+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 25, Issue, May 6, 2025. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 45 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 03: EVENTS. 04: HTML. 05: JAVASCRIPT. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: TOOLS. 08: USABILITY. 09: WEBWASTE & SUSTAINABILITY. SECTION TWO: 10: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Potential Accessibility Issues of Floating Animations on Webpages and Mobile Apps By Bogdan Cerovac. "Recently I did an audit of a webpage rich with animations. And needed to warn people about them as sometimes they destroy the experience if we are not careful." https://cerovac.com/a11y/2025/05/potential-accessibility-issues-of-floating-animations-on-webpages-and-mobile-apps/ Focus Start Position By Martin Underhill. "What's it called when you click somewhere on a webpage? Most people either won't care, either because it doesn't seem to do anything, or they can't click because they don't use a mouse or trackpad. But I care because I use it when testing the accessibility of web pages…" https://www.tempertemper.net/blog/focus-priming How Keyboard Testing Improves Digital Accessibility By Michael Harshbarger. "Designing digital experiences that work for everyone can start with a few simple, actionable steps you can take right now, with no complex tools or advanced training required. One of the most impactful? Keyboard testing…" https://www.deque.com/blog/how-keyboard-testing-improves-digital-accessibility/ Keyboard Navigation: Ensuring Usability Without a Mouse By Michael Beck. "…This blog post explores why keyboard accessibility is critical, common pitfalls, and best practices for creating a seamless experience for keyboard users…" https://afixt.com/keyboard-navigation-ensuring-usability-without-a-mouse/ Testing Methods: Live Captions By Dennis Deacon. "1.2.4 Captions (Live) is a Level AA conformance level Success Criterion. It requires Captions to be provided for all live audio content in synchronized media…" https://www.dennisdeacon.com/web/accessibility/testing-methods-live-captions/ PDFs, Non-HTML Documents, and Accessibility By Whitney Lewis. "PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoints, and Excel spreadsheets are non-HTML documents. Non-HTML documents have special accessibility considerations. Making these documents accessible is usually extra work than making an HTML webpage accessible, which is why we suggest using HTML webpages whenever possible…" https://blog.pope.tech/2022/05/03/pdfs-non-html-documents-and-accessibility/ Remediate a PDF for Accessibility Using Adobe's Accessibility Checker By Whitney Lewis. "Adobe Acrobat Pro's Accessibility Checker is a great way to review and fix PDF accessibility issues…" https://blog.pope.tech/2025/04/30/remediate-a-pdf-for-accessibility-using-adobes-accessibility-checker/ How to Use Adobe Acrobat's Fix Reading Order Tool By Whitney Lewis. "An important part of PDF accessibility is its tags and reading order. In this video, learn how to use Adobe Acrobat Pro's Fix reading order tool to check and fix a PDF's tags and reading order…" https://blog.pope.tech/2025/04/30/how-to-use-adobe-acrobats-fix-reading-order-tool/ Creating Accessible PDFs: A Guide to Inclusive Documents By Michael Beck. "In this post, we'll break down what makes a PDF accessible, common pitfalls, and best practices to ensure your documents work for all users…" https://afixt.com/creating-accessible-pdfs-a-guide-to-inclusive-documents/ Five Common PDF Accessibility Mistakes and How to Fix Them By Josh Crawford. "Making PDFs accessible is essential for ensuring your content reaches everyone who needs it. This article identifies five common PDF accessibility mistakes and provides practical solutions to fix them, helping you create more inclusive digital documents…" https://www.digitalaccesstraining.com/pages/articles?p=five-common-pdf-accessibility-mistakes-and-how-to-fix-them Document Accessibility - Is There a Short Cut? (IAAP EU WAD Event 2024) (Video) By Christopher Patnoe, Hector Minto, Rob Haverty, and Shilpi Kapoor. "Representatives from companies behind document software discuss what can be done to make the trillions of documents out there accessible with reasonable effort. The Dutch government will present a tool to supports automatic remediation. Is there a future of document accessibility, and in that case, how does it look?…" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWF1GOcF5J0 Advancing Accessibility Standards By Rachael Bradley Montgomery. "We are excited to share the Digital Accessibility Framework (DAF) - a top-down look at the needs of people with disabilities within digital environments. Our hope is this model will advance accessibility standards and research…" https://accessiblecommunity.org/blog/advancing-a11y-standards/ Automated Accessibility Test Tools Find Even Less Than Expected By Robert Dodd. "…Looking at the low scores across all five automated accessibility test tools that were tried, we may need to add caveats to that claim of 30%-50% coverage. Perhaps we now say that typical test coverage is 30%-50% of commonly occurring detectable accessibility issues?…" https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/automated-accessibility-test-tools-find-even-less-than-robert-dodd-pk7be/ Tools of the Trade: Accessibility Without the Cost By Equal Entry. "This article is based on Jeremy Rivera's talk at A11yNYC. He talked about how to leverage free accessibility tools to create more inclusive digital experiences. He explores a variety of powerful, no-cost resources that help developers, designers, and content creators identify and resolve accessibility issues efficiently…" https://equalentry.com/accessibility-tools-without-cost/ Guidance on Applying WCAG 2.2 to Mobile Applications (WCAG2Mobile) Jan Jaap de Groot, Jamie Herrera, Joe Humbert, Julian Kittelson-Aldred, and Jon Gibbins editors. "This document describes how Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2 [WCAG22] principles, guidelines, and success criteria can be applied to mobile applications, including native mobile apps, mobile web apps and hybrid apps using web components inside native mobile apps. It provides informative guidance (guidance that is not normative and does not set requirements…" https://www.w3.org/TR/wcag2mobile-22/ CSUN Recap - Testing Mobile Apps: Tools, Techniques, and Best Practices - Part 1 (iOS) By Laurie Pagano, Carolina Crespo, John Lilly. "Testing mobile apps can be difficult because we can't just inspect the HTML like we can with websites. We do have a few techniques to share with you below in our tests. We'll start with testing with a screen reader, move to using a keyboard for navigation, a color contrast tool, and finally inspector applications…" https://www.tpgi.com/csun-recap-testing-mobile-apps-tools-techniques-and-best-practices-part-1-ios/ Building a More Accessible GitHub CLI By Ryan Hecht & Andrew Feller. "How do we translate web accessibility standards to command line applications? This is GitHub CLI's journey toward making terminal experiences for all developers…" https://github.blog/engineering/user-experience/building-a-more-accessible-github-cli/ The Accessibility Show #5: Can A.I. Create an Accessible Site? (Video) By Joe Dolson and Nathan Wrigley. "…Throughout the episode, Joe shares his expert insights, examining how AI handled tasks like semantic structuring, keyboard navigation, and proper use of ARIA labels. He uncovers some of the nuances and common pitfalls AI encounters in accessibility, offering some lessons for developers and designers alike…" https://wpbuilds.com/accessibility/5/ The Accessibility Clock Is Ticking for State Governments By Nikki Davidson and Noelle Knell. "State accessibility officers convened at the NASCIO Midyear Conference with a call to action: State and local governments must prioritize upgrading their websites to meet impending federal accessibility deadlines…" https://www.govtech.com/gov-experience/the-accessibility-clock-is-ticking-for-state-governments States Drop Constitutional Challenge to Section 504 in Texas v. Kennedy By Glenda Sims. "…While the constitutional claim has been dropped, the lawsuit continues. The remaining legal questions focus on how HHS crafted its 2024 updates to the Section 504 regulation, particularly how these updates apply in practice to public programs, digital services, and healthcare settings…" https://www.deque.com/blog/states-drop-constitutional-challenge-to-section-504-in-texas-v-kennedy/ Legal Update: April 2025 By Ken Nakata. "April was a much busier month than March. There were a bunch of new developments, both at the