+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 10, Issue 46, May 09, 2013.

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

++ISSUE 46 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: EVENTS.
05: HTML5.
06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
09: NAVIGATION.
10: PHP.
11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
12: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Accessibility Evaluation For Web Writers
By Dey Alexander.
"...In this article, I discuss evaluating content against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. If you're a web writer and not familiar with the guidelines, you can read my articles on accessibility for web writers..."
http://www.4syllables.com.au/2013/05/writers-accessibility-evaluation/

Accessibility - Clear up the ROT and FILTH on Your Web Site
By Rachel McAlpine.
"Accessibility means making access possible and easy for everyone, including people with any sort of disability. (That'll be you, one of these days.)..."
http://contented.com/contented/2013/accessibility-clear-up-the-rot-and-filth-on-your-web-site/

Accessible Content - Scrub the Decks
By Rachel McAlpine.
"A quick guide to making your documents accessible to blind or low-vision people follows..."
http://contented.com/contented/2013/accessible-content-scrub-the-decks/

Web Accessibility for Designers
By WebAIM.
"The focus of web accessibility is often on web development - the things that happen in HTML, CSS, or JavaScript after a site has been designed visually. Optimal accessibility should start much earlier, as part of the visual design process. We have created an infographic that highlights a few important principles of accessible design."
http://webaim.org/resources/designers/

How Screen-Readers Access Web Content
By Ade Hillier.
"Screen-readers work in a unique way to manage a challenging task: building an effective non-visual user interface for things that are intrinsically visual in nature..."
http://accessiblize.com/how-screen-readers-access-web-content

Pragmatica11y - Perception is Everything
By Denis Boudreau.
"...Punctuation is like people's perception. A minor change can make a big difference in how a message is received and understood. Context changes the experience. Context can substantially alter one's perception and the same is true when we think about the Web. For people with disabilities, even the smallest changes can make all the difference between being able to perceive the content or not..."
http://www.deque.com/pragmatica11y-perception

Mobile Browsers Must be Accessible Under New 21st CVAA Rules 
By coataccess.
"On April 26, 2013, at its open meeting, the FCC adopted landmark new rules to ensure browsers on mobile devices will be accessible to people with disabilities. For example, this means a blind or low vision person will have the same access to content available on the Internet that other smart phone users can get to..."
http://www.coataccess.org/node/10146


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

CSS Architectures - Refactor Your CSS
By Denise Jacobs.
"The top scalable and modular approaches I covered in the previous article in my CSS Architectures series all have pieces of brilliance that can help you change the way you think about and structure your CSS. They also overlap in many areas, which indicates which aspects of the process of improving your CSS are truly critical. Although you could follow any single approach while constructing a new site to great success, the fact of the matter is that what most of us are doing is trying to make sense of existing CSS run amok..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/css-architectures-refactor-your-css/

Build a Responsive, Mobile-Friendly Website From Scratch: CSS Stylesheet
By Annarita Tranfici.
"In the last article of this series, I've shown how to start building a website from scratch with a particular focus on the HTML code and its main elements..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/build-a-responsive-mobile-friendly-website-from-scratch-css-stylesheet/

10 Years
By Dave Shea.
"Wow. It's finally happened. The CSS Zen Garden is 10 years old today..."
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2013/05/07/10_years/


+03: EVALUATION & TESTING.

My Place or Yours? How to Decide Where to Run Your Next Usability Test
By David Travis.
"The most common types of usability test are remote usability tests, corporate lab-based tests, contextual usability tests and rented facility tests. What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of these different approaches to usability testing and how should you choose between them?..."
http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/common-types-of-usability-test.html

Testing Design - Testing Users Impressions of a Design
By Paul Boag.
"We all know that testing the sites we produce is important and there are well established techniques for testing usability. But what about testing aesthetics? What about testing design?"
http://boagworld.com/design/testing-design/

Five User Research Mistakes To Avoid
By Jeff Sauro.
"Almost all research contains mistakes in methodology, measurement or interpretation. Rarely do the mistakes render the research completely useless though. Don't let the fear of mistakes or shortcomings prevent you from conducting new user research. This blog discusses five of the more common mistakes to avoid when making the most of your research efforts."
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/research-mistakes.php


+04: EVENTS.

Open Web Camp V
July 13, 2013.
San Jose, California, U.S.A. 
http://lanyrd.com/2013/owc5/


+05: HTML5.

