+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 15, Issue 20, November 10, 2016. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 20 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: DRUPAL. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: HTML5. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: NAVIGATION. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TYPOGRAPHY. 11: USABILITY. 12: XML. SECTION TWO: 13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Why WCAG is Not Enough By Susanna Laurin. "It's leaning towards legislation on web accessibility in the EU. More and more countries point out WCAG 2.0 level AA as the 'right' level of accessibility. But what does conformance with these guidelines actually signify for the end user?..." http://www.funka.com/en/about-funka/ceos-corner/why-wcag-isnt-enough/ How to Describe Complex Designs for Users with Disabilities By Jesse Hausler. "...It's now up to you to build an accessible experience, but where should you begin?..." https://medium.com/salesforce-ux/how-to-describe-complex-designs-for-users-with-disabilities-ba05f5224130 A Blind Person Loaded Your Website, You Won't Believe What Happens Next By Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent. "This is probably what happens...That's right: nothing (or at best, a random stream of nonsensical information)..." https://medium.com/@kaelig/a-blind-person-loaded-your-website-you-wont-believe-what-happens-next-b69f0853b301 Making the Web Accessible for Everyone With Inclusive Design and Diverse Personas By Graeme Fulton. "The importance of creating a web that is accessible to anyone and everyone has always been emphasised by the inventor of the World Wide Web itself..." https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/making-the-web-accessible-for-everyone-with-inclusive-design-and-diverse-personas--cms-27505 The Audience You Didn't Know You Had By Angela Colter. "...if your target audience includes the general public, you may want to consider that nearly half of them may have low literacy skills..." http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/the-audience-you-didnt-know-you-had/ Uniting the Digital Divide between the Deaf, Hard of Hearing, & Hearing with Accessible Captioning By Debra Ruh. "I have had the pleasure to work in the Disability Inclusion field for many years. My daughter Sara Ruh, now 29 years old, was born with Down syndrome..." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/58137ed7e4b09b190529c3b8 New Era for Disability Rights By Carl Straumsheim. "As higher education turns increasingly digital, disability rights advocates turn to legal measures -- and an attentive Justice Department -- to address the challenges facing students with disabilities..." https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/11/07/disability-rights-advocates-shift-strategies-ensure-equal-rights-digital-age 2016 in Review: Web Accessibility Legal Trends and Case Updates By Patrick Loftus. "...we decided to outline main takeaways in this blog post to help make the legal year a bit more digestible to our readers..." http://www.3playmedia.com/2016/10/12/2016-in-review-web-accessibility-legal-trends-and-case-updates/ NAD Lawsuit Against Harvard and MIT Moves Forward, Obligation to Ensure Equal Treatment Applies in Emerging Technologies By Jean Peterson. "...Today's decision affirms that plaintiffs' case will be going forward..." https://creeclaw.org/nad-lawsuit-against-harvard-and-mit-moves-forward/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Grid, Flexbox And Box Alignment: Our New System For Web Layout By Rachel Andrew. "Layout on the web is hard. The reason it is so hard is that the layout methods we've relied on ever since using CSS for layout became possible were not really designed for complex layout..." https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/11/css-grids-flexbox-and-box-alignment-our-new-system-for-web-layout/ CSS Architecture for Design Systems By Brad Frost. "...I thought it would be great to share how we went about creating our system's CSS architecture..." http://bradfrost.com/blog/post/css-architecture-for-design-systems/ Things I've Learned About CSS Grid Layout By Oliver Williams. "The following is a guest post by Oliver Williams. Oliver has been working with CSS grid layout and has learned quite a bit along the way. In this article he's going to hop around to different concepts that he's learned on that journey. I like this idea of learning little bite-sized chunks about grid layout, through isolated examples where possible. That makes learning the whole thing a bit less intimidating." https://css-tricks.com/things-ive-learned-css-grid-layout/ How and Why You Should Inline Your Critical CSS By Asha Laxmi. "...One thing that developers can do which helps greatly is to inline critical CSS and load non-critical CSS asynchronously. In this article, we'll cover these points one-by-one and help you improve your website's performance..." https://www.sitepoint.com/how-and-why-you-should-inline-your-critical-css/ +03: DRUPAL. Future Directions for Drupal Accessibility (Video) By Andrew Macpherson. Andrew Macpherson's DrupalCon Dublin 2016 talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD5vBC5Ttx4 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. The Origins And Evolution Of Thinking Aloud By Jeff Sauro. "...To better understand both the method and its application, it helps to know where it came from and how it's evolved. And like the field of User Experience in