+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 7, Issue 16, October 17, 2008. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 16 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: EVENTS. 03: JAVASCRIPT. 04: NAVIGATION. 05: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 06: TYPOGRAPHY. 07: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 08: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Making Video Accessible By Jeroen Wijering. "With the increasing popularity of online video comes the increasing need to maximize the accessibility of its content. If your video contains relevant information, deaf or blind people should be able to get to it. And people who use exotic browsers or platforms should too. This doesn't mean you have to offer 20 different versions of your piece. A clever combination of the right formats, the SWFObject javascript and the Flash-based FLV Media Player 3 can do the job as well. (currently the 4.0 player has no audio description. The 4.1 will!)..." http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=Making_Video_Accessible Mozilla Launches Video Accessibility Drive By Nathan Willis. "Video and audio support will soon be built directly into Firefox, by way of the free Vorbis and Theora codecs, and Mozilla is using the opportunity to advance multimedia accessibility for hearing-impaired and seeing-impaired users. Although HTML 5 does not officially include Ogg Vorbis and Theora as baseline codecs for the new VIDEO and AUDIO tags, Mozilla has adopted them for its own implementation. Researcher Silvia Pfeiffer is leading a Mozilla Foundation-funded effort to integrate support for closed captioning and other multimedia accessibility features into the Ogg formats and their implementation in Firefox..." http://www.linux.com/feature/149988 Accessibility/Video Accessibility By Mozilla. "...Video on the Web is a complex topic, not only from a technical, but also from a political and patent viewpoint. Even HTML5 and the WHATWG haven't figured out what baseline codec to recommend yet..." https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/Video_Accessibility Accessibility/Caption Formats By Mozilla. "This is a list of existing caption formats..." https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/Caption_Formats Accessible Implementation of Video and Audio on Websites By Eric Velleman. http://www.accessibility.nl/internet/artikelen/audiovideo?languageId=2 Video Accessibility, Closed Captions, and Video SEO By Mark Robertson. "Many videos on the net simply aren't seen because they cant get discovered..." http://www.reelseo.com/video-accessibility-closed-captions-video-seo/ New Captions Feature For Videos By YouTube. "You can add captions to one of your videos by uploading a closed caption file using the "Captions and Subtitles" menu on the editing page..." http://www.youtube.com/blog?entry=mi8D3ntPgFQ YouTube Offers Captioning for Increased Accessibility and Indexing By Mark Robertson. "YouTube has been working hard to expand the offerings at the site and make the videos more accessible to everyone. One of the features they just recently rolled out was the ability to include captions in videos...Not only will this allow for greater accessibility, but it will give YouTube excellent data for searching videos and targeting advertising to them. If you think about it, a complete set of subtitles for captions is basically the same as a transcript of the video itself, and we know how transcripts can help with video indexing." http://www.reelseo.com/youtube-captioning-accessibility/ +02: EVENTS. Scripting Enabled Seattle November 1-2, 2008. Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. http://ses.eventwax.com/scripting-enabled-seattle World Usability Day November 13, 2008. Everywhere http://www.worldusabilityday.org/ PHPNW08 Conference November 22, 2008. Manchester, United Kingdom. http://conference.phpnw.org.uk/phpnw08/ Web Directions North February 2-8, 2009. Denver Colorado, U.S.A. http://north.webdirections.org/ WebAIM Accessibility Training February 18-19, 2009. Logan, Utah, U.S.A. http://www.webaim.org/training/ CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) 2009 April 4-9, 2009. Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. http://www.chi2009.org/ +03: JAVASCRIPT. ARIA Momentum and Internet Explorer By Jared Smith. "...Perhaps the biggest barrier to ARIA implementation is that it is not yet supported in Internet Explorer. It's difficult to truly recommend a technology that does nothing in the most popular web browser. The standards and accessibility community was thrilled to hear that Internet Explorer 8 will support ARIA. However, this excitement is being tempered by the fact that Microsoft is currently implementing ARIA in a non-standard way..." http://webaim.org/blog/aria-momentum-and-ie/ Explaining JavaScript Scope and Closures By Robert Nyman. "I thought I'd try to explain something which many people struggle with: JavaScript scope and closures..." http://tinyurl.com/4fjlwa How to Get Private, Privileged, Public and Static Members (Properties and Methods) By Robert Nyman. After reading JavaScript inheritance - how and why and Explaining JavaScript scope and closures, I thought we'd combine the knowledge gained to talk about private, privileged, public and static members (properties and methods) for objects in JavaScript..." http://tinyurl.com/453k5x Beware of JavaScript Semicolon Insertion By Robert Nyman. "One of most tricky behaviors by JavaScript interpreters is semicolon insertion..." http://tinyurl.com/4aajoz +04: NAVIGATION. Choosing the Right Classification Words By Gerry McGovern. "Climate change or global warming? Pandemic flu or bird flu? Learning or training? Should we choose the 'correct' words or the words people actually use?" http://tinyurl.com/3oyw9x +05: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. W3C Standardization Process: Breaking Through the FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) By Lachlan Hunt. "While at Web Directions South, Lachlan caught up with Mike(tm) Smith, co-chair of the W3C's HTML Working Group, to talk about the process of standardization at the W3C. Mike(tm) Smith, who is also a W3C team contact, describes what is standardization and how it relates to HTML5. Mike brings some reality to how standardization of HTML5 is happening from someone who is actually there on the ground helping it all happen..." http://standardssuck.org/w3c-standardization-process Structure Your Webpages with HTML 5 By Peter Davison. "... The life of Hypertext on the web has gone through several stages to try and provide proper webpage semantic (meaningful) structure. Tim Berners-Lee created the initial development of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and then the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) updated it to HTML 2 and then the language continued from HTML 3.2 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (directed by Tim Berners-Lee). Beginning the path to Web Standards, the W3C HTML 4 and 4.01 specifications provided a strict edition and two other editions (transitional and frameset) for backwards compatibility of the depreciated code. But all three added internationalization and accessibility..." http://www.legendscrolls.co.uk/webstandards/html5 HTML5 DOCTYPE By John Resig. "Remember the whole crazy Internet Explorer 8 meta http-equiv hub-bub, yesterday? There was one post in all of that mess that was really, really, important. To sum it up: Internet Explorer 8 will support DOCTYPE switching for new DOCTYPEs (like HTML5)..." http://ejohn.org/blog/html5-doctype/ This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 9 By Mark Pilgrim. "...Shelley Powers pointed out that I haven't mentioned the issue of distributed extensibility yet..." http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html-5-episode-9 +06: TYPOGRAPHY. Zoom By Dave Shea. "Somehow over the last year or two we've landed in a situation where most browsers now default to full page zoom instead of traditional text-resizing..." http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2008/10/07/zoom/ +07: USABILITY. The Most Annoying Yet Almost Most Important Task in Professional Website Management By Jens Meiert. "...is link checking. There are tools out there, en masse, however, it is just annoying to run after so-called professionals who neither know about simplest online rules nor how to set up redirects (but dare to waste other people's time)..." http://meiert.com/en/blog/20081016/the-most-annoying-task/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +08: 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.]