How to Mark up Subheadings, Subtitles, Alternative Titles and Taglines
By Steve Faulkner.
"If you don't already know, the hgroup element is obsolete in HTML5. Advice is now provided in the HTML spec on how to mark up subheadings, subtitles, alternative titles and taglines using existing and implemented HTML features..."
http://html5doctor.com/howto-subheadings


+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Five Prevalent Pitfalls When Prototyping
By Jared Spool.
"In our work with design teams, we see a lot of teams using prototypes today. We're also seeing many of those same teams fall into traps that reduce the effectiveness of their prototyping efforts. Here's five of the most common ones we see."
http://www.uie.com/articles/pitfalls_prototyping/

Prototyping Pro Tip - Practice With A New Tool By Redoing An Old Design
By Jared Spool.
"In the desire to expand your prototyping toolkit, you need to regularly try out new tools and techniques. Your goal is to have, at your disposal, as many different prototyping tools as possible. Maybe you want to learn a new software tool? Maybe you're interested in practicing your whiteboard sketching skills or play with paper prototypes?"
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2013/05/07/prototyping-pro-tip-practice-with-a-new-tool-by-redoing-an-old-design/

Semantic Environments and Information Architecture
By Jorge Arango.
"We inhabit many different semantic environments as we go about our lives. For example, religion is one such semantic environment: we use a particular set of words, in particular ways, when we are in church. Semantic environments are also composed of many subenvironments."
http://www.jarango.com/blog/2013/05/02/semantic-environments-and-information-architecture/


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

The ARIA Guide - Introduction
By Ade Hillier.
"You probably noticed that HTML is static while the web is ever less so. HTML5 is blurring the lines between static and dynamic in some places, while JavaScript does the heavy lifting..."
http://accessiblize.com/aria-guide-part-1-introduction

JavaScript Quirk 5 - Parameter Handling
By Axel Rauschmayer.
"The basics of parameter handling in JavaScript are simple, advanced tasks require manual work. This blog post first looks at the basics and then covers advanced topics..."
http://www.2ality.com/2013/05/quirk-parameters.html

Truth, Equality and JavaScript
By Angus Croll.
"You don't have to be a JavaScript novice to get confused by this..."
http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/truth-equality-and-javascript/

Rethinking JavaScript Object Enumeration
By Angus Croll.
"...Borrowing from Prototype.js, ECMAScript 5 defines two nifty new methods Object.keys(obj) and the rather clunkily named Object.getOwnPropertyNames(obj). They already work in the current versions of Chrome and Safari and will be supported in Firefox 4 and IE9..."
http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/javascript-object-keys-finally/

JavaScript Strict Mode
By Angus Croll.
"The fifth edition of the ECMAScript specification introduced Strict Mode. Strict Mode imposes a layer of constraint on JavaScript - intended to protect you from the more perilous aspects of the language....
http://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/javascript-strict-mode/


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

How Much Has The Web Really Changed?
By Vasilis van Gemert.
"Responsive design is about more than just layout; it's about designing for the Web, which means, mostly, for people with browsers. And that's just about everything we know about the people who visit our websites: they are probably using a browser. All the rest we just don't know."
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/05/06/new-defaults-web-design/

Why the Web Is Ready for Responsive Web Design
By Rahul Lalmalani.
"Today, a large portion of site traffic comes from mobile devices-namely smart phones and tablets-in addition to traditional PCs. Across the globe, mobile devices now account for 12 percent of Internet traffic, and this is scaling up faster than desktop Internet traffic. The fraction of mobile Web traffic is sufficiently higher in nations with high smartphone penetration (for example, 20 percent of US-based Web traffic is via mobile browsing). What's more, this figure is expected to grow significantly over the next 10 years, as smartphones evolve and mature in terms of hardware and software and adoption picks up in South America, Asia and Africa..."
http://www.sitepoint.com/why-the-web-is-ready-for-responsive-web-design/

Responsive Design Is Easier Than You Think
By Steven Bradley.
"Robin left a comment on my post about responsive design always being appropriate suggesting I didn't know what I was talking about when I said a responsive site takes a similar amount of time to design and develop as a static site. I understand where the comment comes from, but as you might expect, I disagree..."
http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/easy-responsive/

Sensible Jumps in Responsive Image File Sizes
By Jason Grigsby.
"...I have a new idea on how we might be able to define responsive image breakpoints that is based on a performance budget..."
http://blog.cloudfour.com/sensible-jumps-in-responsive-image-file-sizes/

