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Date: Fri, 1 Jul 2016 06:07:31 -0500
From: Laura Carlson <[log in to unmask]>
To: webdev <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: [webdev] Web Design Update: July 1, 2016




+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.



- Volume 15, Issue 01, July 01, 2016.




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




++ISSUE 01 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: BOOKS.

03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

04: COLOR.

05: DREAMWEAVER.

06: EVALUATION & TESTING.

07: EVENTS.

08: HTML5.

09: JAVASCRIPT.

10: MISCELLANEOUS.

11: NAVIGATION.

12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

13: TYPOGRAPHY.

14: USABILITY.




SECTION TWO:



15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

[Contents ends.]





++ SECTION ONE: New references.




+01: ACCESSIBILITY.




Higher Education Accessibility Online Resource Center

By National Federation of the Blind.

"This online resource includes examples of digital accessibility
policies, legal requirements, and links to accessibility standards and
procurement policies..."


https://nfb.org/higher-education-accessibility-online-resource-center



Give Your Site Some Focus! Tips for Designing Useful and Usable Focus Indicators

By Caitlin Geier.

"Have you ever noticed the blue outlines that sometimes show up around
buttons or form fields when you're filling out a form?..."

http://www.deque.com/blog/ 
give-site-focus-tips-designing-usable-focus-indicators/



Accessibility Basics Series #8 Q&A - Focus Control

By Kim Phillips.

"Last week's presentation in our Accessibility Basics Webinar Series
covered best practices for Focus Control..."

http://www.ssbbartgroup.com/blog/accessibility-basics-series-8-qa-focus-control/



Settlements Reached in Seven States, One Territory to Ensure Website
Accessibility for People with Disabilities

By Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights

"...OCR had received complaints involving each of the organizations,
resulting in investigations. But before OCR had completed its probes,
each of the 11 parties expressed interest in resolving their cases
voluntarily, resulting in the agreements announced today..."

https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/settlements-reached-seven-
states-one-territory-ensure-website-accessibility-people-disabilities



Inclusivity, Gestalt Principles, and Plain Language in Document Design

By Jennifer Turner and Jessica Schomberg.

"Improving document usability requires a basic understanding of
accessibility and Universal Design for Learning, plus a few simple
tips found in Gestalt and plain language principles. Using Gestalt
principles helps connect concepts within the document in a coherent
way..."

http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2016/accessibility/



Creating Accessable Documents (Video)

By Trent Learning System.

"Hello. Welcome to this session on creating accessibile documents in
Microsoft Word..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FHhUS1X9hg



Web Audits Reveal the Five Most Common Accessibility Issues

By Philip Jenkinson.

"...The most common problems are not providing an alternative for
non-text content, having a lack of captions and audio descriptions for
multimedia, not providing enough colour contrast with foreground and
background colours, having the link text on a page that isn't very
descriptive and also having a lack of instructions on labels and
forms..."

http://www.accessiq.org/news/features/2016/06 
/web-audits-reveal-the-five-most-common-accessibility-issues



9 Tools for Website Accessibility Testing

By Simon Heaton.

"While the following tools cannot entirely determine whether or not
your site is accessible (this can only be truly accomplished through
human assessment), they can help you on your path to accessibility by
severely cutting down the time and effort it would take to implement a
thorough evaluation..."

https://www.shopify.com/partners/blog/website-accessibility-testing




+02: BOOKS.




Pickering, Heydon. Inclusive Design Patterns, Smashing Magazine, 2016.




+03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.




Media Queries Fun #1

By Daniel Glazman.

"So one of the painful bits when you have UI-based management of Media
Queries is the computation of what to display in that UI. No, it's not
as simple as browsing all your stylesheets and style rules to retrieve
only the media attribute of the CSS OM objects... Let's take a very
concrete example..."

http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/ 
index.php?post/2016/06/29/Media-Queries-fun-1



Introducing the CSS text-align-last Property

By Nitish Kumar.

"This tutorial will cover all the aspects of the text-align-last
property including acceptable values, support and browser specific
behavior."

https://www.sitepoint.com/
introducing-the-css-text-align-last-property/




+04: COLOR.




How Layout Bugs Keeping Haunting E-Commerce Sites - It's Time to Fix This

By Jamie Appleseed.

"Amazon uses beautiful large lifestyle images in multiple of their
categories. Unfortunately, when scaled down on their mobile site
there's severe contrast issues with white text overlaid images, making
it almost impossible to read some of the sub-category options..."

http://baymard.com/blog/ecommerce-layout-bugs




+05: DREAMWEAVER.




See How Dreamweaver is Transforming for the Future

By Rich Lee.

"...Dreamweaver is undergoing its biggest transformation ever to
become faster, leaner and completely modernized for anyone who works
with code..."

http://blogs.adobe.com/dreamweaver/2016/06/ 
see-how-dreamweaver-is-transforming-for-the-future.html




+06: EVALUATION & TESTING.




Heuristic Evaluation and Identifying Usability Problems

By Jake Rocheleau.

"...After staring at a design long enough you start to lose sight of
smaller troubles with the interface. This is where a fresh set of eyes
can come in handy - but what if you don't have any fresh eyes
available? Heuristic evaluations are the next best thing, and in this
post I'll explain how they work so you can start incorporating them
into your own design projects..."

http://www.vandelaydesign.com/heuristic-evaluation/



We Test with International Audiences

By Katie Sherwin.

