+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 15, Issue 40, March 30, 2017. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 40 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: COLOR. 04: DRUPAL. 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: HTML5. 08: JAVASCRIPT. 09: MISCELLANEOUS. 10: NAVIGATION. 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. Focus Ring! (Video) By Rob Dodson. "Have you ever noticed the little blue or dashed ring that appears around elements when you activate them with your keyboard or mouse?..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilj2P5-5CjI Dementia and Inclusive Digital Design (Video) By Lily Williams and Mark Walker. "Our ageing population means that conditions such as Dementia and Alzheimer's are increasingly common. This webinar explores the impact memory impairment can have on the way we design and deliver the growing number of digital services such as apps and websites." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZmHRrfBPKE CSUN 2017: Developer Versus User By Hans Hillen. "For our CSUN session this year, Léonie Watson and I had a friendly debate about accessibility from the perspective of an end user and a developer..." https://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2017/03/slides-csun-2017-developer-versus-user/ CSUN17 - What Comes After WCAG 2.1? By Jeanne Spellman. "A small group of members of AGWG realized that we needed to start planning future versions of WCAG now, or it would be a very long time before a major upgrade would be completed..." https://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2017/03/slides-csun17-what-comes-after-wcag-2-1/ WCAG 2.0 Level A and Level AA Success Criteria Success Criterion and Corresponding 508 Reference By Access Board. Where is WCAG in Section 508 Refresh? - "Table A-1 lists WCAG 2.0 Level A and Level AA Success Criteria and describes what is required to ensure that each criterion is satisfied in the context of an HTML-coded Web site, as well as the corresponding current Section 508 reference or notation of a new reference, as applicable..." https://www.access-board.gov/guidelines-and-standards/communications-and-it/about-the-ict-refresh/final-regulatory-impact-analysis#_Toc471376905 Top Online Retailers Tested for Accessibility By Jordana Jeffrey. "...Online retail could be the ideal solution for those who suffer physical difficulties when shopping in store and most retailers had a reassuring accessibility statements full of good intentions but they need to act further on this by implementing WCAG 2.0 to significantly improve accessibility..." https://www.wuhcag.com/top-online-retailers-tested-for-accessibility/ Federal Court in Los Angeles Dismisses Website Accessibility Claims By David Raizman. "...Grounded in the due process violation, the court dismissed the action without prejudice under the primary jurisdiction doctrine, holding that the case should not be prosecuted 'pending the resolution of an issue within the special competence of an administrative agency,' which, in this case, is the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)..." http://ogletree.com/shared-content/content/blog/2017/march/federal-court-in-los-angeles-dismisses-website-accessibility-claims Navigating Website Accessibility Claims By Mark S. Sidoti, Mitchell Boyarsky and Ahmed J. Kassim. "Increasingly, companies face threat of legal action based on the claim that their websites and/or mobile applications are inaccessible to disabled users..." http://m.newyorklawjournal.com/?slreturn=20170324012841/#/article/1202781633698/Navigating-Website-Accessibility-Claims Public Accommodations are Starting to Win Website Accessibility Lawsuits By Minh Vu & Julia N. Sarnoff. "Two recent decisions by federal judges to dismiss website accessibility lawsuits may cause more public accommodations to fight instead of settle these suits, but businesses must continue to weigh many factors before making that decision..." http://www.adatitleiii.com/2017/03/public-accommodations-are-starting-to-win-website-accessibility-lawsuits/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS is Broken (Hat Tip to Jennifer Sutton) By Sergio Zamarro. "Yes, CSS is broken. Anyone who has used CSS in a big project knows it. Some of the problems are these..." https://medium.com/@zamarrowski/css-is-broken-5138773e17a5 CSS is Not Broken (Hat Tip to Jennifer Sutton) By Keith J. Grant. "...Just because you expect CSS to be easy, doesn't mean the language is broken when you find it is not..." http://keithjgrant.com/posts/2017/03/css-is-not-broken/ Five CSS Performance Tools to Speed up Your Website By Maria Antonietta Perna. "In this article, I'm going to list five CSS performance tools that will help you put your website on a CSS diet for a fast loading experience..." https://www.sitepoint.com/five-css-performance-tools-speed-website/ Practical CSS Grid: Adding Grid to an Existing Design By Eric A. Meyer. "Understanding and using Grid is easier than you might expect..." https://alistapart.com/article/practical-grid +03: COLOR. Graphics Contrast By Alastair Campbell. "There are many new, potential guidelines (success criteria) up for review as part of the WCAG 2.1 work and I'd like to provide an overview of one of them: Graphics Contrast..." https://alastairc.ac/2017/03/graphics-contrast/ a11y in Real Life: Credit Cards and Color Contrast By Adam Soucie. "...How do we solve this problem in our website designs? The answer is simple. Check your color contrast during the design process. And check it again as you develop..." https://adamsoucie.com/a11y-real-life-credit-cards-color-contrast/ +04: DRUPAL. Prepare for new Success Criteria in WCAG 2.1 By Andrew Macpherson. "Drupal 8 is already leading the way as an accessible CMS. Let's hold on to this prestige..." https://www.drupal.org/node/2864791 +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Automated Testing with aXe (Video) By Rob Dodson. "Manually reviewing a site for accessibility issues can be a time consuming process. Automated tools help streamline the work and make it easier to catch subtle mistakes. Today on A11ycasts we'll show one of those tools, a library called aXe, and how you can use it as a drop in script, a Selenium runner, or from your command line." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC_7NnRdYb0 Automated Web Accessibility Testing Tools Are Not Judges By Karl Groves. "...There's just too many things in Accessibility that are too subjective and too complex for a tool to test with enough accuracy to be considered a judgment of the system's level of accessibility..." http://www.karlgroves.com/2017/03/24/automated-web-accessibility-testing-tools-are-not-judges/ What Are Web Heat Maps, Really? By Jaime Yap. "What heat maps are, what they do, and what they don't do well for visualizing user interactions on a web app..." https://blog.fullstory.com/what-are-web-heat-maps-really-5b8ede9e6dde Asking the Right Questions During User Research, Interviews and Testing By Fabricio Teixeira. "Interviewing users is an art - whether you are running usability testing, focus groups, ethnographic research or whatnot. Here are some good practices for asking users the right questions, and asking the questions the right way..." https://uxdesign.cc/asking-the-right-questions-on-user-research-interviews-and-testing-427261742a67 +06: EVENTS. Washington DC UX Conference May 14-19, 2017. Washington, DC, U.S.A. https://www.nngroup.com/training/washington-dc/ Knowbility Accessibility Leadership Symposium May 15-16, 2017. Austin Texas, U.S.A. https://www.knowbility.org/education/knowbility-accessibility-leadership-symposium/ Confab Central June 7-9, 2017. Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. http://confabevents.com/events/central-2017 +07: HTML5. Divs By Brian Kardell. "...I wonder, seriously, if it was a mistake to make the meaningless element div only 3 characters long. Would we abuse it less if it was long..." http://bkardell.com/blog/Divs.html +08: JAVASCRIPT. Modern JavaScript for Ancient Web Developers By Gina Trapani. "...Here are some of the changes I had to make to my own mindset and expectations around learning a new ecosystem based on an old language which has taken over my craft..." https://trackchanges.postlight.com/modern-javascript-for-ancient-web-developers-58e7cae050f9 Getting Touchy (Video) By Patrick H Lauke. "...This session covers the basics of handling touch in JavaScript - from making sure simple single-tap interactions are as responsive as possible, all the way to examples of full multitouch, gesture-enabled elements, with a particular focus on common pitfalls and browser inconsistencies." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSL-RluQhMs +09: MISCELLANEOUS. The Road To Resilient Web Design By Jeremy Keith. "In the world of web design, we tend to become preoccupied with the here and now. In 'Resilient Web Design', Jeremy Keith emphasizes the importance of learning from the past in order to better prepare ourselves for the future. So, perhaps we should stop and think more beyond our present moment? The following is an excerpt from Jeremy's web book.." https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2017/03/resilient-web-design/ +10: NAVIGATION. Mega Menus Work Well for Site Navigation By Jakob Nielsen and Angie Li. "Large, rectangular menus group navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain users' choices." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/mega-menus-work-well/ +11: PHP. Creating Strictly Typed Arrays and Collections in PHP By Bert Ramakers. "One of the language features announced back in PHP 5.6 was the addition of the ... token to denote that a function or method accepts a variable length of arguments..." https://www.sitepoint.com/creating-strictly-typed-arrays-collections-php/ +12: USABILITY. Top Task Management: Making it Easier to Prioritize (Video) By Gerry McGovern. "Top Tasks Management is a method, developed over ten years of research, that helps you focus on what really matters in your projects, giving you the evidence to remove that which doesn't..." https://aneventapart.com/news/post/top-task-management-making-it-easier-to-prioritize-by-gerry-mcgovern-AEA How to Use Space in UI Design By Wojciech Zielinski. "Space is like air: it is necessary for design to breathe." https://blog.prototypr.io/how-to-use-space-in-ui-design-15e169127236 Best Practices for Modals / Overlays / Dialog Windows By Naema Baskanderi. "Modals, Overlays, Dialogs, whatever you call them it's time to revisit this UI pattern..." https://uxplanet.org/best-practices-for-modals-overlays-dialog-windows-c00c66cddd8c Wasting Time is the Worst Customer Experience By Gerry McGovern. "... A great many websites are poorly designed, poorly managed and short-staffed because organizations want to deliver self-service in the cheapest possible way. Waste customer time and you will lose customers." http://gerrymcgovern.com/wasting-time-is-the-worst-customer-experience/ Poor Management = Mediocre UX Design By Kara Pernice. "Weak management support for UX and lack of UX leadership and role models correlate with unexceptional designs, according to data from 360 companies." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-effectiveness/ 3 Strategies for Handling Accidental 'Taps' on Touch Devices By Jamie Appleseed. "There are many different ways to handle accidental 'clicks' on touch devices. In this article, we'll review the three most predominant strategies." https://baymard.com/blog/handling-accidental-taps-on-touch-devices [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +13: 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.]