+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 14, Issue 10, September 3, 2015. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 10 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: COLOR. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: HTML5. 08: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 09: TYPOGRAPHY. 10: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 11: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Top 10 Most Common Web Accessibility Mistakes By Ken Nakata. "In our experience helping companies ensure Web compliance, we run into 10 common accessibility mistakes. These are largely focused on the human factor of creating content instead of the framework for Web accessibility...." https://insight.cryptzone.com/accessibility/top-10-most-common-web-accessibility-mistakes/ Screen Readers on Touchscreen Devices By Katie Sherwin. "People who are blind or have low vision must rely on their memory and on a rich vocabulary of gestures to interact with touchscreen phones and tablets. Designers should strive to minimize the cognitive load for users of screen readers." http://www.nngroup.com/articles/touchscreen-screen-readers/ WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey #6 Results By WebAIM. "In July 2015, WebAIM conducted a survey of preferences of screen reader users. We received 2515 valid responses to this survey, our highest thus far. This was a follow-up survey to the original WebAIM Screen Reader User Survey of January 2009 and the follow-up surveys from October 2009, December 2010, May 2012, and January 2014..." http://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey6/ The Resurgence of ZoomText and Window-Eyes By Jared Smith. "These survey results suggest that those of us in the web accessibility field may need to reconsider our perceptions of screen reader users - the typical user may be different than our own interactions and experience suggest." http://webaim.org/blog/resurgence-of-zoomtext-and-window-eyes/ Accessibility - Beyond the Screen Reader By Denis Boudreau. "...there are precisely 6.30769239 times as many people who have low vision than there are people who are blind. This ratio is staggering. Why, then, are designers and developers still focusing mostly on screen reader compatibility?..." http://www.creativebloq.com/web-design/accessibility-beyond-screen-reader-91516540 Audio Description for Media and Live Performance (Video) By Martin Wilde. Video of Martin Wilde's July 21, 2015 Chicago Web Accessibility & Inclusive Design Meetup presentation. (1 hour) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAb8jRMObRM Standards for Audio Description and Code of Professional Conduct for Describers (PDF) By Audio Description Coalition. "Audio description helps to ensure that people who are blind or have low vision enjoy equal access to cultural events by providing the essential visual information." http://www.audiodescriptioncoalition.org/adc_standards_090615.pdf The Legal Ramifications of Inaccessible Websites By Beatrice Schmidt. "...For the last forty years the federal government has increasingly mandated that businesses ensure that the content posted on their websites is accessible to people with disabilities. The evolution of making information & communication technologies - namely websites - more accessible dates back to 1973 when the Rehabilitation Act was signed into law..." http://www.viscardicenter.org/resources/blog/inaccessible-websites.html +02: BOOKS Watson, Leonie et al. Practical Approaches For Designing Accessible Websites, Smashing Magazine GmbH, 2015 (ISBN (EPUB: 978-3-945749-23-4). +03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Modern CSS Layout, Power and Responsibility By Rachel Andrew. "...With this power comes great responsibility. For just as it will be possible for a developer to start out with a beautifully semantic, well structured document and use Grid and Flexbox to meet the design requirements, it will be possible for them to stop caring about the document structure at all. Worse, I believe there will be a strong temptation, especially with Grid, to flatten out document structure in order that all elements become a child of the element with the Grid declared. Making layout simple, but at what cost?.." https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2015/07/28/modern-css-layout-power-and-responsibility/ Alternatives to Floating By Ire Aderinokun. "The primary reason I tend to avoid floatings is because floated elements don't always work well with sibling elements that are not also floated..." http://bitsofco.de/2015/alternatives-to-floating/ Responsive Images Pt. 1 (Video) By Mat Marquis. "Websites are heavier than ever, and the vast majority of that increase in weight can be attributed to images. High-resolution displays combined with responsive sites that try to serve the same image to all screens only compound the problem..." (4.55 minutes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJLl6MSHDr4 Responsive Images Pt. 2 (Video) By Yoav Weiss. "The new srcset, sizes and picture standards (introduced in part 1) give developers the ability to selectively load the most