://annevankesteren.nl/2014/08/attributes +06: NAVIGATION. The Anchor Button - Bad for Accessibility, Bad for Usability By Matt Long. "I'm a button, click me - this is the anchor button. Designers and developers have been creating buttons interchangeably with the
, , and elements instead of button and input. Who cares-on the surface things look great, right? Well, the easy answer is, wrong-incorrectly using HTML elements is a bad thing, and usually creates additional work to then add the expected default behaviors of the correct elements..." http://itstiredinhere.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-anchor-button-bad-for-accessibility.html +08: USABILITY. Icon Classification: Resemblance, Reference, and Arbitrary Icons By Jakob Nielsen. "The tighter the mapping between icons and the thing they represent, the easier they are to understand, but standardization can also make an icon easy." http://www.nngroup.com/articles/classifying-icons/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +08: 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@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]