+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 10, Issue 48, May 23, 2013. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 48 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. 03: JAVASCRIPT. 04: MISCELLANEOUS. 06: PHP. 07: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 08: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Locked Out (Video) By Jonathan Lazar. "In 'Locked Out: Investigating Societal Discrimination against People with Disabilities Due to Inaccessible Websites,' Jonathan Lazar discusses equal access to web-based information..." https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/video/jonathan-lazar-locked-out How is Accessibility Made? By Vlad Alexander. "Behind every accessibility achievement, there is usually a story of perseverance, patience and tolerance. Rarely do we get to hear about the people behind these achievements and rarer still do we hear why perseverance, patience and tolerance were required. This is an update on an ongoing advocacy effort to make images on the web more accessible..." http://rebuildingtheweb.com/en/how-is-accessibility-made/ The Gamification of Accessibility, Round 1 - Lessons Learned By Greg Kraus. "NC State held it's first ever Global Accessibility Awareness Day Challenge to see which campus Web sites could correct the largest number of accessibility errors. The challenge was based upon automated scans of Web sites which evaluated for both Section 508 and WCAG 2 conformance. The winners were the sites which corrected the highest percentage of errors. The challenge was just one part of the larger accessibility scanning system we have set up..." http://accessibility.oit.ncsu.edu/blog/2013/05/17/the-gamification-of-accessibility-round-1-lessons-learned/ Tutorial - Replacing Cynthia Says in the Web Developer Toolbar By Karl Groves. "HiSoftware issued a press release: "HiSoftware Gives the Cynthia Says Web Accessibility Testing Tool a Makeover ". Eager to find out more about this new version, I eagerly went to the site to check it out. This is what I saw..." http://www.karlgroves.com/2013/05/16/tutorial-replacing-cynthia-says-in-the-web-developer-toolbar/ Understanding WCAG Level By Karl Groves. "With the upcoming eventual issuance of a Final Rule for Section 508 Refresh and deadlines for compliance with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), as well as increasing rate of Web Accessibility-related lawsuits, I've become increasingly aware of people's frequent misunderstanding of the purpose of what the term 'Level' represents in theÉ Continue Reading Understanding WCAG LevelÉ" http://www.karlgroves.com/2013/05/20/understanding-wcag-level/ A Comparison of Learning Management System Accessibility By Hadi Rangin. "Learning management systems have become the primary delivery platform in most higher education systems for course-related activities such as lecture presentations, readings and assignments, discussions, and quizzes. Until a few years ago, access for learners and instructors with disabilities was either poorly supported or not considered at all in many popular tools. Due to lack of, or limited, accessibility in learning management systems, students were not able to fully or independently participate in key course activities..." http://blog.bargirangin.com/2013/03/a-comparison-of-learning-management.html AccessU - Mobile Accessibility Workshop By Henny Swan. Henny provides her "Mobile Accessibility Workshop" presentation slides. http://www.iheni.com/accessu-mobile-accessibility-workshop/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Layout Optimization: Centering Elements With Flexbox Is As Easy As Pie By David Storey. "Flexible box layout (or flexbox) is a new box model optimized for UI layout. As one of the first CSS modules designed for actual layout (floats were really meant mostly for things such as wrapping text around images), it makes a lot of tasks much easier, or even possible at all..." http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2013/05/22/centering-elements-with-flexbox/ Flexbox Tutorials from Web Designer Depot (Video) By Virginia DeBolt. "I mentioned the first of these videos when it was first published at Web Designer Depot. The second one has come out now and I wanted share them both here, rather than just adding them as useful links. They are good tutorials and I think the two of them together would make a nice classroom experience and introduction to flexbox..." http://www.webteacher.ws/2013/05/20/flexbox-tutorials-from-web-designer-depot-video/ My Presentation Slides - Making Your Site Printable By Adrian A. Roselli. "As promised in the session, I have made my slides available online via SlideShare and embedded them here" http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2013/05/my-presentation-slides-making-your-site.html +03: COLOR. The Fundamentals of Color: Hue, Saturation, And Lightness By Steven Bradley. "If you can remember as far