[webdev] Web Design Update: July 3, 2013

Wed Jul 3 06:11:20 CDT 2013

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 12, Issue 02, July 3, 2013.

An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web
design and development.

++ISSUE 02 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: DRUPAL.
05: EVALUATION & TESTING.
06: EVENTS.
07: HTML5.
08: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
09: JAVASCRIPT.
10: NAVIGATION.
11: PHP.
12: USABILITY.
13: XML.

SECTION TWO:
14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Accreditation and Web Accessibility - Why Should Accreditors Care?
By The National Center on Disability and Access to Education (NCDAE).
"Equitable access to higher education has long been recognized as a
challenge experienced by many individuals, including those from racial
and ethnic groups, women, students from low socioeconomic status and
students with disabilities. Today, many of the barriers that have
historically limited these students' ability to succeed have been
removed or reduced..."
http://ncdae.org/goals/accreditation/accreditation.php

Accessible User Experience and W3C-WAI
By David Sloan.
"Building an optimally accessible web site involves creating a
technical platform that is as robust as possible under different
browsing situations, including diverse assistive technology/browser
combinations. Following the technical guidelines published by the W3C
Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) is an important part of this
process. However, the ultimate focus of people with disabilities, like
any other member of your target audience, is not simply to visit a
technically accessible web site but to successfully use the site to
reach a desired goal - which might be to complete a task, or achieve a
particular experience (even if it is just to pass some time!)..."
http://blog.paciellogroup.com/2013/06/accessible-user-experience-and-w3c-wai/

Choosing an Automated Accessibility Testing Tool - 13 Questions You Should Ask
By Karl Groves.
"I gave a presentation on this topic at this year's CSUN Conference on
Disabilities. Due to the popularity of that session, I figured I'd
share the salient points in a blog post. The below information is
mostly relevant for organizations who are in the market for an
enterprise level accessibility testing tool along the lines of
Compliance Sheriff, AMP, Worldspace, and so on. I do not market an
accessibility testing tool and have no pecuniary interest in any
company which does. I make no recommendations in this post, as that
isn't the point. The important part is that the reader become informed
of the important factors to consider when choosing such a product.
Here are 13 questions to ask yourself when choosing between competing
products."
http://www.karlgroves.com/2013/06/28/choosing-an-automated-accessibility-testing-tool-13-questions-you-should-ask/

'Can't Someone Read that to You?' Dissolving Stereotypes of Blindness
By Lainey Feingold.
"On June 25, 2013, the World Intellectual Property Organization
(WIPO), an agency of the United Nations, reached agreement on an
historic document designed to provide access to reading materials for
people who are blind or have other print disabilities. The draft WIPO
treaty changes copyright law to reflect that blind people need formats
other than standard print in order to read. These alternative formats,
or accessible formats, include Braille, audio, Large Print, accessible
web content and other accessible electronic documents. The lack of
accessible, available formats, and not blindness, is why blind people
cannot read huge swaths of information available in standard print
format..."
http://lflegal.com/2013/06/blind-privacy/

Weight Watchers Print and Digital Accessibility Settlement Agreement
By The Law Office of Lainey Feingold.
Posted here is the settlement agreement between Weight Watchers, the
American Council of the Blind, and blind Weight Watchers members Alice
Ritchhart and Lillian Scaife. The agreement demonstrates Weight
Watchers' strong commitment to digital accessibility for its members
and subscribers who are blind and visually impaired. Weight Watchers
will be using the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0
Level AA as the standard for its online and mobile application
content, and will be providing print material in accessible formats
for persons with visual impairments who cannot read standard print.
Weight Watchers worked on this initiative in Structured Negotiations
with the American Council of the Blind and individual blind Weight
Watchers members.
http://lflegal.com/2013/06/weight-watchers-agreement/

Practitioners Rally To Defend Web Access Guidelines
By Tristan Parker.
"Accessibility practitioners have defended the international standard
'WCAG' web content accessibility guidelines this month, in the wake of
an academic study suggesting they were 'ineffective'..."
http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=897

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

CSS Architectures - Completing MetaCoax Refactoring
By Denise Jacobs.
"Taming CSS that's gone wild is no easy task. If you've studied any of
the top scalable and modular CSS architectures, you may have been
simultaneously overjoyed at finding the cause of your team's CSS woes,
yet intimidated by the prospect of how to initiate getting the
suggested changes into your documents and workflow..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/css-architectures-completing-metacoax-refactoring/

+03: COLOR.

108 Million Web Users Are Color Blind - How Do They See Your Website?
By EyeQuant.
"In this article, we'll speak about color blindness and why it matters
to your website optimization strategy – and your users..."
http://blog.eyequant.com/2013/07/02/108-million-web-users-are-color-blind-how-do-they-see-your-website/

+04: DRUPAL.

Feedback Needed - Drupal Accessibility Testing Script
By Jesse Beach.
"Please take a moment to review the testing plan assembled by Dharmesh
and Terrill..."
https://groups.drupal.org/node/306028

Drupal Administration Explained
By Stephen Burge.
A chapter from "Drupal 7 Explained: Your Step-by-Step Guide" is avaiable
http://www.informit.com/store/drupal-7-explained-your-step-by-step-guide-9780133124231

+05: EVALUATION & TESTING.

