+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 5, Issue 50, May 31, 2007. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 50 CONTENTS. SECTION ONE: New references. What's new at the Web Design Reference site? http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdesign/ New links in these categories: 01: ACCESSIBILITY. 02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 03: DREAMWEAVER. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. WCAG 2.0: Woeful to Wonderful in One Easy Draft? By Jack Pickard. "...I was critical of WCAG 2.0 before, and it deserved that criticism. Now, I'm prepared to praise it, because it deserves that praise. They've done a bloody good job on WCAG 2.0 over the last year, and the people on the Working Group -- and those that submitted comments -- deserve the appropriate credit for all of the hard work that has gone into fixing this. I don't say this lightly, but I think -- even with the known weakness regarding cognitive disability -- that WCAG 2.0 is now the best set of accessibility standards out there: it's clear, it's understandable, the focus is on the user, and finally, finally, it's ready. Bring it on.." http://tinyurl.com/2agb8j May 2007 WCAG 2.0 Draft By Mike Davies. "The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 draft is out (dated 17 May 2007). Thankfully the Working Group has backtracked from its Last Call last year owing to severe criticism of the document. In a lot of areas the document has improved, and in certain areas there's still a bit of work to be done..." http://www.isolani.co.uk/blog/access/May2007Wcag20Draft What's Next for Web Accessibility? By Faruk Ates. "...If you're a web standards-enthusiast in today's world, you belong to a small but growing group that is becoming increasingly aware of how tricky accessibility on the web really is, but at least you know how to deal with a lot of common accessibility pitfalls. You also know that valid markup will help make pages more accessible, yet that it's no guarantee for a truly accessible page at all. WCAG 2.0 is not going to make your life any easier, instead, it'll make it much more difficult and confusing..." http://tinyurl.com/ysbjv8 An Introduction to Screen Readers By Victor Tsaran. Video (27 minutes, 23 seconds) demonstrating how screen readers work are used. http://video.yahoo.com/video/play?vid=514676 Closing the Gap - User Agent Improvements By Alastair Campbell. "Following up on the responsibilities in accessibility, some of the most critical gaps at the moment are on the User Agent (UA) end. Improvements here would actually make the most difference to accessibility in general on the web. This post highlights the things I think would make the most difference to people's experience of accessibility on the web. If I get into too much detail for you, skip to Profiles, that's the most important aspect..." http://alastairc.ac/2007/05/user-agent-improvements/ Current Browsers And The User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 By Patrick H. Lauke. "In web accessibility, you'll often hear emphasis being placed on the duty of web authors to create accessible content. However, this is only one part of the web accessibility equation. One that has been particularly close to me, or rather one that has provided me with a lot of opportunity to rant, is the responsibility of developers of user agents..." http://www.webstandards.org/learn/articles/current-browsers-uaag10/ New Browser For Web Video By Mel Pedley. "IBM recently announced that they were developing a new browser with the potential to enable visually impaired users to access multimedia such as streaming video. Currently named A-Browser, the tool will give visually-impaired people the same control over multimedia content that sighted people currently have using a mouse..." http://blackwidows.co.uk/blog/?p=128 Overcoming Objections to Accessibility By Mike Cherim. "Experience over the years has taught me that salesmanship often comes down to nothing more than overcoming objections. The prospective customer states they can't afford it; the salesman speaks the virtues of easy financing. The prospective customer claims they have no room for it; the salesman dons work clothes and expresses a willingness to make room. Once the prospective customer has had all of his or her objections swatted down like sluggish fall flies, he or she will often sign on the dotted line. This is fact. Now let's look at how this applies to web accessibility." http://tinyurl.com/23b8rf Accessibility Issues On U.S. Senate Web Site Impact Constituents Who Are Blind By Darrell Shandrow. "Mika Pyyhkala wrote the following letter to the Senate webmaster not only reiterating the accessibility issue already reported but also identifying some additional concerns with links missing appropriate descriptive alt text tags. He also provides some resources for webmasters to begin to learn about and address accessibility issues..." http://tinyurl.com/2zc9pw Avoiding Extreme Accessibility By Mike Cherim. "I've seen it before, I'll see it again, and I've been guilty of it myself. What is it? Extreme Accessibility, of course. But what is it really? What is Extreme Accessibility? And why should one want to avoid it? It sounds like a good thing after all. But it's really the abuse of features, faulty or overboard implementations, and good intentions gone bad. Sometime in your life, did someone ever tell you that moderation is the key? This logic applies to web accessibility as well..." http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=182 Making CAPTCHAs Less Evil? By Paul Crichton. "The Internet Archive is a