+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 13, Issue 27, December 31, 2014. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 27 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: EVENTS. 04: JAVASCRIPT. 05: MISCELLANEOUS. 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. Accessibility - It's not as Hard as You Think By Chris Northwood. "I've been fortunate enough to spend most of my career so far in an organisation where accessibility is part of the culture, so when I see inaccessible code, it's as jarring to me as I'm sure code like this is to most developers who've learnt a bit about security..." https://medium.com/@cnorthwood/accessibility-its-not-as-hard-as-you-think-59dd48582803 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide By Rakesh Paladugula. "People who have difficulty in reading stationary text quickly, those who will be distracted easily and those who use screen readers face difficulty in reading the content that is moving, blinking or scrolling..." http://www.maxability.co.in/2014/12/2-2-2-pause-stop-hide/ Advanced Form Labeling By Jared Smith. "WebAIM's forms article has been expanded to include information on aria-labelledby and aria-describedby" http://webaim.org/techniques/forms/advanced Mark Zuckerberg Seeks Ideas for Next Year's Personal Challenge (Facebook post) Comment by Leonie Watson. "Do not use a mouse, trackpad or any other pointer device on any piece of technology you use, to understand the way people with disabilities (that mean they either cannot see well enough to use a pointer or do not have the dexterity to do so) experience the web on a daily basis." https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10101822067339241?comment_id=10101822982570111&offset=0&total_comments=38320 Quail Accessibility Testing Framework - 2014 Project Conclusion Report By J. Renee Beach. "Late in 2013 the Quail project and the Kwaliteits Instituut Nederlandse Gemeenten (KING) organization of the Netherlands joined together to improve automated testing of accessibility support on web pages. KING brought resources and knowledge to Quail and without their support, this project would not have improved at such a rapid pace..." https://medium.com/@jessebeach/quail-accessibility-testing-framework-2014-project-report-d64f7d6275d7 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Grid Layout 2014 Recap: Specification Evolution By Manuel Rego Casasnovas. "Year 2014 is coming to an end, so it's the perfect timing to review what has happened regarding the CSS Grid Layout spec, which Igalia has been implementing in both Blink and WebKit engines, as part of our collaboration with Bloomberg..." http://blogs.igalia.com/mrego/2014/12/30/css-grid-layout-2014-recap-specification-evolution/ Copying Content Styled with Text-Transform By Adrian Roselli. "Using the CSS property text-transform to automatically shift copy to uppercase has been popular for a while now, but a combination of a recent explosion in the use of that style and my slow move to Chrome as my default browser has caused me to regularly paste text into emails, tweets, and blog posts that is not what I expect." http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2012/06/copying-content-styled-with-text.html Approaches to Media Queries in Sass By Eduardo Boucas. "Using media queries in CSS as part of responsive websites is bread and butter stuff to todays front-end developer. Using preprocessors to make them more comfortable to write and easier to maintain has become common practice as well..." http://css-tricks.com/approaches-media-queries-sass/ +03: EVENTS. W3C HTML5 Training February 2-March 15, 2015. Online. http://www.w3devcampus.com/html5-w3c-training/ Responsive Web Design February 6-March 16, 2015. Online. http://www.w3devcampus.com/responsive-web-design-w3c/ ConvergeSE April 15-18, 2015. Columbia, South Carolina, U.S.A. http://convergese.com/ Fluent Conference April 20-22, 2015. San Francisco, California, U.S.A. http://fluentconf.com/javascript-html-2015 Industry April 22, 2015. Newcastle upon Tyne, England, United Kingdom http://2015.industryconf.com/ Front-Trends May 6-8, 2015. Warsaw, Poland http://2015.front-trends.com/ An Event Apart Boston May 11-13, 2015. Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. http://aneventapart.com/event/boston-2015 GOTO Chicago May 11-14, 2015. Chicago, Illiois, U.S.A. http://gotocon.com/chicago-2015 +04: JAVASCRIPT. Accessible Timeout Notifications By Leonie Watson. "When a web application has a session timeout, it's a good idea to warn users about the impending timeout and give them the opportunity to do something about it. It's therefore important to make sure that all users know when the warning notification appears..." http://tink.uk/accessible-timeout-notifications/ Symbols in ECMAScript 6 By Axel Rauschmayer. "Symbols are a new primitive type in ECMAScript 6. This blog post explains how they work." http://www.2ality.com/2014/12/es6-symbols.html +05: MISCELLANEOUS. A New Microsoft Browser? By Peter-Paul Koch. "Recently the news broke that Microsoft may be working on another browser instead of IE. After reviewing the available evidence I've come to the conclusion that, although Microsoft is making a few adjustments, and a name change for IE might be a good idea, the new browser will essentially be IE12. Still, I think we web developers should support the 'new browser' narrative..." http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2014/12/a_new_microsoft.html Interactive Git Tutorials By Jacob Gube. "To be completely honest, I find Git to be a dry subject. But a version control system is essential to a modern dev workflow so I had to learn it. Any good VCS is fine but Git seems to be the most popular. So I went with Git..." http://sixrevisions.com/git/interactive-git-tutorials/ +06: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Style Guide Best Practices By Brad Frost. "Style guides and pattern libraries are essential tools to help Web teams maintain sanity while creating experiences for our multi-device Web..." http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/style-guide-best-practices/ +07: USABILITY. M-Commerce: Terrible UX (at least during Christmas 2014) By Jakob Nielsen. "Traffic and sales data collected by IBM shows that e-commerce sites had 288% higher conversion rates on desktop than on smartphones during Christmas 2014." http://www.nngroup.com/articles/m-commerce-terrible-ux/ Broken All the Way Down - Seeking Basic Information from Southwest Airlines By Jeffery Zeldman. "...Design, user experience, customer service: whatever you call it, it seems some companies will only be driven to it when it is too late." http://www.zeldman.com/2014/12/27/broken-all-the-way-down-seeking-basic-information-from-southwest-airlines/ Average Page Weight Increases 15% in 2014 By Craig Buckler. "The HTTP Archive Report collates information from almost half a million of the web's most popular websites. The latest figures indicate that average page weight has increased by 15% in one year to reach 1,953Kb - a little under 2Mb - and comprises 95 individual HTTP requests. While this is smaller than the 32% increase in 2013, it remains cause for concern..." http://www.sitepoint.com/average-page-weight-increases-15-2014/ 7 More Controversial Usability and UX predictions for 2015... By W Craig Tomlin. "My very first set of usability predictions was originally posted 5 years ago. So how did I do? And what are my more even controversial predictions for 2015?..." http://www.usefulusability.com/7-more-controversial-usability-and-ux-predictions-for-2015/ [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.]