+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 15, Issue 01, July 01, 2016. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 01 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: DREAMWEAVER. 06: EVALUATION & TESTING. 07: EVENTS. 08: HTML5. 09: JAVASCRIPT. 10: MISCELLANEOUS. 11: NAVIGATION. 12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 13: TYPOGRAPHY. 14: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Higher Education Accessibility Online Resource Center By National Federation of the Blind. "This online resource includes examples of digital accessibility policies, legal requirements, and links to accessibility standards and procurement policies..." https://nfb.org/higher-education-accessibility-online-resource-center Give Your Site Some Focus! Tips for Designing Useful and Usable Focus Indicators By Caitlin Geier. "Have you ever noticed the blue outlines that sometimes show up around buttons or form fields when you're filling out a form?..." http://www.deque.com/blog/give-site-focus-tips-designing-usable-focus-indicators/ Accessibility Basics Series #8 Q&A - Focus Control By Kim Phillips. "Last week's presentation in our Accessibility Basics Webinar Series covered best practices for Focus Control..." http://www.ssbbartgroup.com/blog/accessibility-basics-series-8-qa-focus-control/ Settlements Reached in Seven States, One Territory to Ensure Website Accessibility for People with Disabilities By Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights "...OCR had received complaints involving each of the organizations, resulting in investigations. But before OCR had completed its probes, each of the 11 parties expressed interest in resolving their cases voluntarily, resulting in the agreements announced today..." https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/settlements-reached-seven-states-one-territory-ensure-website-accessibility-people-disabilities Inclusivity, Gestalt Principles, and Plain Language in Document Design By Jennifer Turner and Jessica Schomberg. "Improving document usability requires a basic understanding of accessibility and Universal Design for Learning, plus a few simple tips found in Gestalt and plain language principles. Using Gestalt principles helps connect concepts within the document in a coherent way..." http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2016/accessibility/ Creating Accessable Documents (Video) By Trent Learning System. "Hello. Welcome to this session on creating accessibile documents in Microsoft Word..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FHhUS1X9hg Web Audits Reveal the Five Most Common Accessibility Issues By Philip Jenkinson. "...The most common problems are not providing an alternative for non-text content, having a lack of captions and audio descriptions for multimedia, not providing enough colour contrast with foreground and background colours, having the link text on a page that isn't very descriptive and also having a lack of instructions on labels and forms..." http://www.accessiq.org/news/features/2016/06/web-audits-reveal-the-five-most-common-accessibility-issues 9 Tools for Website Accessibility Testing By Simon Heaton. "While the following tools cannot entirely determine whether or not your site is accessible (this can only be truly accomplished through human assessment), they can help you on your path to accessibility by severely cutting down the time and effort it would take to implement a thorough evaluation..." https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/website-accessibility-testing +02: BOOKS. Pickering, Heydon. Inclusive Design Patterns, Smashing Magazine, 2016. +03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Media Queries Fun #1 By Daniel Glazman. "So one of the painful bits when you have UI-based management of Media Queries is the computation of what to display in that UI. No, it's not as simple as browsing all your stylesheets and style rules to retrieve only the media attribute of the CSS OM objects... Let's take a very concrete example..." http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2016/06/29/Media-Queries-fun-1 Introducing the CSS text-align-last Property By Nitish Kumar. "This tutorial will cover all the aspects of the text-align-last property including acceptable values, support and browser specific behavior." https://www.sitepoint.com/introducing-the-css-text-align-last-property/ +04: COLOR. How Layout Bugs Keeping Haunting E-Commerce Sites - It's Time to Fix This By Jamie Appleseed. "Amazon uses beautiful large lifestyle images in multiple of their categories. Unfortunately, when scaled down on their mobile site there's severe contrast issues with white text overlaid images, making it almost impossible to read some of the sub-category options..." http://baymard.com/blog/ecommerce-layout-bugs +05: DREAMWEAVER. See How Dreamweaver is Transforming for the Future By Rich Lee. "...Dreamweaver is undergoing its biggest transformation ever to become faster, leaner and completely modernized for anyone who works with code..." http://blogs.adobe.com/dreamweaver/2016/06/see-how-dreamweaver-is-transforming-for-the-future.html +06: EVALUATION & TESTING. Heuristic Evaluation and Identifying Usability Problems By Jake Rocheleau. "...After staring at a design long enough you start to lose sight of smaller troubles with the interface. This is where a fresh set of eyes can come in handy - but what if you don't have any fresh eyes available? Heuristic evaluations are the next best thing, and in this post I'll explain how they work so you can start incorporating them into your own design projects..." http://www.vandelaydesign.com/heuristic-evaluation/ We Test with International Audiences By Katie Sherwin. "Designs that incorporate local nuances of international markets benefit organizations and their customers. Even small-scale studies can lead to insights that improve designs and increase trust." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/cultural-nuances/ The Importance of User Testing By Robyn Collinge. "The article goes into detail about how Icons8 developed and promoted their 'Request Icon' feature; the intended goal was to replace an old design, making it simpler and more modern, while continuing to drive conversions. However, after the redesign, the company found that almost 50% fewer users were requesting icons even though their overall website traffic remained the same..." http://blog.usabilla.com/importance-user-testing/ Essential Excel Skills For Researchers Part 1 By Jeff Sauro. "This is the first of two articles on using Excel for data analysis..." http://www.measuringu.com/blog/excel-1.php Essential Excel Skills For Researchers Part 2 By Jeff Sauro. "Excel is an invaluable tool for analyzing and displaying data. In Part 1 I covered some essentials Excel skills, such as conditionals, absolute references and the fill handle. In this second part I'll cover a few more advanced functionalities that mimic database manipulations..." http://www.measuringu.com/blog/excel-2.php +07: EVENTS. Forge Conference September 26, 2016. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. http://www.forgeconf.com/ Paris Web 2016 September 29-October 1, 2016. Paris, France http://www.paris-web.fr/ The 2016 Boston Accessibility Conference October 1, 2016. Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. http://a11y-bos.org/ Fronteers Conference October 6-7, 2016. Amsterdam, The Netherlands https://fronteers.nl/congres/2016 Full Stack Toronto October 17-18, 2016. Toronto, Canada http://fsto.co/ +08: HTML5. Talking About Hypertext By Jeremy Keith. "I've just published a transcript of the talk I gave at the HTML Special...PPK wanted each speaker to give an entire talk on just one HTML element. He offered me the best element of them all: the A element..." https://adactio.com/journal/10890 Autofill: What Web Devs Should Know, but Don't By Jason Grigsby. "Many people know that you can scan your credit credit in Mobile Safari. But how many web developers know how to create a form that supports that feature?..." http://blog.cloudfour.com/autofill-what-web-devs-should-know-but-dont/ MarkSheet By Jeremy Thomas. A HTML and CSS tutorial http://marksheet.io/ +09: JAVASCRIPT. A Proposal for Unambiguous JavaScript Grammar By John-David Dalton and Bradley Meck. "A well-informed proposal to resolve standing issues over whether JavaScript files are treated as regular scripts or modules..." https://github.com/bmeck/UnambiguousJavaScriptGrammar/blob/master/README.md +10: MISCELLANEOUS. Making Bad Ads Sad. Rad! (Video) By Bruce Lawson. "Bruce Lawson explores how the whole advertising ecosystem can (hopefully) improve." https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/making-bad-ads-sad-rad +11: NAVIGATION. Hamburger Menus and Hidden Navigation Hurt UX Metrics By Kara Pernice and Raluca Budiu. "Discoverability is cut almost in half by hiding a website's main navigation. Also, task time is longer and perceived task difficulty increases." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/ Hamburger Menus and Hidden Navigation Damage UX By Lee Duddell. "A joint NN/g and WhatUsersDo research project concludes that discoverability is cut almost in half by hiding a website’s main navigation. Also, task time is longer and perceived task difficulty increases..." http://whatusersdo.com/blog/hamburger-menus-damage-ux/ +12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Web Standards Project: Re-ignited! By Molly E. Holzschlag. "Insofar as WaSP, the initial focus action I have put together is to 'bring about an iterative set of professional standards, codes of conduct and ethics to the Web design and development industry'..." http://hyperverbal.org/world-wide-web/web-standards-project-re-ignited/ Perspectives on Security Research, Consensus and W3C Process By Coralie Mercier. "Linux Weekly News published a recent story called 'Encrypted Media Extensions and exit conditions', Cory Doctorow followed by publishing 'W3C DRM working group chairman vetoes work on protecting security researchers and competition'..." https://www.w3.org/blog/2016/06/perspectives-on-security-research-consensus-and-w3c-process/ +13: TYPOGRAPHY. Typography for User Interfaces By Viljami Salminen. "...In this article, I want to share some of the fundamentals that I've learned, and hopefully help you get better at setting type for user interfaces..." https://viljamis.com/2016/typography-for-user-interfaces/ +15: USABILITY. What's the Best Way to Manage Lean UX? A Q&A with Jakob Nielsen By Lee Duddell. "Getting members of your team involved in the design process in a Lean UX environment can be extremely valuable...and potentially hard to manage. So, as part of our ongoing Q&A series, I posed the following question to Jakob Nielsen.." http://whatusersdo.com/blog/manage-lean-ux/ How to Speed Up Your UX with Skeleton Screens By Chris Lienert. "However well-designed your user interface may be, at some point or other, the people using it are going to have to wait for something to load..." https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-speed-up-your-ux-with-skeleton-screens/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +15: 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.]