not-for-profit organization that is working to create a digital library by scanning 12,000 books a month. Carnegie Mellon University, who work with them on this project, has developed a way to improve both the speed and accuracy of this process by using CAPTCHAs and the brainpower of the millions of users who come across them every day..." http://tinyurl.com/ypn2a5 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Cascading Style Sheets Part 1: Browser Styling By Sarah Horton. "...This is the first in a series of articles focused on the mechanics of style sheets. Here, we discuss browser defaults: what they are, where to find them, and how to overcome them. In future articles, we'll discuss fun stuff like how to shorthand style sheet markup, methods for styling for print and small screens, and maybe a bit on voice browsing sprinkled in for good measure..." http://tinyurl.com/2csoww User Style Sheets Come of Age By Matthew Magain. "User style sheets?CSS files that sit on the user's desktop machine and override a site's original styles..." http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/05/28/user-style-sheets-come-of-age/ Supercharge Your Image Borders By Matthew Pennell. "...three new ways to style your images, and not an extraneous
or in sight." http://bitesizestandards.com/bites/supercharge-your-image-borders Fancy Form Design Using CSS By Cameron Adams. "Forms design is the necessary evil of web development. Don't you wish you had a wizard's wand to create accessible yet attractive forms? We have found such a wizard! Here, Cameron Adams shows you how to use CSS to create forms that are both great-looking and usable, and gives you the code you need to make the job easy..." http://www.sitepoint.com/article/fancy-form-design-css +03: DREAMWEAVER. Managing Websites with Multiple Layouts By Adrian Senior. "Quickly and easily mix and match the different available layouts into a single CSS file." http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/multiple_layouts.html +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Web's Key Management Metric: Task Completion By Gerry McGovern. "Supposing someone has to visit 20 pages on a web site to complete a task, when with better management, they would only have to visit 5. Thus, the more page impressions, the more frustrated customers become..." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2007/nt-2007-05-28-task2.htm +05: EVENTS. What's New, WCAG 2.0, and Current Issues (Shawn Henry) June 5, 2007. London, United Kingdom. http://tinyurl.com/2z7e9g Web 2.0 Accessibility Workshop June 12-13, 2007. Champaign/Urbana, Illinois, U.S.A. http://www.cita.uiuc.edu/courses/aria/ Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2007) July 16-18, 2007. York, United Kingdom. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2007/ Web Directions South 2007 September 27-28, 2007. Sydney, Australia. http://www.webdirections.org/ Fundamentos Web 2007 October 3-5, 2007. Asturias, Spain. http://www.fundamentosweb.org/2007 World Usability Day New England 2007 November 8, 2007. Hanover, New Hampshire, U.S.A. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~wud/ +06: JAVASCRIPT. Element Attributes in JavaScript By Jonathan Snook. "I'd be interested to hear what the general consensus is on something. Consider this like a SimpleQuiz but not really simple and not really a quiz. More like a survey. SnookSurvey. And survey says... I've got an element that I'm working with in JavaScript and I wish to get and set an attribute. How do you do it?..." http://tinyurl.com/2hj3st Dot Notation and Square Bracket Notation in JavaScript By David Dorward. In JavaScript, everything is an object. Put simply, this means that any variable can have properties which are other objects. There are two different syntaxes for accessing properties which this article explains and compares." http://www.dev-archive.net/articles/js-dot-notation/index.html +07: MISCELLANEOUS. The Next Web Documentary "Watch this iChat Video interview with 5 Internet Influentials who answer 5 basic questions in almost 20 minutes. Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly Media, Steve Rubel from Edelman and Micropersuasion, Matt Mullenweg the founder of WordPress, Marten Mickos the CEO of MySQL, Eric A. Meyer, CSS and HTML guru and Jay Adelson, CTO and co-founder of Digg.com all give their opinion and share their insights on what the Next Web will look like..." http://2007.thenextweb.org/2007/05/28/the-next-web-documentary/ +08: PHP. PHP Interview Questions From Yahoo By Nick Halstead. A few questions from the exam that job applicants need to complete for PHP development jobs. http://tinyurl.com/296593 Good and Bad PHP Code By Kevin Yank. "When interviewing a PHP developer candidate for a job at SitePoint, there is one question that I almost always ask, because their answer tells me so much about the kind of programmer they are. Here's the question: 'In your mind, what are the differences between good PHP code and bad PHP code?'