"Designs that incorporate local nuances of international markets
benefit organizations and their customers. Even small-scale studies
can lead to insights that improve designs and increase trust."

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/cultural-nuances/



The Importance of User Testing

By Robyn Collinge.

"The article goes into detail about how Icons8 developed and promoted
their 'Request Icon' feature; the intended goal was to replace an old
design, making it simpler and more modern, while continuing to drive
conversions. However, after the redesign, the company found that
almost 50% fewer users were requesting icons even though their overall
website traffic remained the same..."

http://blog.usabilla.com/importance-user-testing/



Essential Excel Skills For Researchers Part 1

By Jeff Sauro.

"This is the first of two articles on using Excel for data analysis..."

http://www.measuringu.com/blog/excel-1.php



Essential Excel Skills For Researchers Part 2

By Jeff Sauro.

"Excel is an invaluable tool for analyzing and displaying data. In
Part 1 I covered some essentials Excel skills, such as conditionals,
absolute references and the fill handle. In this second part I'll
cover a few more advanced functionalities that mimic database
manipulations..."

http://www.measuringu.com/blog/excel-2.php




+07: EVENTS.




Forge Conference
September 26, 2016.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
http://www.forgeconf.com/



Paris Web 2016
September 29-October 1, 2016.
Paris, France
http://www.paris-web.fr/



The 2016 Boston Accessibility Conference
October 1, 2016.
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
http://a11y-bos.org/



Fronteers Conference
October 6-7, 2016.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
https://fronteers.nl/congres/2016



Full Stack Toronto
October 17-18, 2016.
Toronto, Canada
http://fsto.co/




+08: HTML5.




Talking About Hypertext

By Jeremy Keith.

"I've just published a transcript of the talk I gave at the HTML
Special...PPK wanted each speaker to give an entire talk on just one
HTML element. He offered me the best element of them all: the A
element..."

https://adactio.com/journal/10890



Autofill: What Web Devs Should Know, but Don't

By Jason Grigsby.

"Many people know that you can scan your credit credit in Mobile
Safari. But how many web developers know how to create a form that
supports that feature?..."

http://blog.cloudfour.com/
autofill-what-web-devs-should-know-but-dont/



MarkSheet

By Jeremy Thomas.

A HTML and CSS tutorial

http://marksheet.io/




+09: JAVASCRIPT.




A Proposal for Unambiguous JavaScript Grammar

By John-David Dalton and Bradley Meck.

"A well-informed proposal to resolve standing issues over whether
JavaScript files are treated as regular scripts or modules..."

https://github.com/bmeck/UnambiguousJavaScriptGrammar/blob/master/README.md




+10: MISCELLANEOUS.




Making Bad Ads Sad. Rad! (Video)

By Bruce Lawson.

"Bruce Lawson explores how the whole advertising ecosystem can
(hopefully) improve."

https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/making-bad-ads-sad-rad




+11: NAVIGATION.




Hamburger Menus and Hidden Navigation Hurt UX Metrics

By Kara Pernice and Raluca Budiu.

"Discoverability is cut almost in half by hiding a website's main
navigation. Also, task time is longer and perceived task difficulty
increases."

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/



Hamburger Menus and Hidden Navigation Damage UX

By Lee Duddell.

"A joint NN/g and WhatUsersDo research project concludes that
discoverability is cut almost in half by hiding a website’s main
navigation. Also, task time is longer and perceived task difficulty
increases..."

http://whatusersdo.com/blog/hamburger-menus-damage-ux/




+12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.




Web Standards Project: Re-ignited!

By Molly E. Holzschlag.

"Insofar as WaSP, the initial focus action I have put together is to
'bring about an iterative set of professional standards, codes of
conduct and ethics to the Web design and development industry'..."

http://hyperverbal.org/world-wide-web/
web-standards-project-re-ignited/



Perspectives on Security Research, Consensus and W3C Process

By Coralie Mercier.

"Linux Weekly News published a recent story called 'Encrypted Media
Extensions and exit conditions', Cory Doctorow followed by publishing
'W3C DRM working group chairman vetoes work on protecting security
researchers and competition'..."

https://www.w3.org/blog/2016/06/perspectives-
on-security-research-consensus-and-w3c-process/




+13: TYPOGRAPHY.




Typography for User Interfaces

By Viljami Salminen.

"...In this article, I want to share some of the fundamentals that
I've learned, and hopefully help you get better at setting type for
user interfaces..."

https://viljamis.com/2016/typography-for-user-interfaces/




+15: USABILITY.




What's the Best Way to Manage Lean UX? A Q&A with Jakob Nielsen

By Lee Duddell.

"Getting members of your team involved in the design process in a Lean
UX environment can be extremely valuable...and potentially hard to
manage. So, as part of our ongoing Q&A series, I posed the following
question to Jakob Nielsen.."

http://whatusersdo.com/blog/manage-lean-ux/



How to Speed Up Your UX with Skeleton Screens

By Chris Lienert.

"However well-designed your user interface may be, at some point or
other, the people using it are going to have to wait for something to
load..."

https://www.sitepoint.com/how-to-speed-up-your-ux-with-skeleton-screens/





[Section one ends.]






++ SECTION TWO:





+15: 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:[log in to unmask]






[Issue ends.]




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