+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 21, Issue 35, February 22, 2023. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 35 CONTENTS. SECTION ONE: New references. What's new at the Web Design Reference site? https://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: HTML. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: TOOLS. 09: USABILITY. 10: WEBWASTE & SUSTAINABILITY. SECTION TWO: 11: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Avoid Spanning Table Headers By Adrian Roselli. "Spanned table headers are not well supported across screen readers…" https://adrianroselli.com/2023/02/avoid-spanning-table-headers.html Understanding the Cost of Not Being Accessible By Karl Groves. "…Your accessibility journey never starts and ends with one audit, the single worst accessibility-related business strategy you can take is to stay in that audit-fix-audit-fix cycle. Beyond the fact that you never reduce any legal risk it is also the most expensive way to handle accessibility. Growing your company’s maturity with respect to accessibility allows you to spend less and less on it as you learn to bake it into your design, development, QA, content, and procurement processes…" https://karlgroves.com/understanding-the-cost-of-not-being-accessible/ A Practical Approach to Automated Accessibility By Mark Steadman. "…what is the most practical way in which we can bring automated accessibility into the development lifecycle, while effectively making it apart of the development culture…" https://dev.to/steady5063/a-practical-approach-to-automated-accessibility-1h88 Accessible Target Sizes By Lupe Camacho. "In this post, we'll be touching on how interactive targets in your UI can be sized to ensure accessibility and overall usability…" https://craftcms.com/blog/accessible-target-sizes Buttons, Links, and Focus By Martin Underhill. "…When a keyboard user follows a link, their focus should be taken to the new place; when a keyboard user presses a button, focus should remain on that button… A couple of edge cases: This seems pretty straightforward until…" https://www.tempertemper.net/blog/buttons-links-and-focus ToolKit Tuesday: Creating Accessible Course Content By Jay McKay, Melissa Green, Julieanne King et al. "Accessible course content makes it easier for students to read and engage with materials, which can help improve overall learning. This session explores steps you can take to ensure your digital course materials are accessible for all students…" https://knowbility.org/blog/2023/toolkit-tuesday-creating-accessible-course-content A Step-By-Step Guide To Building Accessible Carousels By Sonja Weckenmann. "Most carousels come along with usability and accessibility issues. To avoid these issues, this article addresses step-by-step design considerations as well as semantic requirements for carousels to be accessible…" https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/02/guide-building-accessible-carousels/ Keys To An Accessibility Mindset By Daniel Yuschick. "…this article will demonstrate three keys for approaching and developing accessible content…" https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2023/02/keys-accessibility-mindset/ Quick and Small Accessibility By Adam Laki. "Learn something new about accessibility with short and solid posts (less than 150 words)…" https://bite-sized-a11y.com/ Having an AI Dialog By Scott O'Hara. "…I'm very curious to see what ChatGPT has to say about something that has such a long history of being inadequately implemented, in regards to accessibility, by web developers. The purpose of this will be to demonstrate what ChatGPT gets right (because to be fair, it does get some stuff right), vs what it gets wrong. And boy howdy to that…" https://www.scottohara.me//blog/2023/01/31/an-ai-dialog.html Ask AI – Accessibility Overlays By Jeff Singleton. "…ChatGPT gave us a lot of information. And while much of that feedback shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has dealt with WCAG vs Accessibility Overlays, this feedback does seem to make the case, whenever possible, to choose coding to WCAG over implementing an accessibility overlay." https://convergeaccessibility.com/2023/02/20/ask-ai-accessibility-overlays/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Speech Module Level 1 Léonie Watson and Elika J. Etemad, editors. "The Speech module defines aural CSS properties that enable authors to declaratively control the rendering of documents via speech synthesis, and using optional audio cues…" https://www.w3.org/TR/css-speech-1/ Uncontainable Container Query Excitement By Matthias Ott. "CSS Container Queries are now available in all major browsers…" https://matthiasott.com/notes/uncontainable-container-query-excitement Container Queries Land in Stable Browsers By Una Kravets. "This Valentine's day, we're celebrating size container queries and container query units landing in all stable browsers…" https://web.dev/cq-stable/ Do We Need CSS flex-wrap Detection? By Ahmed Shadeed. "…In this post, I will try to explain why we need it and what the use-cases can get benefit from that…" https://ishadeed.com/article/flex-wrap-detect/ +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. 27 Tips and Tricks for Conducting Successful User Research in the Field By Susan Farrell and Mayya Azarova. "Leave your office and go where the users are. Learn about common pitfalls and how to avoid them from our experience." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/tips-user-research-field/ Do Images Make Card Sorting Easier? By Jeff Sauro and Jim Lewis. "…To continue the effort of making sorting easier, we wondered whether adding images to cards along with (or instead of) text would help or hinder the experience. We know the benefits of visualizations on memory and wanted to understand whether they also positively impacted card sorting…" https://measuringu.com/do-images-make-card-sorting-easier/ Adapting Top Tasks for Startups By Mary Zide and Sarah Zimmers. "…Top Tasks method can enable you to quickly identify the overarching trends in your customer base's goals…" https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2023/02/adapting-top-tasks-for-startups.php +04: EVENTS. Bridging The Gap Between Accessibility and Education February 28, 2023. Online https://www.meetup.com/a11ybay/events/291529024/ Toolkit Tuesdays: Using YouTube for Captions & Transcripts February 28, 2023. Online https://events.humanitix.com/toolkit-tuesdays-using-youtube-for-captions-and-transcripts Web Accessibility in Action - Q and A with Agency Experts - Panel Discussion February 28, 2023. Online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlNchpHa_ew Making Beauty Accessible - How L'Oreal Prioritizes Accessibility on 40+ Consumer-Facing Websites February 28, 2023. Online https://www.levelaccess.com/earesources/webinar-making-beauty-accessible-how-loreal-prioritizes-accessibility-on-40-consumer-facing-websites/ Creating a Better Web Through Accessible Design Systems February 28, 2023. Online https://a11ytalks.com/posts/2023-FEB/ Ability Summit March 8, 2023. Online