+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 13, Issue 33, February 12, 2015. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 33 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: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: TYPOGRAPHY. 09: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 10: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Math is Hard. People with Disabilities Matter By Sarah Horton. "When I first started advocating for web accessibility in design and development projects I was drawn to the argument that accessibility wasn't about people with disabilities, but rather about people, and that designing to meet the needs of people with disabilities would improve things for everyone..." https://medium.com/@gradualclearing/math-is-hard-people-with-disabilities-matter-a393812d2927#45ef Why Do We Need WCAG Level AAA? By Luke McGrath. "My philosophy for complying with WCAG is always the same – aim for Level AA plus all Level AAA guidelines you can reasonably meet. Really, claiming a certain level is meaningless. What matters is your website is the best it can be for all your users..." https://www.wuhcag.com/wcag-level-aaa/ Keyboard Accessibility with the Space Bar By Ted Drake. "Keyboard accessibility is critical for your users that depend on voice recognition, onscreen keyboards, screen readers, ergonomic accessories, and your power users that prefer to avoid grabbing the mouse for every task. Most people test to make sure every interactive element can receive focus via the tab key and that buttons and links work with the enter key. We've gotten pretty good at making sure links have href attributes and using role='button' on our pseudo-buttons..." http://www.last-child.com/keyboard-accessibility-with-the-space-bar/ Mobile Application and Web Accessibility By Tim Lohman. "Smartphone, tablet and other mobile device usage has soared, but the standards to make mobile apps accessible are lagging behind..." http://www.accessiq.org/news/features/2015/02/mobile-application-and-web-accessibility Mobile Accessibility - How WCAG 2.0 and Other W3C-WAI Guidelines Apply to Mobile By Kim Patch, Jeanne Spellman, and Kathy Wahlbin Editors "This document, 'Mobile Accessibility: How WCAG 2.0 and Other W3C-WAI Guidelines Apply to Mobile' describes how the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 [WCAG20] and its principles, guidelines, and success criteria can be applied to mobile web content, mobile web apps, native apps, and hybrid apps using web components inside native apps. It provides informative guidance, but does not set requirements. It also highlights the relevance of the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 [UAAG20] in the mobile context. This document is intended to become a Working Group Note and is part of a series of technical and educational documents published by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)..." http://w3c.github.io/Mobile-A11y-TF-Note/ Making Real Progress in Digital Accessibility in Higher Education By David Sloan. "We were delighted to see the University of Colorado at Boulder recently announce the appointment of a Chief Digital Accessibility Officer, and also announce recruitment for an IT Accessibility Manager. The TPG UX team has been working with CU-Boulder for the past few months to help them create a roadmap and strategy towards a culture and practice of excellence in digital accessibility, and we're really excited to see their thoughtfulness, enthusiasm and determination in taking such a progressive approach, documented on their Accessible Technology web site..." http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2015/02/making-progress-in-digital-accessibility-in-higher-education/ Is Accessibility a Supply or Demand Issue? By Mike Paciello. "Jim Tobias has me thinking….Is the 508 Refresh delay a Supply (Industry) or a Demand (Government) issue? For years I've been advocating for economic stimulus and price subsidies - Federal/State sponsored rebates, grants, and refundable credits. Long term investment in the underlying technology, open source systems, applications and architecture to improve cost structure thereby generating organic market competition..." http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2015/02/is-accessibility-a-supply-or-demand-issue/ Captioning Videos in Facebook By Facebook. "You can include captions with your video by uploading a SubRip (.srt) file with it. To add captions in other languages, you can edit your video and upload an additional SubRip file for each new language. Each SubRip file must be saved using the format.." https://www.facebook.com/help/261764017354370 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Easy Textures with CSS Masks By Jeremy Frank. "...There are a few different ways to achieve this effect in today's browsers, from CSS background-clip and mask-image, to SVG , and , and even canvas. Each have their own varying levels of support and implementation peculiarities; however, one of these rises above the rest in terms of its ease of implementation and flexibility of use..." http://viget.com/inspire/easy-textures-with-css-masks Gradient List Bullets By Eric A. Meyer. "CSS gradients are kind of fun. I know, they're a little clumsy at first, but I've found that with just a little practice, you can hand-author them without more than a brief refresher course on exactly how to structure the first part. At least for me, as long as I can get the setup right, the color stops are a breeze..." http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2015/02/09/gradient-list-bullets/ Why I Don't Use Compass Anymore Hugo Giraudel. "Yet, about a year ago or so, I stopped using Compass altogether. I removed it from our project at work. I removed it from my own site. I removed it from most of my side projects. So what happened? How could I move from “Compass is the best” to “I don’t need it anymore”? I think I just got better and more confident with Sass, to a point where Compass did not