+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 13, Issue 21, November 20, 2014. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 21 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: BOOKS. 03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: HTML5. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: TOOLS. 11: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Identifying Web Accessibility Issues By National Center on Disability and Access to Education (NCDAE). "While it takes a fairly technical background to detect all accessibility issues and features, there are many accessibility problems that can be quickly and easily identified without the need for a highly technical background. This handout will suggest a few free accessibility tools and offer 4 simple techniques to help you identify some common web accessibility problems..." http://www.ncdae.org/resources/cheatsheets/accessibility.php Don't Use Tabindex Greater Than 0 By Adrian Roselli. "...mis-use has effectively guaranteed that using tabindex values greater than zero is a bad idea..." http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2014/11/dont-use-tabindex-greater-than-0.html Considerations for Testing with Speech Recognition Software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking By Jonathan Avila. "...While many technical solutions to accessibility challenges will benefit users of multiple types of assistive technology there are certain implementations that are more likely to cause issues for users of speech recognition software. All organizations have limitations in time available for testing and thus it is helpful to focus these testing efforts to specific situations that are crucial to evaluate the functional experience with Dragon and other speech recognition software. Below is a list of implementations that may present accessibility challenges..." https://www.ssbbartgroup.com/blog/2014/11/14/considerations-for-testing-with-speech-recognition-software-such-as-dragon-naturally-speaking/ High Contrast Mode Primer By Becky Gibson. "...Often when I am explaining accessibility requirements for Web pages, I find that people donŐt really understand the issues concerning High Contrast. This post attempts to explain high contrast mode and includes some pictures to demonstrate the potential problems..." http://www.weba11y.com/blog/2014/11/19/high-contrast-mode-primer-2/ Hiding or Disabling By Aaron Cannon. "...The takeaway from all this, in my view, is that when causing new controls to appear on screen, that are far from where the screen reader user is currently 'looking', can require some careful consideration to ensure that the user knows that they have appeared, and where to find them. I am not aware of any clear solution to this problem, and I believe that it is best avoided if at all possible." http://www.cannonaccess.com/2014/11/hiding-or-disabling/ How Ticketleap Made Online Ticketing More Accessible By Paul Nuschke. "When local hackathon #Hack4Access discovered that many of its attendees who were visually impaired had difficulty using Ticketleap with a screen reader, the company's UX head, Paul Nuschke, set out to fix it..." https://technical.ly/philly/2014/11/10/ticketleap-accessibility/ Justice Department Enters into a Settlement Agreement with Peapod to Ensure that Peapod Grocery Delivery Website is Accessible to Individuals with Disabilities By The Department of Justice. The Department of Justice announced that they have settled accessibility issues with the online grocery ordering system PeaPod. http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-enters-settlement-agreement-peapod-ensure-peapod-grocery-delivery-website U.S. Department of Justice Continues Enforcement of Accessibility Requirements for Websites and Mobile Apps - But Its Rulemaking Still Awaits By Kenneth J. Yerkes. "...Through its enforcement activity, the DOJ has signaled a clear intent to rely on WCAG 2.0 Level AA Success Criteria as defining accessibility for websites and mobile applications under the ADA..." http://www.natlawreview.com/article/us-department-justice-continues-enforcement-accessibility-requirements-websites-and- A Picture is Worth a Thousand (Coherent) Words: Building a Natural Description of Images By Oriol Vinyals, Alexander Toshev, Samy Bengio, and Dumitru Erhan. "People can summarize a complex scene in a few words without thinking twice. It's much more difficult for computers. But we've just gotten a bit closer..." http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2014/11/a-picture-is-worth-thousand-coherent.html Google Automatic Alts? WebAim Thread. "Just saw this on another list. Very interesting concept to create 'automatic' alts... I wonder how it will work in practice?..." http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=6679 +02: BOOKS. Hassell, Jonathan. "Including your missing 20% by embedding web and mobile accessibility". BSI British Standards Institution, 2014. +03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Fun Times with CSS Counters By Will Boyd. "CSS counters are one of those 'oh neat, didn't know CSS could do that' features with a lot of interesting potential. In simple terms, they let you keep a running tally of things in CSS - no JavaScript needed..." http://codersblock.com/blog/fun-times-with-css-counters/ CSS Specificity Graph Generator By Jonas Ohlsson. "Spikes are bad, and the general trend should be towards higher specificity later in the stylesheet." http://jonassebastianohlsson.com/specificity-graph/ +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 5-Steps for Getting Started Measuring the Customer Experience By Jeff Sauro. "Most companies have more bug lists and requests for product features than they can realistically address. In an earlier post, I present ways to help you prioritize those features; now let's figure out where to start. This post describes an approach that works in many situations, beginning with a survey of your customers or prospects, or a representative set thereof, with the following objectives..." http://www.measuringu.com/blog/five-step-cux.php +05: EVENTS. Accessible Way-Finding Using Web Technologies December 3, 2014. Online Symposium. http://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2014/way-finding/ Accessibility Camp Ottawa December 6, 2014. Ottawa, Canada http://a11yyow.ca/ Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) May 21, 2015. Everywhere. http://www.globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org/ Announcing GAAD's New Date for 2015 and Beyond http://www.webaxe.org/announcing-gaads-new-date-for-2015-and-beyond/ +06: HTML5. HTML5 Accessibility Analysis By Steve Faulkner. "HTML5Accessibility.com was updated last week to include the latest results for HTML5 accessibility support in Windows browsers. What do these results mean?" http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2014/11/html5-accessibility-analysis/ Responsive Images Revisited-The Picture Element By Steven Bradley. "...As I mentioned above, when using srcset you provide browsers with information they use to make an informed decision. With the picture element you provide rules that the browser must follow. That means the browser won't be able to optimize things quite as well, but sometimes it's more important to serve a different image regardless of any performance loss..." http://www.vanseodesign.com/web-design/responsive-images-picture-element/ 5 Obsolete Features in HTML5 By Aurelio De Rosa. "...during the evolution of the standard, some elements, attributes, and APIs have been added and then changed or removed. Because it's hard to keep up with all the news and updates in our field, some of you may have missed features that have been deprecated or removed from the specification. In this article we'll cover five of them..." http://www.sitepoint.com/5-obsolete-features-html5/ +07: JAVASCRIPT. The ARIA Combobox Module is Now Available By Bryan Garaventa. "The ARIA Combobox module for AccDC has been released, and supports many powerful features." https://www.linkedin.com/groups/ARIA-Combobox-module-is-now-4512178.S.5940640328133398529 +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Stop Breaking the Web By Nicolas Bevacqua. "...What we should be doing instead is going back to basics. Let content down the wire as quickly as possible, using server-side rendering. Then add any extra functionality through JavaScript once the page has already loaded, and the content is viewable and usable for the human. If you want to include a feature older browsers don't have access to, such as the history API, first think if it makes sense to do it at all. Maybe your users are better off without it. In the history API case, maybe it's best to let older browsers stick to the request-response model, rather than trying to cram a history API mock onto them by means of a hash router..." http://ponyfoo.com/articles/stop-breaking-the-web Are Meetings That Evil? By Paul Boag. "...running a good meeting is not that hard. It just needs some discipline, a bit of thought and somebody to take control. Below are some dos and don'ts for running effective meetings. If you stick with these you will find meetings feel a lot less evil..." http://www.sitepoint.com/meetings-evil/ The Responsive Images Community Group: What Comes Next By Matt Marquis. "The RICG's work is starting to wind down, but we're just getting started at the same time..." http://bocoup.com/weblog/after-the-ricg/ 9 Basic Principles of Responsive Web Design By Sandijs Ruluks. "Responsive web design is a great solution to our multi-screen problem, but getting into it from the print perspective is difficult. No fixed page size, no millimetres or inches, no physical constraints to fight against..." http://blog.froont.com/9-basic-principles-of-responsive-web-design/ Mozilla Introduces the First Browser Built For Developers: Firefox Developer Edition By Dave Camp. "...In celebration of the 10th anniversary of Firefox, we're excited to unveil Firefox Developer Edition, the first browser created specifically for developers..." https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/11/mozilla-introduces-the-first-browser-built-for-developers-firefox-developer-edition/ +09: NAVIGATION. Video - Mobile Navigation, Conversion, Input, and More By Luke Wroblewski. "Conversions@Google published a complete video recording of my two and a half hour seminar last month (September 2014 in Dublin) on optimizing mobile experiences for conversion using design..." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1936 +10: TOOLS. craptions.to.captions By Michael Lockrey a.k.a. @TheDeafGuy. "My name is Michael Lockrey and I'm a captioning evangelist. I'm also profoundly Deaf and this means that I simply cannot watch YouTube videos when only automatic craptioning* is provided. So I decided to do something about it and nomorecraptions.com is the result." http://nomorecraptions.com/ Related article: https://medium.com/@mlockrey/nomorecraptions-dot-com-f3b3a7924fff +11: USABILITY. User Experience Impossible - The Line Between Accessibility and Usability By Angela Hooker. "The two are quite different by definition, but in practice, they're still separate issues. Accessibility means that your audience can get to the content and message you want them to receive. It's more than just user experience. Without accessibility, the user experience-good or bad-can't even happen. So, as the saying goes, 'usability depends on accessibility.'" https://www.digitalgov.gov/2014/11/17/user-experience-impossible-the-line-between-accessibility-and-usability/ The Future of Marketing is to be Useful By Gerry McGovern. "...The future is about being useful. Before the Web it was very hard to measure the effectiveness of marketing and communications. The Web and Big Data shine a brutal light on that which is not useful. Your organization may not yet have installed the right measurement system to allow that light to be shone. But pretty soon it will. Be ready. Be useful." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/future-marketing-be-useful Video Usability By Amy Schade. Video content is helpful only if users have control over it, understand what's contained within it, and have an alternate way to access it. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/video-usability/ Use Specialized Language for Specialized Audiences By Jakob Nielsen. "B2B sites and other sites with specialized content that targets professionals or enthusiasts should use their audiences' jargon to communicate more precisely and professionally." http://www.nngroup.com/articles/specialized-words-specialized-audience/ Beyond the UX Tipping Point By Jared M. Spool. "...The UX Tipping Point is the moment when an organization no longer compromises on well-designed user experiences. Before they hit the tipping point, they might talk about great design, but they'll still ship a mediocre experience. However, once they've passed it, design has become an embedded part of their culture and DNA..." http://www.uie.com/articles/beyond_ux_tipping_point/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +12: 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.]