+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 14, Issue 45, May 5, 2016. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 45 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: 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. Integrate Accessibility Into Teaching Practices, Says Field Expert By Headstar. "Accessibility should be weaved into more educational curriculums and demonstrated in teaching, a specialist consultant told delegates at a recent conference." http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=1155 Beyond Access: Facebook's Automated Image Descriptions and Disability Justice By Tasha Raella. "Two weeks ago, Facebook launched Automatic Alternative Text, or AAT, a tool that provides automated image descriptions for blind users..." https://medium.com/disability-stories/beyond-access-facebooks-automated-image-descriptions-and-disability-justice-5e27698a2fa3#.3tpde540a Web Accessibility Will Now be the Law of the Land in Europe By Dita Charanzova. "On Tuesday (3 May), after a long night of negotiation, and after more than three years since its proposal, it was agreed that web accessibility will now be the law of the land in Europe. This is a victory not only for persons with disabilities, but all of us, writes Dita Charanzova..." http://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/opinion/web-accessibility-will-now-be-the-law-of-the-land-in-europe/ ACB Calls for Further DOJ Action on Web Access By American Council of the Blind. "ACB Calls for Further DOJ Action on Web Access.." http://www.acb.org/PR-DOJWebAccess U.S. Government Again Puts Web Accessibility Guidelines On Back Burner By David Bolton. "Promised years ago, the guidelines are nowhere in sight..." https://arc.applause.com/2016/05/03/web-accessibility-united-states-doj/ Web Reg 'Do Over?': DOJ Withdraws Title II Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Issues Supplemental Advanced Notice Seeking Further Comments By Kristina M. Launey and Minh Vu. "Public entities and private businesses have been waiting for years - since 2010 - for the Department of Justice to issue regulations setting a standard for website accessibility. The DOJ has announced that it is stepping backward rather than moving forward in that process..." http://www.adatitleiii.com/2016/05/1928/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. An Ultimate Guide To CSS Pseudo-Classes And Pseudo-Elements By Ricardo Zea. "...I want to share with you in a very friendly, casual, non-dogmatic way a CSS reference guide to pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements..." https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/05/an-ultimate-guide-to-css-pseudo-classes-and-pseudo-elements/ Meaningful CSS: Style Like You Mean It By Tim Baxter. "Our markup too often remains a snarl of divs, our CSS a chaos of classes. Tim Baxter urges us to move beyond that. We can use real objects now instead of abstract representations. We can write CSS to support our markup instead of the other way around, and both can be more semantic and meaningful. The browser support is there; the standards are in place. Only habit is stopping us." http://alistapart.com/article/meaningful-css-style-like-you-mean-it +03: COLOR. How to Measure Color Contrast, for Web Accessibility By Joseph C. Dolson. "The essence of accessible color contrast is simple..." http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/122494-How-to-Measure-Color-Contrast-for-Web-Accessibility +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. My Post-CSUN Comparison of Web Accessibility Checkers By Terrill Thompson. "... I found myself wondering how the various accessibility checkers would do with a web page like AU's 'before' page, the page with at least 18 known accessibility problems. I decided to find out..." http://terrillthompson.com/blog/730 Measuring Usability With The System Usability Scale (SUS) By Jeff Sauro. "It is the 30th anniversary of the creation of the most used questionnaire for measuring perceptions of usability. The System Usability Scale (SUS) was released into this world by John Brooke in 1986. It has become an industry standard with references in over 600 publications." http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/measuring-usability-with-the-SUS.html Visualizing Data: Raw vs Difference Scores By Jeff Sauro. "One of the best ways to make metrics more meaningful is to compare them to something..." http://www.measuringu.com/blog/raw-difference-scores.php +05: EVENTS. Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) June 21-23, 2016. Liverpool, England, United Kingdom http://iwmw.org/iwmw2016/ Web Accessibility Training July 19-20, 2016. Logan, Utah, U.S.A. http://webaim.org/training/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Designing and Wireframing By John Stevens. "...Content is what matters on a website. Not the design. Content. People come for the content. They don't come for the design. The design is only a vehicle to deliver the content. Never start with how your website looks. Start with content. Content. Content. Content." https://hostingfacts.com/web-development-101/#2 Creating a Content Inventory: A Journey Through the Five Stages of Grief By Gayle Frassenei. "I challenge anyone to pick up a book about content strategy and not encounter the words 'content inventory' within the first few chapters..." http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/creating-a-content-inventory-a-journey-through-the-five-stages-of-grief/ +07: JAVASCRIPT. JavaScript Testing: Unit vs Functional vs Integration Tests By Eric Elliott. "Unit tests, integration tests, and functional tests are all types of automated tests which form essential cornerstones of continuous delivery, a development methodology that allows you to safely ship changes to production in days or hours rather than months or years..." http://www.sitepoint.com/javascript-testing-unit-functional-integration/ The Current State of Web Forms By Kevin Suttle. "In working with web forms, the same sorts of edge cases seem to appear repeatedly, and (at least) I find myself waffling on how to approach them with JavaScript..." http://codepen.io/kevinSuttle/post/the-current-state-of-web-forms +08: MISCELLANEOUS. The Contributions of Others: A Session with Jeremy Keith By An Event Apart. "...I've found that on the web, it's best to assume nothing. That might sound like a scary prospect, but it's actually quite liberating. Giving up on 'pixel-perfect' control doesn't mean giving up on quality. Quite the opposite: it means treating the web for what it is, not what we wish it were..." http://aneventapart.com/news/post/the-contributions-of-others-a-session-with-jeremy-keith +09: TYPOGRAPHY. Stop Maiming Bodies - The Perils of Pixel Font-Size By Tim Severien. "...To make the web great for the visual impaired or those with a reading disability, we have to use relative units." http://www.sitepoint.com/stop-maiming-bodies-the-perils-of-pixel-font-size/ +10: USABILITY. Website Forms Usability: Top 10 Recommendations By Kathryn Whitenton. "Follow these well-established - but frequently ignored - guidelines to ensure users can successfully complete your website forms." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/web-form-design/ The Role of Enhancement in Web Design By Raluca Budiu. "An enhancement is a user-interface feature that speeds up or enriches the interaction on some platforms for some users. Enhancements take advantage of special user or device capabilities and need to be backed up by more traditional ways of implementing the same interaction." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/enhancement/ 125 Easy Tweaks to Optimize Your Website's Usability Today By Nick Kolenda. "Welcome to a huge resource on user experience (UX), user interfaces (UI), and interaction design..." http://www.nickkolenda.com/user-experience/ UX and UI Principles By John Stevens. "...UX is about user goals...Not as much your goals...User goals..." https://hostingfacts.com/web-development-101/#3 Your Website is the Web By Gerry McGovern. "...If you want to make things really findable you bring them as close to the consumer as possible. To maximize findability you must minimize the need to search. It's there, exactly where the consumer is. It is placed at the point of consumption so its chances of being consumed are maximized." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/your-website-web +11: XML. Making the Switch Away from Icon Fonts to SVG: Converting Font Icons to SVG By Sara Soueidan. "If you're reading this article, then I can probably assume you've already decided to switch from using fonts for icons to an SVG icon system. Or maybe you're pondering the idea and want to get an overview of how that would be done and whether or not it's worth it. Either way, this post is here to help you with that..." https://sarasoueidan.com/blog/icon-fonts-to-svg/ SVG Clipping Paths By Steven Bradley. "...The good news is, all browsers support SVG in general and clipping in particular..." http://vanseodesign.com/web-design/svg-clipping-paths/ Why JPEGs are like McDonalds Apple Pies (and SVGs are not) By Alex Walker. "SVG isn't an image format - it's more of an image recipe..." http://www.sitepoint.com/svg-vector-effects-non-scaling-strokes/ [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. + 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.]