bring much to the table anymore. At least, it was not enough to be worth including it in a project, especially given that it slows Ruby Sass, already quite slow in itself..." http://www.sitepoint.com/dont-use-compass-anymore/ +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Choosing Your Usability Tests and Participants By Jerry Cao. "...Once your goals are clear, you're ready to hone your test planning to meet those specific goals..." http://www.sitepoint.com/choosing-usability-tests-participants/ Getting to Know Your Data Types By Jeff Sauro. "... In practice, we've found that once you identify your data as quantitative, you need to know mainly whether you're working with continuous or discrete binary data to determine the best statistical test and method for finding the sample size. So while it's good to understand how data can get classified, especially when having discussions with other numerically minded stakeholders, don't get too caught up in the measurement classifications. Make sure that more effort is spent on doing something about the data you collect than on just classifying it..." http://www.measuringu.com/blog/data-types.php +05: EVENTS. Usability Week San Diego February 23-27, 2015. San Diego, California, U.S.A. http://www.nngroup.com/training/san-diego/ Usability Week Washington, DC March 15-20, 2015. Washington, DC, U.S.A. http://www.nngroup.com/training/DC/ Usability Week San Francisco April 18-24, 2015. http://www.nngroup.com/training/san-francisco/ San Francisco, California, U.S.A. Usability Week London May 16-22, 2015. London, England, United Kingdom http://www.nngroup.com/training/london/ +05: HTML5. HTML5 Canvas Sub DOM By Steve Faulkner. "All modern browser implement the HTML5 specification's canvas element fallback concept. This means that the content inside a canvas elements start and end tags is exposed to assistive technology users even when the browser supports canvas. It also means that any interactive elements, inside a canvas elements start and end tags such as links or form controls will be included in a documents default tab order even when the browser supports canvas..." http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2015/02/html5-canvas-sub-dom/ Flipboard - React Canvas Accessibility By Steve Faulkner. "Flipboard announced yesterday that they are using HTML5 canvas to improve performance on mobile devices. This has accessibility ramifications..." http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2015/02/flipboard-react-canvas-accessibility/ HTML Plan By Sam Ruby, Paul Cotton, Philippe Le Hegaret, and Robin Berjon. "...the time has come to reorganise the HTML WG's operation in the manner most conducive to improving the Web. The core ideas behind this reorganisation were published in the 'After5' plan, much of which has already been deployed..." http://darobin.github.io/after5/html-plan.html +06: JAVASCRIPT. Variables and Scoping in ECMAScript 6 By Axel Rauschmayer. "This blog post examines how variables and scoping are handled in ECMAScript 6..." http://www.2ality.com/2015/02/es6-scoping.html +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Why You Need to Know About Online Accessibility with Dennis Lembree By Nicole Krug. "Every once in a while a story surfaces involving a company that is forced to pay out big bucks because their website isn't accessible to people with disabilities. People shake their heads and say 'bad company,' but may not actually understand what online accessibility is and what they need to do to make their own websites more accessible. To remedy that, I asked online accessibility expert, Dennis Lembree, to be a guest and talk about what it means to be accessible..." http://sociallight.net/online-accessibility-dennis-lembree/ Experience Development pt. 1: Universal Access with Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery By Tim Wright. "This week we kick off the start of a new series entitled Experience Development where we look at the coding side of UX. This week's topic is: Universal Access. We sit down with the co-authors of Rosenfeld Media's A Web for Everyone, Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery to talk about digital accessibility..." http://www.freshtilledsoil.com/experience-dev-universal-access/ Why do We Need PDFs? By Tom Johnson. "I've never been a fan of PDFs, but PDF output is usually a requirement someone invariably brings up for documentation. In some cases, often for unstated reasons, users will ask for a PDF, and product managers expect technical writers to deliver one.." http://idratherbewriting.com/2015/02/05/why-do-we-need-pdfs/ +08: TYPOGRAPHY. Windows Substitutes Helvetica for Arial By Jonathan Snook. "I just ran into this issue today and honestly a little surprised I haven't run into it before..." http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/windows-subs-helvetica-arial +09: USABILITY. Radical Redesign or Incremental Change? By Hoa Loranger. "Before you throw out the old and bring in the new, make sure you have solid evidence that doing so is necessary to achieve user-centered goals..." http://www.nngroup.com/articles/radical-incremental-redesign/ Improve Validation Errors with Adaptive Messages By Jamie Appleseed. "Form validation errors are inevitable. Yes, they can (and should) be minimized, but validation errors won't ever be eliminated – they are a natural part of complex forms and user's data input. The key question then is how to make it easy for the user to recover from form errors..." http://baymard.com/blog/adaptive-validation-error-messages Does Agile Methodology Lead to Poor Interface Design? By Marcus Lillington. "There has been a lot of finger pointing at frameworks such as Bootstrap for an apparent depreciation in design standards lately. But, I think that Agile methodologies have something to answer for as well..." http://headscape.co.uk/design/agile-methodology-design/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +10: 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.]