Web Design Update: April 13, 2017

[Laura Carlson]

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 15, Issue 42, April 13, 2017.

An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web
design and development.

++ISSUE 42 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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: HTML5.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
09: NAVIGATION.
10: USABILITY.

SECTION TWO:
11: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Accessibility Compliance in Higher Education
By Eric Grzymkowski.
"...In January 2017, the federal government adopted Web Content
Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0) Levels of A and AA standards for
all its websites. This sets a precedent going forward that will likely
be adopted by the Department of Justice. In short, if your higher
education site conforms to WCAG 2.0 best practices, it's very likely
you'll be in the clear..."
https://www.oho.com/blog/accessibility-compliance-higher-education

Accessibility Focus: 5 Common Mistakes You Should Avoid
By Julia Currie.
"...Julia, one of our Accessibility Specialists, takes a look at five
common accessibility mistakes we see here at Zoonou. Hopefully
identifying them here will help you to avoid them in the future..."
http://www.zoonou.com/blog/accessibility-focus-common-mistakes

The Challenges Web Designers Face in Ensuring Website Accessibility
By Eric Karkovack.
"Over the past several years, accessibility has become one of
most-discussed topics in web design..."
https://speckyboy.com/web-design-challenges-accessibility/

What is an Accessible Name?
By Léonie Watson.
"Many HTML elements have an accessible name. It can be derived from
different sources, and browsers use an algorithm called the Accessible
Name and Description Computation to figure it out..."
https://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2017/04/what-is-an-accessible-name/

UW Highlights Ph.D. Candidate's Work on Touchscreen Accessibility
By University of Washington.
"Today's touchscreen world threatens to leave behind a lot of people
with motor impairments, but iSchool Ph.D. candidate Martez Mott is
working to change that with Smart Touch..."
https://ischool.uw.edu/news/2017/04/uw-highlights-phd-candidates-work-touchscreen-accessibility

How to Avoid Losing One Million Website Customers with Inclusive Digital Design
By Claudia Cahalane.
"In our recent webinar Dementia and Inclusive Digital Design, we
shared examples of how the BBC, NHS and other organisations and
companies are catering for an ageing audience by using thoughtful web
design..."
https://abilitynet.org.uk/news-blogs/how-avoid-losing-one-million-website-customers-inclusive-digital-design

EME and Accessibility
By Philippe Le Hégaret, Judy Brewer.
"During an Advisory Committee review of the Encrypted Media Extensions
(aka EME) specification, concerns were raised regarding potential
accessibility for people with disabilities..."
https://www.w3.org/2017/03/eme-accessibility.html

An Introduction to Audio Description in Higher Education Video Content
By Penn State.
"This document summarizes information gathered by a research team at
Penn State. The team investigated various services and techniques
related to audio description for the vision impaired."
http://accessibility.psu.edu/video/audiodescription/adwhitepaper/

What Did WCAG 2.0 Do for People with Low Vision and Cognitive Disabilities?
By David MacDonald.
"WCAG did as much as any standard could possibly do in 2008..."
http://www.davidmacd.com/blog/wcag-for-low-vision-cognitive-disabilites.html

Drive-By Demand Letters and Lawsuit Threats Do Not Help Advance Accessibility
By Karl Groves.
"Over the last 18 months, a handful of law firms in the United States
have been sending out demand letters to website owners threatening to
sue over web accessibility..."
http://www.karlgroves.com/2017/04/07/drive-by-demand-letters-and-lawsuit-threats-do-not-help-advance-accessibility/

Florida Courts Rule ADA Covers Websites With Nexus To Physical Store
By Minh Vu.
"Two Florida federal district court judges require websites to have a
'nexus' to a physical location for coverage under Title III of the
ADA, but a third judge requires more..."
http://www.adatitleiii.com/2017/04/florida-courts-rule-ada-covers-websites-with-nexus-to-physical-store/


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

PX, EM or REM Media Queries?
By Zell Liew.
"Have you wondered if you should use px, em or rem for media queries..."
https://zellwk.com/blog/media-query-units/

Units for Media Queries - Different Conclusion
By Alastair Campbell.
"This is a reply to a post on zellwk.com concluding that 'So.. I'm
sorry to break your bubble, pixel fans, but it's a no-go for pixel
based queries'..."
https://alastairc.ac/2017/04/px-em-or-rem-media-queries-different-conclusion/