https://abilitysummit.eventcore.com/home Cognitive Bias in Visual Story Telling March 8, 2023. St. Paul, Minnesota, U.S.A. https://uxpamn.org/event-5162423 Inclusive Imagery - Writing Alt-Text Depicting People with Disabilities and Other Marginalized Identities March 16, 2023. Online https://www.accessibilityonline.org/ada-tech/session/?id=111046 International Conference of the Association for the Advancement of Assistive Technology in Europe (AAATE) August 30-September 1, 2023. Paris, France https://aaate2023.eu/ +05: HTML. Representation of Style By Steve Faulkner. "…The conclusion I draw from the specification, usage and implementation examples above is that although the HTML specification attempts to make a distinction between & , and & ; the general fuzz and fudge of their specification, historical and current use, UI implementations & style representations, coalesce to make attempts to distinguish them futile…" https://html5accessibility.com/stuff/2023/02/19/representation-of-style/ Screen Readers Don't Convey the Semantics of STRONG and EM By Matthias Ott. "…none of the most commonly used screen readers like VoiceOver, JAWS, or NVDA convey the text semantics of those elements to users. And they also don't expose em or strong element role semantics in the accessibility tree…" https://matthiasott.com/notes/screen-readers-semantics-strong-em All of Learn HTML! is Available By Rachel Andrew. "…All modules in the Learn HTML course are now available. This course was written by Estelle Weyl and takes you through an in-depth journey to really understand HTML…" https://web.dev/learn-html-available/ +06: JAVASCRIPT. The (Extremely) Loud Minority By Andy Bell. "…remember that although a subset of the JavaScript community can be very loud, they represent a paltry portion of the web as a whole…" https://andy-bell.co.uk/the-extremely-loud-minority/ A Historical Reference of React Criticism By Zach Leatherman. "There have been a number of criticisms levied at the React project over the years, some of them handled and some of them still wavering in the wind. In this post, I'll summarize the ones that are most prominent in my memory as a way of maintaining a record (primarily for my own use but maybe you'll find it useful too). If you have others, please send them my way…" https://www.zachleat.com/web/react-criticism/ +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Future of Interfaces By Future of Interface. "This website is designed to accompany the Future of Interface - and Accessibility Workshop held on February 15th and 16th, 2023… A primary goal of this website, the workshop (which is chronicled in the Auditorium of this website), and the discussions on Discord during and after the workshop (see the Forum section of this website), it to identify future directions for interfaces and where we might be in 20 years, in order to better create and execute a research agenda that will ensure that future interfaces are accessible to everyone when they appear - accessible either directly or via a new generation of assistive technologies…" https://futureofinterface.org/home Accessibility Switchboard A National Federation of the Blind Jernigan Institute Project. "Connecting industry and consumers to solutions for technology accessibility, and the benefits of organization-wide approaches to accessibility…" https://accessibilityswitchboard.org/ The Richard Dimbleby Lecture Sir Tim Berners-Lee: The World Wide Web - A Mid-Course Correction (Video) By Tim Berners-Lee. "Originally broadcast on BBC on 17th November 2019, reuploaded for educational purposes only." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdyrjxa00DE Design Thinking Was Supposed to Fix the World. Where Did It Go Wrong? By Rebecca Ackermann. "An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite…" https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/09/1067821/design-thinking-retrospective-what-went-wrong +08: TOOLS. 48 Accessibility Bookmarklets You Can Use For A11Y Testing By Raghavendra Satish Peri. "These nifty accessibility bookmarklets perform various accessibility audit functions & will come in handy during an accessibility automation evaluation…" https://www.digitala11y.com/accessibility-bookmarklets-testing/ +09: USABILITY. 3 Alternatives to Infinite Scrolling (Video) By Tim Neusesser. "Infinite scrolling can create great user experiences, but it also has weaknesses. Consider 3 alternative design patterns that may work better for your product: A load-more button, integrated pagination within a long scroll, and traditional pages." https://www.nngroup.com/videos/alternatives-to-infinite-scrolling/ Figure/Ground: Gestalt Principle for User Interface Design (Video) By Samhita Tankala. "Users perceive interface design elements that differentiate the foreground (figure) from the background (ground) as something to focus on or interact with." https://www.nngroup.com/videos/figure-ground-gestalt/ +10: WEBWASTE & SUSTAINABILITY. Increasing Complexity Increases Waste By Gerry McGovern. "So much that digital touches turns to complexity and that, in shorter and shorter periods of time, turns to waste. The beating heart of digital is pumped with a toxic flow of waste…" https://gerrymcgovern.com/increasing-complexity-increases-waste/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +11: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? Accessibility Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/accessibility.html Association Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/associations.html Book Listings. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/books.html Cascading Style Sheets Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/css.html Color Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/color.html Drupal Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/drupal.html Evaluation & Testing Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/testing.html Event Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/events.html HTML Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/html.html Information Architecture Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/architecture.html JavaScript Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/javascript.html Miscellaneous Web Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/misc.html Navigation Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/navigation.html PHP Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/php.html Sites & Blogs Listing. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/sites.html Standards, Guidelines & Pattern Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/standards.html Tool Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/tools.html Typography Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/type.html Usability Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/usability.html WebWaste & Sustainability Information. https://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/webwaste.html XML Information. https://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: https://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.]