appropriate images for each browser, providing a big boost for performance. This video, written by Yoav Weiss (@yoavweiss), walks through each of the three standards and explains when and how to use them..." (4.5 minutes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WwgQ0LGRnR8 +04: COLOR Colour Contrast Determinator (beta) By Pierre Frederiksen. "We've developed a new online tool to help you find colour combinations that have sufficient contrast. With scaling features for hue, saturation and lightness, this tool doesn't just test colour combinations, it determines them.." http://www.visionaustralia.org/digital-access-determinator +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. My Approach to Mobile Accessibility Testing By Helen Burge. "When I get asked by team members about mobile accessibility, I am often asked how difficult it is compared to desktop accessibility testing. Often the questions indicate how many assume that mobile accessibility is a completely different beast to traditional functional and accessibility software testing. This has prompted me to write this quick summary to help clarify how I approach mobile accessibility testing, and how it only requires a few tweaks to desktop testing successfully perform audits..." http://www.ministryoftesting.com/2015/09/my-approach-to-mobile-accessibility-testing/ 3 Tips for Testing Sketches and Flows with Users By Jennifer Winter. "Testing with users should begin the moment you've got an idea or concept in mind. You probably already have a few sketches or flows drawn out on paper or a whiteboard and that's exactly what you should be testing...." https://www.usertesting.com/blog/2015/08/27/3-tips-for-testing-sketches-and-flows-with-users/ +06: EVENTS. Open Source and Feelings October 2-3, 2015. Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. http://osfeels.com/ ConveyUX 2016 February 9-11, 2016. Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. http://conveyux.com/ Fluent March 8-10, 2016. San Francisco, California, U.S.A. http://conferences.oreilly.com/fluent-javascript-html-ca South by Southwest Interactive March 11-15, 2016. Austin, Texas, U.S.A. http://www.sxsw.com/interactive +07: HTML5. HTML5 Video Accessibility: Updates, Features, & Guidelines (Video) By John Foliot. "What are the best practices for making web-based video and audio accessible? In this webinar, John Foliot, a video accessibility expert and contributor to the W3C's new Media Accessibility User Requirements (MAUR), will go over the latest updates to HTML5 video as well as new guidelines for making media accessible on the web." (1 hour 9 minutes) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCmyKP9MFTg ARIA in HTML Steve Faulkner, Editor. "This specification defines the web developer rules (author conformance requirements) for the use of [wai-aria-1.1] attributes on [HTML51] elements. It also defines requirements for Conformance Checking tools..." http://www.w3.org/TR/html-aria/ +08: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Test Paper Prototypes to Save Time and Money - The Mozilla Case Study By Susan Farrell. "Low-fidelity user testing of several iterations of Mozilla's Support website quickly showed which user-interface elements worked best for Firefox users." http://www.nngroup.com/articles/mozilla-paper-prototype/ +09: TYPOGRAPHY. CSS Properties to Control Web Typography By Maria Antonietta Perna. "Web typography has the advantage of drawing on the wealth of knowledge belonging to the centuries-old tradition of print typography. By the same token, that tradition carries with it standards of best practices and excellence that web typography is called on to live up to..." http://www.sitepoint.com/css-properties-to-control-web-typography/ +10: USABILITY. Writing Content for Responsive Design By Dey Alexander. "If you're writing for the web, you're writing for responsive design. Or you soon will be. In this article, we offer some tips to get your content working well on a range of screen sizes and orientations..." http://www.4syllables.com.au/2015/08/writing-responsive-content/ How to Write a Great Error Message By Thomas Fuchs. "...Your job as product manager, designer or developer of an app is to recognize that writing copy in your app is not something that you can just do on the side. It's just as important as having the application work correctly and the user interface being easy and efficient to use..." https://medium.com/@thomasfuchs/how-to-write-an-error-message-883718173322 Ashley Madison and the Power of Traditional Marketing By Gerry McGovern. "...We all know about banner blindness. (You are as likely to get hit by lightning as click on a banner ad.) Increasingly, we are also finding that traditional hero shot imagery actually reduces people's trust in a website. Deceptive advertising has been used for so long that more and more people are not simply becoming immune to it-they are becoming allergic to it." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/new-thinking/ashley-madison-and-power-traditional-marketing [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +11: 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.]