general, the roots of thinking aloud has its genesis in other fields with over a century of history and evolution..." http://www.measuringu.com/blog/thinking-aloud.php Awaken the Champion A/B Tester Within By Yael Tolub. "Athletes capture and analyze data to optimize their performance. A/B testing can produce winners the same way: with data that goes beyond best guesses via behavioral analysis to extract deeper insights." http://alistapart.com/article/awaken-the-champion-a-b-tester-within 5 Ways To Increase Study Participation Rates By Jeff Sauro. "...Here are five approaches you can use to get the right people to participate in your studies..." http://www.measuringu.com/blog/study-participate.php +05: EVENTS. World Usability Day at the University of Minnesota November 10, 2016. Schedule: http://it.umn.edu/usability-services/news/world-usability-day-2016-november-10 Streamed live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjlLL-uWf4U Professional Web Accessibility Auditing Made Easy November 14 - December 12, 2016. Online https://de.ryerson.ca/wa/ Accessibility Summit March 24-25, 2017. Online http://accessibilitysummit.org/ An Event Apart Seattle April 3-5, 2017. Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. https://aneventapart.com/event/seattle-2017 WWW2017 April 3-7, 2017. Perth, Australia http://www.www2017.com.au/ +06: HTML5. HTML 5.1 is a W3C Recommendation By W3C. "The Web Platform Working Group has published a W3C Recommendation of HTML 5.1." https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/5932 The Lost Art of HTML By Shaun Rashid. "...Building a good foundation using HTML is like building a good foundation for a house. Without it, you run the risk of having to deal with issues that are difficult and expensive to fix later on..." http://shaunrashid.com/2016/10/31/the-lost-art-of-html/ +07: JAVASCRIPT. Are We Relying Too Much on JavaScript? By Mark DuBois. "...One nagging question keeps coming to my mind - are we preventing access for some (because of reliance on these frameworks)..." http://webprofessionals.org/relying-much-javascript/ +08: NAVIGATION. Cards: UI-Component Definition By Page Laubheimer. "A 'card' is a UI design pattern that groups related information in a flexible-size container visually resembling a playing card." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/cards-component/ The Golden Rules Of Bottom Navigation Design By Nick Babich. "...In this post, we'll help you better understand the principles of good navigation for mobile apps, then show you how it's done using two popular patterns..." https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/11/the-golden-rules-of-mobile-navigation-design/ +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Why Do Semantics Matter? (Video) By Rob Dodson. "I thought it'd be cool to talk about this idea of semantics, and really why semantics matter in accessibility, and how they affect screen readers..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2tzEil5TL0 +10: TYPOGRAPHY. Web Fonts, Boy, I Don't Know By Monica Dinculescu. "...Web fonts are okay. They make your blog prettier. They're also slow and kind of an annoying experience, but if you need to use them, use them. Just remember that it's also your responsibility to make your site load super fast..." http://meowni.ca/posts/web-fonts/ +11: USABILITY. Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules Will Help You Design Better Interfaces By Euphemia Wong. "...1. Strive for consistency... 2. Enable frequent users to use shortcuts... 3. Offer informative feedback... 4. Design dialogue to yield closure... 5. Offer simple error handling... 6. Permit easy reversal of actions... 7. Support internal locus of control... 8...Reduce short-term memory load..." https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/shneiderman-s-eight-golden-rules-will-help-you-design-better-interfaces Choice Paralysis: 3 Ways the Number of Choices Impacts Conversions By Marc Schenker. "Maybe you've heard of a phenomenon called choice or analysis paralysis..." http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2016/11/choice-paralysis-3-ways-the-number-of-choices-impacts-conversions/ Are Chinese Websites Too Complex? By Yunnuo Cheng and Jakob Nielsen. "Testing finds that Chinese and Western users experience the same difficulties with complex sites, but Chinese tend to complain less about complexity and prefer fairly high information density." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/china-website-complexity/ A Quick Guide For Designing Better Buttons By Nick Babich. "In today's article, we'll be covering the essential items you need to know in order to create effective controls that improve user experience..." https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/11/a-quick-guide-for-designing-better-buttons/ Why It's Time to Prioritize Visual Content By Paul Boag. "You should never underestimate the power of visual content. Whether you have a website, or a blog, the visuals you choose are key to your marketing strategy. If you're wondering how you can improve your image selection today, you've come to the right place..." https://boagworld.com/design/time-prioritize-visual-content/ +16: XML. SVG Accessibility By Léonie Watson and Chaals McCathie Nevile. Léonie and Chaals's presentation slides from the Graphical Web conference. http://ljwatson.github.io/decks/2016/graphicalweb/index.html [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +17: 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.]