beginning of the month and the end of the month. As there is a lot of ground to cover, let's hop in and get to it…" https://convergeaccessibility.com/2025/05/05/legal-update-april-2025/ +02: EVALUATION & TESTING. Analyze Usability Test Data in 4 Steps By Maria Rosala. "Analyze with confidence by collecting relevant data, critically assessing it, and forming testable explanations." https://www.nngroup.com/articles/analyze-usability-data/ See What Users See: Enhancing User-Centered Product Innovation with Eye Tracking By Soussan Djamasbi. "In today's digital economy, the demand for enhanced user experience is a key driver of user-centered product innovations…" https://uxpajournal.org/see-what-users-see-enhancing-user-centered-product-innovation-with-eye-tracking/ Grading Scales for the UX-Lite By Jim Lewis and Jeff Sauro. "…In this article, we discuss standard and curved grading scales for the UX-Lite and when to use them…" https://measuringu.com/grading-scales-for-the-ux-lite/ +03: EVENTS. Designing Web Content Accessibly from Center for Accessible Technology (ATAC) May 14, 2025. Online https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/z74iGVdbSM2rnnLCoCkl3Q#/registration Basic Web Auditing for Accessibility (with Free tools) from ATAC May 29, 2025. Online https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/HB-h93cbT7yOkq9yZi98VQ#/registration San Diego Accessibility & Inclusive Design June Meetup June 12, 2025. Online https://www.meetup.com/a11ysd/events/307069494/ The ADA and Your Content: How To Be Compliant June 17, 2025. Online https://www.prsa.org/event/2025/06/17/default-calendar/the-ada-and-your-content-how-to-be-compliant-wbnr2508 The UX Conference September 13, 2025. Online and London, England, United Kingdom https://theuxconf.com +04: HTML. The cite Element By Heydon Pickering. "…in HTML5, it's the title of the work, and only the title of the work, that should form the citation, falling between the and tags…I don't think you should worry too much about what goes in your elements. For some elements, like , it's imperative to use appropriate wording. That's becauses links can be aggregated, with their labels taken out of context. There's also an art to writing search-engine optimized link text. However, doesn't have this kind of dimensionality. As far as I'm aware, there aren't even any screen readers that differentiate from its surrounding text. This is the case with the majority of text-level (inline) elements…" https://heydonworks.com/article/the-cite-element/ +05: JAVASCRIPT. Event Handling in JAWS and NVDA By James Edwards. "When you're scripting for a screen reader, then you're scripting for the browser, with exactly the same level of JavaScript support. JAWS with Chrome, or NVDA with Firefox, are simply Chrome or Firefox being mediated by external software. However complications can arise with event handling, because screen readers intercept events, and don't necessarily pass them on to the browser. Even then, events don't always match the input type, since desktop screen readers are typically controlled with a keyboard, yet keyboard actions might fire mouse events." https://www.tpgi.com/event-handling-in-jaws-and-nvda/ K.I.S.S. ARIA By Nat Tarnoff. "I sat down to review some code with my colleagues. It was clear that each of these solutions was heavily over-engineered. Each used custom web components, React, Angular, or other framework, and even basic HTML with aria added. All of them should get slimmed down and work to reduce or remove ARIA…" https://tarnoff.info/2025/05/05/k-i-s-s-aria/ Celebrating with The Perfect Toast By Ian Lloyd. "…I tried to create a script/pattern that adapted based on the content that is being displayed and preferences set by the user, with some opinionated decisions thrown in for good measure. The appearance (position/style) of these updates is the same regardless of the content or timings, but how it's built and exposed changes, as does the focus behaviour"…" https://www.tpgi.com/celebrating-with-the-perfect-toast/ Creating a More Accessible Web With Aria Notify By Evelynn Kaplan and Patrick Brosset. "…Developers have come to rely on ARIA live regions as a limited workaround. ARIA Notify is an imperative notification API that's designed to replace the usage of ARIA live regions, and overcome its limitations…" https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2025/05/05/creating-a-more-accessible-web-with-aria-notify/ Disclosures and Accordions By WebAIM. "…Disclosures and accordions created using