..." http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/05/25/good-and-bad-php-code/ Security Techniques: Part 2 By Larry Ullman. "New in PHP 5 is the filter library of PECL code. This filter package (in beta as of this moment) offers two types of security, data validation by type and data sanitization." http://www.webreference.com/programming/php/php5-advanced2/index.html +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. HTML5, Microformats and Testing Accessibility By Bruce Lawson. "...What I really want to know from the HTML5 people is who they think is going to do this research that will provide the evidence that their gang requires before useful attributes are restored to the specification. The WHATWG spec is funded by big business, all of whom have millions in the bank. Maybe now the spec is 'official', they will be funding user research with disabled people using assistive technologies. Perhaps they will invite representatives from the manufacturers of the big screen readers to work with them. They could even fund those representatives, given that assistive technology vendors aren't anything like as rich as Apple, Opera, Mozilla and Google. After all, it's impossible to imagine that they would make arbitrary decisions to remove or retain certain elements, all with unknown accessibility side-effects, and put the burden to prove the usefulness of removed attributes on a small group of volunteers, isn't it?" http://tinyurl.com/2emag2 Presentation: How HTML5 can be Used Today By Simon Pieters. "Yesterday I held a presentation first for Creuna and then at Geek Meet about how HTML5 can be used today...The discussion afterwards was interesting, but it wasn't recorded and I can't recall all the questions, unfortunately. These are the ones I can recall for now however..." http://blog.whatwg.org/html5-geekmeet About the HTML WG By Lachlan Hunt. "The following was originally written in an email to Molly Holzschlag on 2007-05-11 to explain the current situation in the HTML WG. It is being published here by request..." http://lachy.id.au/log/2007/05/htmlwg Evangelizing Outside the Box: Web Standards and Big Companies By Peter-Paul Koch. "Contrary to popular belief, designers and developers at many big companies use web standards in their work every day. They just don't talk about it. For standards awareness to reach the next level, they'll have to start talking, says PPK." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/standardsandcompanies +10: TOOLS. New Improved Colour Contrast Firefox Extension By Gez Lemon. "The Juicy Studio Colour Contrast Firefox Extension has been updated to match the latest version of the draft Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0, and includes a patch that checks for contrast for input elements.One of the updates from the draft Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 is a change to the algorithm to determine whether the contrast between foreground and background colours is sufficient. As well as updating the algorithm itself, the thresholds have changed to consider large and bold text (at least 18 point or 14 point bold). I've updated the Colour Contrast Firefox Extension to incorporate the changes. The extension only checked the colour contrast between foreground and background colours on text nodes, so didn't include empty elements, such as input for form controls. Maurice Lanselle contacted me with a patch to include input elements whose type is one of submit, reset, button, text, file, or password. The patch is included in this update; many thanks to Maurice." http://tinyurl.com/yujvuj +11: USABILITY. Who Needs Headlines? By Shaun Crowley. "A designer formats and places text. Technically, the job ends there. But some designers go further, sharpening their clients' content to grab and focus user attention. In so doing, they create more effective sites-and gain an advantage over other designers. Drawing on decades of copywriter lore, Shaun Crowley discusses seduction by headline and other principles of writing that sells." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/whoneedsheadlines The Myth of the Genius Designer By Jakob Nielsen. "Having a good designer doesn't eliminate the need for a systematic usability process. Risk reduction and quality improvement both require user testing and other usability methods." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/genius-designers.html [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? Accessibility Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/accessibility Association Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/associations Book Listings. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/books Cascading Style Sheets Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/css Color Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/color Dreamweaver Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/dreamweaver Evaluation & Testing Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/testing Event Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/events Flash Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/flash Information Architecture Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/architecture JavaScript Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/javascript Miscellaneous Web Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/misc Navigation Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/navigation PHP Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/php Sites & Blogs Listing. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/sites Standards, Guidelines & Pattern Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/standards Tool Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/tools Typography Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/type Usability Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/usability XML Information. http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/xml [Section two ends.] ++END NOTES. + SUBSCRIPTION INFO. WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription. For information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit: http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdevlist 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.]