+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 15, Issue 45, May 4, 2017. 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: DRUPAL. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: TOOLS. 11: TYPOGRAPHY. 12: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Creating Accessibility By Information Technology for Minnesota Government. "How accessibility, design and IT are working together to make accessible document templates broadly available at the state." https://mn.gov/mnit/blog/#/detail/appId/2/id/291784 Creating a Culture of Accessibility By Cordelia McGee-Tubb. "...I hope these tips can help you prioritize accessibility in your organization..." https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2017/04/creating-a-culture-of-accessibility/ Making Accessibility More Accessible, Part 1 By Gabe Hoffman. "Tim Cook started the most recent Apple event with a bold claim that 'Technology should be accessible to everyone'..." https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/making-accessibility-more-accessible-part-1/ Will WCAG 2.1 Make Accessibility More Accessible? By Ricky Onsman. "It staggers me that we are still - STILL - struggling with making our web and digital products and services universally accessible." https://www.webdirections.org/blog/making-accessibility-accessible/ Designing for Screen Reader Compatibility By WebAIM. "Screen readers convert digital text into synthesized speech..." http://webaim.org/techniques/screenreader/ We're Building an Autocomplete By Ed Horsford. "We're building an autocomplete. These are sometimes called typeaheads..." https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2017/04/20/were-building-an-autocomplete/ The Trouble with Tables: A Brief Introduction By Gershon Blackmore. "This is the first in a three-part series of blog posts that is dedicated to the many people in government agencies who deal with PDF files on a daily basis, and encounter Section 508 requirements for these files..." https://www.ssbbartgroup.com/blog/trouble-tables-brief-introduction/ Tagging Complex Tables By Gershon Blackmore. "...the first step in dealing with any complex table is to analyze the table to see if it can be altered to make it non-complex. A complex table is one in which there are two rows of headers that must be referenced to understand the relevance of dependent data cells. Both header IDs and data cell dependencies must be defined to make a complex table accessible." https://www.ssbbartgroup.com/blog/tagging-complex-tables/ PDF/UA Structure Elements and the User Experience (PDF) By Karen McCall. "There is a direct correlation between the experiences of people with disabilities and the correct implementation of PDF structure elements in PDF documents..." http://scholarworks.csun.edu/bitstream/handle/10211.3/190207/JTPD-2017-p121-129.pdf Slides from MinneWebCon By Adrian Roselli. "I promised to share the slides, so here they are. If the embed is a problem you can go the slides directly on SlideShare..." http://adrianroselli.com/2017/05/slides-from-minnewebcon.html Lawsuit: McDonald's Website, Mobile App not Accessible to the Blind, Violates ADA By Jonathan Bilyk. "A blind man has sued McDonald's, claiming the fast food giant has discriminated against him under federal disabilities law because it has not made its smartphone app or website accessible to those with visual impairments..." http://cookcountyrecord.com/stories/511107875-lawsuit-mcdonald-s-website-mobile-app-not-accessible-to-the-blind-violates-ada +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. What's Happening in CSS? By Rachel Andrew. "A list of links I use to track what is happening in CSS and browsers..." https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2017/05/01/whats-happening-in-css/ The :focus-within Pseudo Class By Ian Devlin. "Today I came across the a new CSS pseudo class that will be very handy for web developers who are styling focus states..." https://www.iandevlin.com/blog/2017/04/css/the-focus-within-pseudo-class Focus Styles on Non-Interactive Elements? By Chris Coyier. "...moving focus through JavaScript isn't possible on every element. Sometimes you need to force that element to be focusable, which she did through setting tabindex=-1...We since updated our snippet to do this more-accessible handling of focus. Since then, we've heard from quite a few folks about a new side effect to the updated snippet..." https://css-tricks.com/focus-styles-non-interactive-elements/ The Different Logical Ways to Group CSS Properties By Chris Coyier. "...Let's take a look at some ways we could apply different logic to this ruleset..." http://mediatemple.net/blog/tips/different-logical-ways-group-css-properties/ How to Set CSS Margins and Padding (And Cool Layout Tricks) By Baljeet Rathi. "...In this tutorial, you will learn the difference between CSS margins and padding and how these properties affect the space between elements on a webpage..." https://www.sitepoint.com/set-css-margins-padding-cool-layout-tricks/ Replace Bootstrap Layouts with CSS Grid By Dan Brown. 'I wanted to see what it would take to replace an existing grid framework with CSS Grid.' https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/04/replace-bootstrap-layouts-with-css-grid/ CSS Ruleset Terminology By Chris Coyier. "...here's the basics..." https://css-tricks.com/css-ruleset-terminology/ +03: DRUPAL. DrupalCon Baltimore 2017: Accessibility, New Technology & the Aging Baby Boomers (Video) By Katherine MacNally. "Accessibility isn't just for the blind or deaf. Accessibility is for everyone. Our eyes, ears, and motor function won't get better with age..