Despite our pursuit to do a better job every day, sometimes we forget about accessibility, the practice of designing and developing in a way that’s inclusive of people with disabilities.These days, we build a lot of client-rendered web applications, also known as single-page apps, JavaScript MVCs and MV-whatever. AngularJS, React, Ember, Backbone.js, Spine: You may have used or seen one of these JavaScript frameworks in a recent project. Common user experience-related characteristics include asynchronous postbacks, animated page transitions, and dynamic UI filtering. In this article, Marcy Sutton will explore techniques for building accessible client-rendered web applications, making our jobs as web creators even more worthwhile.
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By inserting a single element in your markup, you can tell any web browser to render an interaction control, and you can completely modify that interaction – from a text field to a checkbox to a radio button – by simply changing a keyword. Now imagine a world where creating these interactions means also creating custom interaction controls, and you begin to realize how taken for granted inputs really are. That’s what the HTML 5.0 specification was intended to solve, by expanding the concept of the text input to allow for specific data types, such as numbers and email addresses, as well as rich interactions, such as task-specific on-screen keyboards and date- and color-pickers.
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The extend directive can produce undesirable side effects if it is not carefully implemented. Thankfully, there are many strategies for using extend effectively that can prevent these side effects and produce clean, organized CSS. Understanding how extend works and keeping the guidelines above in mind will enable you to use @extend to its full advantage — reducing CSS output and keeping relationships intact, no matter what exported selectors (classes, attributes, etc.) you use. Make wise use of both the @mixin and @extend directives — they’re meant to coexist in your well-organized style sheets.
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As designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for May 2015. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper! This creativity mission has been going on for seven years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month.
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Compositional flow determines how the eye is led through a design: where it looks first, where it looks next, where the eye pauses, and how long it stays. You have a lot of control over where people look when they’re viewing a webpage you’ve designed. On a text-heavy and graphic-light page, a visitor’s eye likely follows something like a Z-pattern or F-pattern across and down the page. However, as soon as you design page elements and add graphics, those patterns no longer apply. Your visitor’s eye will follow the flow, movement and rhythm you create.
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Because Foundation for Apps was only released at the end of 2014, it hasn’t yet seen widespread usage, so there are few good sources of information on using the framework. In this article, Stephen Saucier brings you a comprehensive guide to build a functional web app with Foundation for Apps from start to finish. The techniques detailed here are fundamental to building practically any kind of app for any client, and this tutorial also serves as a strong introduction to the wider world of AngularJS and single-page apps.
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Perhaps the only thing worse than a fire that could happen to the office of a web development company would be losing connectivity to the web. This is why Google Mail inserts a warning whenever you go offline. As noted in Marco Zehe’s 2008 blog post, Google was an early adopter of ARIA live regions. In this article, Heydon Pickering is going to create a script which tests whether the user is online or off and uses ARIA to warn screen reader users of the change in this status so they know whether it’s worth staying at their desk or giving up and going for a beer.
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No matter your status or situation, whether director or loner, you are in a position to lead, to raise the bar in a place where it consistently sits lower than you think it should. As an in-house UX professional, Robert Hoekman Jr has formed and run UX teams for multiple companies. As a consultant, he has worked with dozens of clients on hundreds of projects. In this article, he will share what he learned about how to get what you want. Most of these things can be applied whether you’re inside of a company or consulting for one, whether you’re a fledgling designer or a veteran leader.
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One of the best attributes of WordPress is its ease of use. It’s easy because there’s not a significant amount of bloat with endless bells and whistles that steepen the learning curve. On the flip side, some might find WordPress a little light. It does a lot, but not quite enough. In this article, Brian Onorio will explore the process of registering new data types in a fully compliant manner. Once you get the hang of it and you create a few of these, it’ll start to come naturally. Although this article is long and in-depth, it really is about a 10-minute process from concept to conclusion once you fully understand what’s going on.
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Recently, with the creation of modern web frameworks such as AngularJS and Ember, we’ve seen a push to render on the client and only use a server for an API. We’re now seeing a possible return or, rather, more of a combination of both architectures happening. Web architecture definitely goes through cycles. We started out rendering everything on the server and shipping it down to the client. Then, JavaScript came along, and we started using it for simple page interactions. At some point, JavaScript grew up and we realized it could be used to build large applications that render all on the client and that use the server to retrieve data through an API.
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