back as January, one of my goals for 2013 was to learn more about color and share some of what I learn with you. I've talked before about how I feel my skills working with color are lacking and I said at some point this year I would grab a few books about color with the hopes of changing that..." http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/hue-saturation-and-lightness/ +04: JAVASCRIPT. The Design of Code - Organizing JavaScript By Anthony Colangelo. "Well-designed code is much easier to maintain, optimize, and extend, making for more efficient developers. Three high-level, language-agnostic aspects of code design are key to achieving this nirvana: system architecture, maintainability, and reusability. All three may be attained via the module pattern, whose extensible structure lends itself to a solid system architecture and a maintainable codebase. Anthony Colangelo shows how to craft our code into well-organized components that can be reused in projects to come." http://alistapart.com/article/the-design-of-code-organizing-javascript Writing Testable JavaScript By Rebecca Murphey. "As our JavaScript takes on more and more responsibilities, we need a reliable codebase-one that is thoroughly tested. Integration tests focus on how the pieces of an application work together, but don't tell us whether individual units of functionality are behaving as expected. That's where unit testing comes in. And we'll have a hard time writing unit tests until we start writing testable JavaScript. Rebecca Murphey explains how to save time in the long run by writing cleaner application code and testing, testing, testing..." http://alistapart.com/article/writing-testable-javascript JavaScript Regular Expression Enlightenment By Cody Lindley. "... I hope to push you past the insurmountable learning curve that stops most developers from knowing regular expression basics..." http://tech.pro/tutorial/1214/javascript-regular-expression-enlightenment JavaScript Quirk 6: The Scope of Variables By Axel Rauschmaye. "In most programming languages, variables only exist within the block in which they have been declared. In JavaScript, they exist in the complete (innermost) surrounding function..." http://www.2ality.com/2013/05/quirk-variable-scope.html +05: MISCELLANEOUS. Responsive Images - Interim Report By Bruce Lawson. "At Google I/O last week, I was hoping to hear Google's thoughts on responsive images. Every developer I speak to wonders how to send the right image size to browsers, Google is obsessed with performance, Peter Beverloo and Paul Kinlan were explicit in their talk Mobile HTML: The Future of Your Sites that web sites should request the correctly-sized images. But how?..." http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2013/responsive-images-intrerim-report/ Responsive/Adaptive Design - Do I Need It? By John Eric Brandt. "There has been a lot of chatter in the web design world recently about something called Responsive/adaptive web design. I have merged these two somewhat distinct methods into one just briefly to answer the question as to whether you 'need this' or not. I'll get to the differences in a little bit..." http://jebswebs.net/blog/2013/05/responsiveadaptive-design-do-i-need-it/ Stop Building Websites and Start Building Smart Sites By Chuck Longanecker. "...As designers of the Web, we need to rally around a common cause of democratizing web-based experiences as seamless, story-driven, goal-based, intuitive and viscerally satisfying as their mobile brethren..." http://www.dtelepathy.com/blog/news-events/impress-smart-site +06: PHP. How to Write Testable and Maintainable Code in PHP By Chris Fidao. "Here's how to begin structuring your code to achieve testability and maintainability - and save you time..." http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/how-to-write-testable-and-maintainable-code-in-php/ 5 Reasons Why the Web Platform War is Over: PHP Won with 75% says Google By Manuel Lemos "During Google I/O 2013 event a Google manager said PHP runs on 75% of the Web sites. So they decided to finally support PHP as in their AppEngine hosting serviceÉ http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/208-5-Reasons-Why-the-Web-Platform-War-is-Over-PHP-Won-with-75-says-Google.html 5 Reasons Why the Web Platform War is Over: PHP Won with 75% says Google By Manuel Lemos. "During Google I/O 2013 event a Google manager said PHP runs on 75% of the Web sites. So they decided to finally support PHP as in their AppEngine hosting service... http://www.phpclasses.org/blog/post/208-5-Reasons-Why-the-Web-Platform-War-is-Over-PHP-Won-with-75-says-Google.html +07: USABILITY. 5 Tips for Writing Better Microcontent By Dey Alexander. "Most web writers produce the following kinds of microcontent..." http://www.4syllables.com.au/2013/05/5-tips-microcontent/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +08: 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.]