and have built-in accessibility. The element properly functions like a button, and the expanded state (open or closed) is presented to assistive technologies. The problems below only occur when other elements or scripting are used. Disclosures and accordions created using buttons, JavaScript, and ARIA can be implemented incorrectly and create accessibility issues. Below are some common issues and how to address them…" https://webaim.org/techniques/disclosures/ Converting Values to Strings in JavaScript By Axel Rauschmayer. "Converting values to strings in JavaScript is more complicated than it might seem…" https://2ality.com/2025/04/stringification-javascript.html JavaScript, When is this? By Mat "Wilto" Marquis. "I spent the first few years of my career regarding this as yet another aspect of my primarily hunch-driven approach to web development-which is to say, sometimes it felt like this might be what I wanted, but if so, it was for reasons I couldn't possibly begin to understand…" https://piccalil.li/blog/javascript-when-is-this/ +06: MISCELLANEOUS. Software Release of WWW Into Public Domain By CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire). "The document that officially put the World Wide Web into the public domain on 30 April 1993." https://cds.cern.ch/record/1164399/ What is Accessibility Sludge and How to Get Rid of It By Sheri Byrne-Haber. "…Removing accessibility sludge requires serious cleaning. That means…Streamlining approvals and cutting out review loops that don't add value. Replacing performative reporting with actionable, transparent data. Creating a single source of truth for standards and enforcing it across all teams. Don't require an ROI before making things accessible. Making sure your tools support the work rather than slow it down. Hiring dedicated staff and giving them the resources to lead. Allocating budgets proactively, not just when you're in legal trouble…" https://buttondown.com/access-ability/archive/what-is-accessibility-sludge-and-how-to-get-rid/ 'Dangerous Nonsense': AI-Authored Books About ADHD for Sale on Amazon By Rachel Hall. "Experts say online retailer has ethical responsibility to guard against chatbot-generated work on sensitive topics…" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/04/dangerous-nonsense-ai-authored-books-about-adhd-for-sale-on-amazon +07: TOOLS. Cap Height View Angle Calculator By Michael Cooper. "Determines the cap height of a font, and calculates the font size needed for that size to fill a given portion of the visual field…" https://aihal-accessibility.com/tools/cap-height-view-angle-calculator +08: USABILITY. What 96 Designers Taught Us About Harm: The Behaviors Around Considering Harm in Digital Products By Lexi Namer, Sharon Joines. "Potential harm within digital product design has long been underexplored, despite the growing influence that consumer-facing digital products exert on individuals' daily lives. This paper presents the methodology and findings from an online survey conducted with 96 US-based UX- and product-designers working on customer-facing digital products…" https://uxpajournal.org/harm-digital-products/ 6 Ways Mobile Usability Fails People With Disabilities By Sam Proulx. "There's a perception-reality mismatch when it comes to how mobile app accessibility standards impact digital usability for people with disabilities…" https://makeitfable.com/article/mobile-usability-reality-check-for-inclusive-ux/ +09: WEBWASTE & SUSTAINABILITY. What if the Key to Better Business Was… Less? By Lucie Montel. "I started this year with a mantra. Last December, I was exhausted, feeling like I was juggling too many things, both professionally and personally, yet achieving none of them - constantly chasing my to-do list and frustrated with myself. So over the winter break, I set an intention for 2025: fewer things, fewer tabs open at once - on my laptop and in my mind - but doing things well, present and mindful. Less, but better…" https://tomgreenwood.substack.com/p/what-if-the-key-to-better-business [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +10: 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.]