+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 10, Issue 40, March 28, 2013. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 40 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: HTML5. 05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 07: TOOLS. 08: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 09: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility and Content Management Tools By Lisa Seeman. "...make sure your content management tools are accessible. Each hour spent on accessibility evaluation of tools and processes when you establish your IT process can save you literally months of accessibility remediation later..." http://www.deque.com/its-tools-dammit-accessibility-content-management-tools Deaf, Blind Sue Over Web Shopping By Joe Palazzolo. "Advocates for Disabled Say Netflix, Target Are Legally Obligated to Make Sites Easier to Navigate" http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324373204578374483679498140.html?mod=e2tw PDF Techniques for WCAG 2.0 By W3C WAI. "This Web page lists PDF Techniques from Techniques for WCAG 2.0: Techniques and Failures for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. Technology-specific techniques do not supplant the general techniques: content developers should consider both general techniques and technology-specific techniques as they work toward conformance..." http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/pdf.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS3 Video Tutorial - Box Sizing By Russ Weakley. "...This week, Australian CSS expert Russ Weakley gives you the lowdown on using the new CSS3 box-sizing property. You'll find the transcript further down the page..." http://www.sitepoint.com/css3-video-tutorial-box-sizing/ CSS3 Video Tutorial - NOT Selector By Russ Weakley. "Today we're talking about a new CSS3 selector called the not selector. The interesting thing about the not selector is that it's the opposite of almost every other selector you've used..." https://learnable.com/jumpcasts/css-not-selector-20 Letting Users Disable Responsive Layout By Roger Johansson. "It's great that media queries allow us to adapt the layout of our sites to the users' viewport size, a.k.a. Responsive Web Design. However, some argue that doing so comes with a (slight) risk of confusing some people that don't expect viewport width to make the layout change as drastically as media queries allow..." http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201303/letting_users_disable_responsive_layout/ A Simple (and Very Rough) Responsive Table Solution By Russ Weakley. "There are a lot of very clever responsive table solutions available now. There are solutions that flip the table on it's side, convert it to a pie chart, gradually reduce the columns, allow users to determine columns, and even allow partial scrolling across the table. All of them are very clever. However, there are concerns about many of them..." http://www.maxdesign.com.au/2013/03/22/simple-responsive-table/ Printing the Web By Hans Christian. "...There are still some people that like to print web sites on paper. Once you are aware of that you might want to include a dedicated print stylesheet into web sites you build. Here is some advice on what you can do to get the best out of your page..." http://drublic.de/blog/printing-the-web/ Tracking When Users Print Pages By Adrian A. Roselli. "A few months ago I had the pleasure of writing a piece for .net Magazine about print styles (Make your website printable with CSS). It was posted to .net's web site last month and received an overwhelming one comment. That comment, however, summed up something I hear all the time..." http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2013/03/tracking-when-users-print-pages.html Go Vertical By Anthony Colangelo. "...why has responsive design focused almost exclusively on viewport width? Just like we had to stop ignoring skinny viewports, we need to stop ignoring short (and tall!) ones..." http://cognition.happycog.com/article/go-vertical +03: DRUPAL. Drupal Themes Explained By Stephen Burge. "In this chapter, learn how to change your Drupal theme and change your site's design and layout. You'll also learn how to distinguish between the administrative theme and the site theme, install a theme from Drupal.org, turn on and setup a theme, and configure a theme that utilizes modules to provide features..." http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1984067 Creating a New Drupal Node Type By Abbas Suterwala. "...In this article you'll see how to write a custom Drupal module which will install new node types using the Drupal hooks and API..." http://phpmaster.com/creating-a-new-drupal-node-type/ +04: HTML5. HTML5 Video and Background Images By Ian Devlin. "Stack Overflow can be a great place to get the mind going and this evening was no exception. A question was posted asking how to get a HTML5 video's poster..." http://www.iandevlin.com/blog/2013/03/html5/html5-video-and-background-images +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Using Card Sorting to Test Information Architecture By Jeff Sauro. "...here are some questions and answers to help make the method more approachable..." http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/card-sorting-ia.php +06: JAVASCRIPT. Access All ARIAs By Leonie Watson. "Leonie Watson takes a closer look at Accessible Rich Internet Applications and assistive technologies" http://www.netmagazine.com/features/access-all-arias ARIA (sydjs lightning talk) By Ben Buchanan. "Last week I did a five-minute lightning talk about ARIA, at Sydjs. The main point was to illustrate a secondary benefit to using ARIA, beyond the primary purpose of accessibility: taking advantage of the standardised definition of state..." http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2013/03/aria-sydjs-lightning-talk.html Standardizing JSON By Larry Masinter. "JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a text representation for data interchange. It is derived from the JavaScript scripting language for representing data structures and arrays. Although derived from JavaScript, it is language-independent, with parsers available for many programming languages..." http://masinter.blogspot.com/2013/03/standardizing-json_25.html +07: TOOLS. Readability Bookmarklet By Greg Kraus. "This tool will show you how readable selected text is on a page. The readability guidelines are based on WCAG 2 Level AAA Conformance. Note, there is no readability requirement for WCAG 2, Level AA Conformance. The results are based on six tests..." http://accessibility.oit.ncsu.edu/tools/readability/ +08: USABILITY. No to NoUI By Timo Arnall. "...Of course the interfaces we design may become normalised in use, effectively invisible over time, but that will only happen if we design them to be legible, readable, understandable and to foreground culture over technology. To build trust and confidence in an interface in the first place, enough that it can comfortably recede into the background." http://www.elasticspace.com/2013/03/no-to-no-ui A Great UI is Invisible By Patrick Cox. "A user interface that is invisible and that provides seamless interaction possibilities will help the user focus on their goals and direct them to what they need." http://tympanus.net/codrops/2013/03/21/a-great-ui-is-invisible/ Why User Experience Cannot be Cesigned By Helge Fredheim. "A lot of designers seem to be talking about user experience these days. We're supposed to delight our users, even provide them with magic, so that they love our websites, apps and start-ups. User experience is a very blurry concept. Consequently, many people use the term incorrectly. Furthermore, many designers seem to have a firm (and often unrealistic) belief in how they can craft the user experience of their product. However, UX depends not only on how something is designed, but also other aspects. In this article, I will try to clarify why UX cannot be designed." http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2011/03/15/why-user-experience-cannot-be-designed/ Site Speed and Usability By Toby Biddle. "The cost of every lagging second, and what you can do about it..." http://boxesandarrows.com/site-speed-and-usability/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +09: 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 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 Flash Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/flash.html HTML5 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.]