The Art of Guerilla Usability Testing
By David Simon.
"Guerrilla usability testing is a powerful technique. Designer Martin
Belam describes it as 'the art of pouncing on lone people in cafes and
public spaces, [then] quickly filming them whilst they use a website
for a couple of minutes.' Let's skip the pouncing part and instead
focus on its subtleties, including how to obtain and share feedback
with our team..."
http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/the-art-of-guerilla-usability-testing/

Measuring User Confidence in Usability Tests
By Jeff Sauro.
"Are you sure you did that right? When we put the effort into making a
purchase online, finding information or attempting tasks in software
we want to know we're doing things right. Having confidence in our
actions and the outcomes is an important part of the user experience.
That's why we ask users how confident they are that they completed a
task in a usability test or a tree test.  To measure confidence we use
the following seven-point rating scale..."
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/measuring-confidence.php

+06: EVENTS.

Open Web Camp V
July 13, 2013.
San Jose, California, U.S.A.
http://openwebcamp.com/

DenverUX Boot Camp
September 25-27, 2013.
Denver, Colorado, U.S.A.
http://www.denverux.com/

Future of Web Design
October 7-9 2013.
New York, New York, U.S.A.
http://futureofwebdesign.com/nyc-2013/

Full Frontal 2013
November 8, 2013.
Brighton, England, United Kingdom
http://2013.full-frontal.org/

An Event Apart San Francisco
December 9-11, 2013.
San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
http://archive.aneventapart.com/2013/sanfrancisco/

+07: HTML5

Resources for the New HTML template Element
By Virginia DeBolt.
"In draft state at the W3C, the new <template> element is making its
way into the HTML spec. The description of the document states, 'This
specification describes a method for declaring inert DOM subtrees in
HTML and manipulating them to instantiate document fragments with
identical contents.'"
http://www.webteacher.ws/2013/07/02/resources-for-the-new-html-template-element/

+08: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

...for the World Wide Web
By Jorge Jarango.
"Information architecture is the only field I'm aware of that is
concerned with the structural integrity of meaning across contexts."
http://www.jarango.com/blog/2013/06/28/for-the-world-wide-web/

+09: JAVASCRIPT.

Enough With the JavaScript Already!
By Nicholas Zakas.
A slide deck from Nicholas Zakas: "After consulting with several
companies on performance related issues, it became clear that one of
the biggest performance issues facing websites today is the sheer
amount of JavaScript needed to power the page. The demand for more
interactive and responsive applications has driven JavaScript usage
through the roof. It's quite common for large sites to end up with
over 1 MB of JavaScript code on their page even after minification.
But do today's web applications really need that much JavaScript?"
http://www.slideshare.net/nzakas/enough-withthejavascriptalready

Progressive Enhancement - Still Not Dead
By Emil Bjorklund.
"There's been a lot of focus on Javascript the last couple of years.
Sometimes, the best way of building a web property is described as
just slapping a JS-driven app on top of a REST-API, and I have some
issues with that. More specifically, I think the benefits of
progressive enhancement are still misunderstood, and progressive
enhancement is Still Not Dead. Layering support for user-agents,
performance and being robust against broken or blocked JS code are
very good reasons."
http://thatemil.com/blog/2013/07/02/progressive-enhancement-still-not-dead/

Iterators and Generators in ECMAScript 6
By Axel Rauschmaye.
"This blog post explains how iterators and generators work in
ECMAScript 6. The iterator protocol has recently changed, this post
explains the new protocol..."
http://www.2ality.com/2013/06/iterators-generators.html

+10: NAVIGATION.

Enabling Landmark-Based Keyboard Navigation in Firefox
By Matthew Atkinson.
"Landmark navigation is an increasingly important accessibility tool,
and one that will become even more powerful as HTML5 is adopted, but
it has mostly been restricted to users of 'heavy' (and sometimes
costly) assistive technologies (ATs) such as screen readers. Browsers
do not offer keystrokes to move between landmarked regions on the
page, so people who need to browse via the keyboard, but do not
require the use of a screen reader, cannot benefit."
http://blog.paciellogroup.com/2013/07/enabling-landmark-based-keyboard-navigation-in-firefox/

+11: PHP.

Array Operators in PHP - Interesting but Less Spoken
By Hamid Sarfraz.
"Operators in PHP can be organized into seven different categories:
arithmetic, assignment, bitwise, comparison, error control, execution,
incrementing/decrementing, logical, string, array, and type operators.
This article details working with array operators, but also covers how
some of the other operators work when used with arrays..."
http://phpmaster.com/array-operators-in-php-interesting-but-less-spoken/

+12: USABILITY.

3 Ways to Revamp Your University Website
By Michelle Fredette.
"If your institution's website doesn't pull in students, it's time for
a revamp. Here's how universities are reorganizing their web content,
integrating enterprise applications, and adapting to mobile
devices..."
http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/07/02/3-ways-to-revamp-your-university-website.aspx

The Spread of Link Rot
By Felix Salmon.
"What I fear is that the entire web is basically becoming a
slow-motion Snapchat, where content lives for some unknowable amount
of time before it dies, lost forever. Sites like archive.org can't
possibly keep up; and the moguls who own most of the content online
are simply not invested in the ideals of the link economy. "
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/06/28/the-spread-of-link-rot/

+13: XML.

Google Kills Reader, Helps RSS
By Tristan Louis.
"...So as Google reader passes on, let us not cry for the newsreader
of the past. Let's rejoice at Google letting RSS go free again and
let's all hope that our industry will not make the same mistake of
centralizing a technology that was initially created as a
decentralized one."
http://www.tnl.net/blog/2013/06/30/google-kills-reader-helps-rss/#sthash.JZZ7NCF0.dpuf

[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.

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+ 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 at d.umn.edu

[Issue ends.]