AccessU Keynote Speaker Kimberly Blessing (Interview)
By Elle Waters.
"Today, we talk with Kimberly Blessing about her upcoming keynote at John Slatin AccessU. Kimmie talks with our own Derek Featherstone about facilitating cultural change in an organization and how it relates to web accessibility."
http://simplyaccessible.com/article/kimberly-blessing/

Denis Boudreau on Enterprise Accessibility (Interview)
By Elle Waters.
"Enterprise-wide accessibility is receiving a lot more attention these days as large organizations work to implement accessible design, development and content practices into their processes. Today, we talk with Denis Boudreau about some of the goals and challenges of these scenarios."
http://simplyaccessible.com/article/denis-boudreau/

Molly Holzschlag at AccessU on the Open Web (Interview)
By Elle Waters.
"Today we talk with Molly Holzschlag about CSS, resolving accessbility tensions in design, ARIA and the culture in Austin as we prepare for Knowbility's John Slatin AccessU..."
http://simplyaccessible.com/article/molly/

Plain Language and Usable Accessibility - Whitney Quesenbery  (Interview)
By Elle Waters.
"A modern view of accessibility leans towards it being part of User Experience. Our own Derek Featherstone talks with Whitney Quesenbery, a UX researcher about her sessions at AccessU about usability testing with people with disabilities and plain language."
http://simplyaccessible.com/article/whitney-quesenbery/


+09: NAVIGATION.

Accessible and Usable Link Text
By Ade Hillier.
"Well thought-out link text is not just a boost for accessibility, but for usability, too, which is helpful to everyone."
http://accessiblize.com/accessible-and-usable-link-text

Information Wayfinding, Part 2 - Elements of the Information Environment 
By Tyler Tate.
"...In this article, I'll scrutinize the nature of information environments by investigating their most fundamental elements..."
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/05/information-wayfinding-part-2-elements-of-the-information-environment.php

Your Taxonomy is Broken
By Rick Yagodich.
"The only answer that makes any sense when managing large amounts of content is - perhaps counter-intuitively - to use a flat structure, without a taxonomy."
http://think-info.com/2013/05/06/broken-taxonomy/


+10: PHP.

Using Grep to Find Security Vulnerabilities in PHP Code
By Ryan Dewhurst.
"Finding all security vulnerabilities in a piece of code may be hard as it requires in depth analysis of what the code does. However, simple security vulnerabilities follow certain code style patterns that are easier to find with simple search tools..."
http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/206-Using-Grep-to-Find-Security-Vulnerabilities-in-PHP-code.html


+11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

WYSIWTF
By Karen McGrane.
"Arguing for 'separation of content from presentation. implies a neat division between the two. The reality, of course, is that content and form, structure and style, can never be fully separated. Anyone who's ever written a document and played around to see the impact of different fonts, heading weights, and whitespace on the way the writing flows knows this is true. Anyone who's ever squinted at HTML code, trying to parse text from tags, knows it too."
http://alistapart.com/column/wysiwtf


+12: USABILITY.

Why Long Topics Are Better for the User
By Tom Johnson.
"...how big should the topics be? Obviously not the length of a book, because that switches us right back into the book paradigm. There's probably not an exact way to determine topic length, because so much depends on the context of the information and the task at hand. But basically, a good topic answers a good question. What's a good question?... "
http://idratherbewriting.com/2013/05/06/why-long-topics-are-better-for-the-user/

Intention vs. Interpretation - What Matters?
By Thomas Wendt.
"Both interaction designers and information architects want to design objects with a singular meaning. It's a noble, albeit impossible goal. The best we can hope for is to create more consistently meaningful experiences. To do that, designers must better understand the interplay between designer intention and user interpretation: the ways that we can influence - but not dictate - user interpretation..."
http://www.uxbooth.com/articles/intention-vs-interpretation-what-matters/

The 3 R's of Measuring Design Comprehension
By Jeff Sauro.
"To measure whether users understand a price, concept or design you can't just ask them. To measure comprehension use the three R's: recognition (multiple choice), recall (open-response) and recounting (explaining to a friend)."
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/measuring-comprehension.php

Infinite Scrolling - Let's Get To The Bottom Of This
By Yogev Ahuvia.
"Infinite scrolling promises a better experience for users. However, the good is often accompanied by the bad and the ugly. Once we understand the strengths and weaknesses of infinite scrolling, we can begin to use it to enhance our interfaces..."
http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2013/05/03/infinite-scrolling-get-bottom/


[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

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.]