Grid-Powered Drop Quotes, Revisited
By Eric A. Meyer.
"In last week's Grid-Powered Drop Quotes, I overlooked a potential
problem with the styles I created. Fortunately, Philippe Wittenbergh
caught it and pointed it out, and we both hit on the same solution..."
http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2017/04/10/grid-drop-quotes-revisited/

Let's Define Exactly What Atomic CSS is
By John Polacek.
"As Atomic CSS (also known as Functional CSS) has been gaining in
popularity, some confusion has occurred about similar related terms.
The goal of this article is to clarify this terminology..."
https://css-tricks.com/lets-define-exactly-atomic-css/

Refer to the Spec
By Rachel Andrew.
"As people have started to work with CSS Grid Layout I've been getting
more questions..."
https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2017/04/11/refer-to-the-spec/


+03: COLOR.

Reproduction of Color Images for Monochromats and Dichromats (PDF)
By Karl Rasche, Robert Geist, and James Westall.
"Authors producing documents with color images for any venue
must account for the possibility that the color images might be
reduced to gray scale before they are viewed."
https://people.cs.clemson.edu/%7Egeist/recent_papers/g3geis.pdf


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Write Better Qualitative Usability Tasks: Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid
By Amy Schade.
"Writing good tasks for a usability study is an art, not a science,
but there are still rules. Examine your tasks for these 10 common
task-writing mistakes."
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/better-usability-tasks/

WCAG Accessibility Conformance Testing (ACT)
By Shadi Abou-Zahra.
"Today W3C published a First Public Working Draft of the Accessibility
Conformance Testing (ACT) Rules Format 1.0 specification..."
https://www.w3.org/blog/2017/04/wcag-accessibility-conformance-testing-act/

Practical Usability Ratings by Experts (PURE)
By Jeff Sauro.
"There's a continued need to measure and improve the user experience..."
https://measuringu.com/pure/


+05: EVENTS.

aXe-Core Live Tutorial
April 27, 2017.
Online.
https://www.deque.com/blog/join-axe-core-live-tutorial/

Midwest JS
August 16-18, 2017.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A.
http://midwestjs.com/

UX Week
August 29-September 1, 2017.
San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
http://uxweek.com/

BigDesign
September 14-16, 2017.
Addison, Texas, U.S.A.
http://bigdesignevents.com/conference/

Fluxible
September 18-24, 2017.
Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
http://www.fluxible.ca/


+06: HTML5.

On Hiding Content (Hat Tip to Jennifer Sutton)
By Hidde de Vries.
"Sometimes you want parts of your page to be invisible. For example,
because all of your application is on a single page..."
https://hiddedevries.nl/en/blog/2017-04-11-on-hiding-content


+07: JAVASCRIPT.

ARIA Alert Support
By Steve Faulkner.
"...Support has improved considerably since the last round of tests in 2012..."
https://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2017/04/aria-alert-support/

Accessible hide/show (collapsible regions) using ARIA
By Nicolas Hoffmann.
"This script will transform a simple list of Hx/contents into shiny
and accessible hide/show - collapsible regions - using ARIA..."
https://van11y.net/accessible-hide-show/


+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Jeremy Keith at Render 2017 - YouTube
By Jeremy Keith.
"Here's the opening keynote I gave at the Render Conference in Oxford.
The talk is called Evaluating Technology..."
https://adactio.com/links/12140


+09: NAVIGATION.

The Links vs. Buttons Showdown (Sides)
By Marcy Sutton.
"Tonight! In a battle as old as the Internet, we'll pit two HTML
elements against each other in a crusade of better and worse, right
and possibly wrong. One element is triggered with the Space bar; the
other, with the Enter key. Who will win in this all-out free-for-all
between LINKS vs BUTTONS?"
https://speakerdeck.com/marcysutton/the-links-vs-buttons-showdown


+10: USABILITY.

7 Tips for Presenting Bulleted Lists in Digital Content
By Hoa Loranger.
"Bullet points help break up large blocks of text, make complex
articles and blog posts easier to grasp, and make key information
stand out."
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/presenting-bulleted-lists/

[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+11: 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.


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+ 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:lcar...@d.umn.edu


[Issue ends.]