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhulja_KbbY +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Group Notetaking for User Research By Susan Farrell. "Teams can use digital chronological logs or affinity diagrams to capture notes, and then aggregate these notes into top findings with the whiteboard method. " https://www.nngroup.com/articles/group-notetaking/ User Research When You Can't Talk to Your Users By Jon Peterson. "User research is about understanding people. But how can we do that when frontline methods of research aren't an option? Jon Peterson offers up several 'outside the box' methods for getting to know users when access and funding is limited." https://alistapart.com/article/user-research-when-you-cant-talk-to-your-users +05: EVENTS. Don't Shut Me Out! Language is Content, Usability and Accessibility June 8, 2017. Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. http://upamn.wildapricot.org/event-2533829 AIGA Design Conference October 12-14, 2017. Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. http://www.aiga.org/2017conference Midwest UX October 12-14, 2017. Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.A. http://2017.midwestuxconference.com/ Full Stack Toronto October 23-24, 2017. Toronto, Canada http://fsto.co/ +06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. UX Glossary: Task Flows, User Flows, Flowcharts and Some New-ish Stuff By Naema Baskanderi. "UX has a long list of terms and deliverables..." https://uxplanet.org/ux-glossary-task-flows-user-flows-flowcharts-and-some-new-ish-stuff-2321044d837d +07: JAVASCRIPT. A Quick Intro To BookMarkLets By Alan Richardson. "...Bookmarklets are an easy way to have custom javascript to support your testing that sync across browsers...." http://blog.eviltester.com/2017/04/a-quick-intro-to-bookmarklets.html +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Where Do We Go from Mobile First? By Jess Hutton. "Let's unravel how mobile design theory has evolved, consider each movement in the context of its time, and how we can move towards user first design..." http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/where-do-we-go-from-mobile-first/ A History of Human-Computer Interaction By Jonathan Grudin. "Ron Baecker's 1987 Readings in Human-Computer Interaction quoted from prescient 1960s essays by Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland, Ted Nelson, and others. I wondered, 'How did I work for years in HCI without hearing about them?'..." https://interactions.acm.org/blog/view/a-history-of-human-computer-interaction +09: NAVIGATION. Accessibility: Skip to Main Content By Jake Trent. "Give keyboard users a way to get to the main content of your site quickly..." https://jaketrent.com/post/accessibility-skip-to-main-content/ Customer Journeys Need to be Defined by Customers By Gerry McGovern. "The journey the organization would prefer the customer to go on is not usually the journey the customer wants to go on." http://gerrymcgovern.com/customer-journeys-need-to-be-defined-by-customers/ Best Practices for Search By Nick Babich. "Search is like a conversation between the user and app or website: the user expresses their information need as a query, and the app or website expresses its response as a set of results..." http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/best-practices-for-search/ +10: TOOLS. WGBH Makes Video Captioning Accessible and Affordable with Free Software Innovation By National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM). "Public invited to experience the captioning tool at free Boston Public Library launch event, May 11 at 2pm..." http://www.wgbh.org/press/press_release.cfm?pid=0FBB4EB8-5056-0403-6736-ECA743FAC8A4 +11: TYPOGRAPHY. Your Body Text Is Too Small By Christian Miller. "Why website body text should be bigger, and ways to optimize it..." https://blog.marvelapp.com/body-text-small/ +12: USABILITY. Stop Shaming Your Users for Micro Conversions By Kate Meyer and Kim Flaherty. "Manipulinks make users feel bad about themselves in order to convince them to accept an offer or sign up for a newsletter." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/shaming-users/ Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules Will Help You Design Better Interfaces By Euphemia Wong. "Follow Ben Shneiderman's 'Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design' if you want to design great, productive and frustration-free user interfaces..." https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/shneiderman-s-eight-golden-rules-will-help-you-design-better-interfaces The Homepage is Dead: A Story of Website Personalization By Cara Harshman. "...We went from one average best homepage to 26 different versions of the homepage uniquely personalized to different visitors. Let's talk about why we did it, what we did, and how it all performed (because of course we measured it)...The web Jeff Bezos imagined in 1998 has become reality and the opportunities to use personalization to design better web experiences just continue to grow." https://moz.com/blog/homepage-personalization Creating Usability with Motion: The UX in Motion Manifesto By Issara Willenskomer. "The following manifesto represents my answer to the question - 'As a UX or UI, designer, how do I know when and where to implement motion to support usability?'..." https://medium.com/ux-in-motion/creating-usability-with-motion-the-ux-in-motion-manifesto-a87a4584ddc How Do You Measure UX Maturity? By Jeff Sauro. "While UX is related to software development, it's certainly not the same thing. To understand how much a mature organization may lead to better user experiences, UX needs its own model for measuring maturity..." https://measuringu.com/ux-maturity/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +13: 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.]