+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 13, Issue 07, August 14, 2014. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 07 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 05: JAVASCRIPT. 06: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 07: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 08: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Use the aria-label Property to Provide Additional Information to Users By Denis Boudreau. "Make sure the purpose of links is made meaningful using the aria-label property..." http://dboudreau.tumblr.com/post/93968506102/use-the-aria-label-property-to-provide-additional Accessible HTML Heading Markup By Sailesh Panchang. "On this page, HTML heading markup h tags are used for the titles of each scenario I / Ii / III and for each of the two ARIA1 and ARIA2 techniques. This is good enough to comply with SC 1.3.1 (A) for the three scenarios illustrated below. In Scenario I, these are the only headings..." http://www.deque.com/blog/accessible-html-heading-markup/ W3C Invites Implementations of HTML5 Image Description Extension By W3C. "The HTML Working Group has published a Candidate Recommendation of the HTML5 Image Description Extension, which defines the 'longdesc' attribute that enables web authors to provide longer textual descriptions for complex images..." http://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/4016 RE: Call for Implementations: HTML5 Image Description Extension (longdesc) By John Foliot. "...your contributions, as an author, user-agent implementer (or even consumer - if you consume a provided longdesc description - send an email to the author and thank them!)" will help move this useful attribute forward. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2014JulSep/0033.html W3C WAI releases HTML5 Image Description Extension By Tim Lohman. "...According to the W3C WAI, HTML-longdesc is part of W3C's work to ensure that the Open Web Platform is accessible to people with disabilities..." http://www.accessiq.org/news/news/2014/08/w3c-wai-releases-html5-image-description-extension How Website Accessibility can Boost your SEO By Kevin Rydberg. "In case having a website that's accessible to all users wasn't enough incentive on its own, here's another reason - it will help boost your SEO rankings. Yeah, true story. On the surface it may not seem like the two are connected, but behind the subtle scenes of your website's code, proper accessibility practices are providing a major boost to your SEO. What's that idiom about birds and stones?..." http://blog.siteimprove.co.uk/how-website-accessibility-can-boost-your-seo Celebrating the ADA's 20th/24th/25th Anniversary (Video) By Karl Groves and Billy Gregory. "Karl 'the Viking' Groves and Billy 'the Lumberjack'Gregory discuss the 20th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Field reporter Eric Wright goes out on the street to see how America is celebrating." To quote Lˇonie Watson "It's a funny (sometimes irreverent) take on accessibility that genuinely made me laugh out loud." http://youtu.be/l3eb0DALdnA +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Beginner Concepts - How CSS Selectors Work By Chris Coyier. "Are you new to CSS? This article is for you! Perhaps the biggest key to understanding CSS is understanding selectors. Selectors are what allows you to target specific HTML elements and apply style to them. Let's not think about style right now though, let's just focus on the selecting..." http://css-tricks.com/how-css-selectors-work/ How to Create a Fixed Navigation Bar By Jacob Gube. "...In this tutorial, I'll walk you through a simple CSS technique for implementing a top horizontal fixed navigation bar..." http://sixrevisions.com/css/fixed-navigation-bar/ +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. What To Do When You Can't Run a Usability Test By Jeff Sauro. In an ideal world, users would be involved in every stage of product development, including requirements gathering, iterative prototype testing and post release testing. But sometimes testing with users just doesn't happen. Here are three alternatives we use to understand the user experience without usability testing. http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/usability-alternatives.php Usability vs Beta Testing (The What and When) By UX Sisters. "If you work in software and product development (or are stumbling around a UX blog, you've probably heard about usability testing and beta testing. They sound kind of useful and buzzwordy, but what do they actually mean? Are they even different from each other in any meaningful way? I'm asked this question quite often, so I wanted to define what each one is - what each one is not - in the life of a UX researcher at a SaaS software company" http://www.uxsisters.com/2014/08/usability-vs-beta-testing/ A Closer Look At Personas - What They Are And How They Work (Part 1) By Shlomo Goltz. "In my experience as an interaction designer, I have come across many strategies and approaches to increase the quality and consistency of my work, but none more effective than the persona. Personas have been in use since the mid-'90s and since then have gained widespread awareness within the design community..." http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/06/a-closer-look-at-personas-part-1/ UX Without User Research Is Not UX by Hoa Loranger. "UX teams are responsible for creating desirable experiences for users. Yet many organizations fail to include users in the development process. Without customer input, organizations risk creating interfaces that fail." http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-without-user-research/ A Closer Look At Personas: A Guide To Developing The Right Ones (Part 2) By Shlomo Goltz. "How can designers create experiences that are custom tailored to people who are unlike themselves? As explained in part 1 of this series, an effective way to gain knowledge of, build empathy for and sharpen focus on users is to use a persona. This final part of the series will explain an effective method of creating a persona..." http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/13/a-closer-look-at-personas-part-2/ +04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. How To Do a Content Audit - Step-by-Step By Everett Sizemore. "This is Inflow's process for doing content audits. It may not be the "best" way to do them every time, but we've managed to keep it fairly agile in terms of how you choose to analyze, interpret and make recommendations on the data. The fundamental parts of the process remain about the same across numerous types of websites no matter what their business goals are: Collect all of the content URLs on the site and fetch the data you need about each URL. Then analyze the data and provide recommendations for each content URL. Theoretically it's simple. In practice, however, it can be a daunting exercise if you don't have a plan or process in place. By the end of this post we hope you'll have a good start on both..." http://moz.com/blog/content-audit-tutorial Analyzing Card-Sorting Data Using Graph Visualization By Celeste Lyn Paul. "This paper describes a method for visualizing and analyzing co-occurrence in card-sorting data. Card sorting is a popular knowledge elicitation method used in information architecture and user experience design. However, analyzing card-sorting data can be a challenge. Detailed qualitative analysis is difficult and time consuming, especially for larger studies. Quantitative analysis can be automated and is scalable, but can be difficult to interpret." http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_publications/jus/2014may/paul1.html +05: JAVASCRIPT. What ARIA Does Not Do By Steve Faulkner. "ARIA is a set of attributes that can be added to HTML elements (and other markup languages) to communicate accessibility role, state, name and properties which are exposed by browsers via platform accessibility APIs. This provides a common, interoperable method of relaying the information to assistive technologies. That's it. It is the same method used by browsers to convey the inbuilt (or default) accessibility information of native HTML features. The difference being that authors can wire up this information for themselves in the DOM using ARIA, before they could not..." http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2014/08/what-aria-does-not-do/ JavaScript Coding Tips (Video) By Axel Rauschmayer. "The following video is a recording of the talk 'JavaScript coding tips', which I held 2014-05-16 at the Sud Web Conference in Toulouse, France." http://www.2ality.com/2014/08/javascript-coding-tips.html Asynchronicity By Anne van Kesteren. "There is ever more asynchronicity within the web platform. Asynchronous being some set of steps that could be performed in parallel with JavaScript running in a given environment such as a window or worker..." http://annevankesteren.nl/2014/08/asynchronicity +06: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Standards for Web Applications on Mobile - Current State and Roadmap By W3C. "This document summarizes the various technologies developed in W3C that increase the capabilities of Web applications, and how they apply more specifically to the mobile context. A good subset of these technologies are described and explained in the W3C on-line training on programming Web applications...." http://www.w3.org/2014/07/mobile-web-app-state/ +07: USABILITY. The Pervasiveness of Text Advertising Blindness By Justin W. Owens, Evan M. Palmer, and Barbara S. Chaparro. "Users of websites tend to ignore text advertisements, especially when they are on the right side of a web page, even when the advertisements are useful for completing a task..." http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_publications/jus/2014february/owens1.html User Experience and Accessibility - An Analysis of County Web Portals By Norman E. Youngblood and Susan A. Youngblood. "...This study applies usability heuristics and automated analyses to assess a state-wide population of county web portals and examines whether population, per capita income, or median household income are related to usability, accessibility, and coding practices..." http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_publications/jus/2013november/youngblood1.html [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 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.]