+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 7, Issue 45, May 8, 2009. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 45 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 AND TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: FLASH. 07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 08: JAVASCRIPT. 09: MISCELLANEOUS. 10: NAVIGATION. 11: PHP. 12: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 13: TOOLS. 14: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility at Recovery.gov By Jim Thatcher. "Continuing to look at Obama administration web sites, let's check out http://Recovery.gov, the web site set up by the administration to monitor and explain the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It is disconcerting how serious the issues get..." http://www.jimthatcher.com/recovery.htm Postscript on Recovery.gov By Jim Thatcher. "...This is worse than disappointing. It is something like a bluff. What is especially distressing is that neither Watchfire nor WebXACT exist any more - and they have been off the air since soon after IBM"s purchase of Watchfire around June of 2007; it seems that WebXACT was discontinued February 1, 2008. So how then could Recovery.gov have been tested with WebXACT? In my report on Recovery.gov, the home page has two machine detectable errors but many other very serious accessibility road blocks.. Those two errors are technically not violations of the "Section 508 Accessibility Guidelines", but the depth 1 scan of Recovery.gov turned up 69 errors that are unequivocal violations of the Section 508 Accessibility Standards, 1194.22(a) and 1194.22(n)." http://www.jimthatcher.com/news.htm#postscript Use the Fieldset and Legend Elements to Group HTML Form Controls By Roger Johansson. "The fieldset and legend elements, which should always be used together, allow you to create and name groups of related input fields in HTML forms. By doing this you help users understand how the input fields are related..." http://tinyurl.com/cbqcmk Autoplay is Bad for All Users By Emma Sax. "Autoplay is a bad idea not just for accessibility but for usability and general sanity while browsing. This article will explain what the problems are, where to find backup for arguments and what you can do if autoplay is a must have..." http://www.punkchip.com/2009/04/autoplay-is-bad-for-all-users/ Learning About Video and Captioning By Becky Gibson. "...I used Camtasia 6.0 to record a demonstration video using the Dojo Sample Mail application with the JAWS 10 screen reader. I then used the IBM DigiCape program to transcribe the audio for me. That is certainly a big help! It is much easier to edit the captions than to have to try to transcribe it all myself. And, the Freedom Scientific folks might get a chuckle that 'screen reader' often got transcribed as 'supreme leader'..." http://tinyurl.com/cdbmve The alt Attribute is NOT for Tooltips By Robert Nyman. "I'm am so tired of the never-ending misunderstanding of the alt attribute versus the title attribute..." http://robertnyman.com/2009/05/07/the-alt-attribute-is-not-for-tooltips/ CSS Background Images Cannot and Should Not Have Alternate Text By Roger Johansson. "I sometimes see people asking how they can provide alternate text for CSS background images. The answer is that you can't. Neither should you need to..." http://tinyurl.com/ddzlcz How to Provide Alternatives to Non Text Content on a Website By Virginia DeBolt. "A web content accessibility guideline published by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) states that website creators should provide text alternatives for any non-text content, so that it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, braille, speech, symbols or simpler language. Here are some tips for ways to do this..." http://tinyurl.com/dhafyn How POUR is Your Blog By Glenda Watson Hyatt. "With all of this talk about monetizing your blog and using your blog to generate business, and hence, generate an income, how POUR is your blog?..." http://www.doitmyselfblog.com/2009/how-pour-is-your-blog/ Comments on the Ontario Accessibility Spec, April 2009 edition By Joe Clark. "I submitted comments via Sharlyn and stated that the Ministry of Community and Social Services had a week to contact me or I'd publish my comments. They didn't, so here we are..." http://joeclark.org/access/crtc/AODA/April2009/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Hiding with CSS: Problems and Solutions By Roger Johansson. "...In most cases, using display:none to hide an element is a bad choice that reduces accessibility. I thought this was a well-known fact, but apparently there are many who are not aware of it being a problem. For that reason, here is a quick explanation of the problem and a suggestion for an alternative technique (that I also thought was well-known)..." http://tinyurl.com/cb93hr CSS Content, counter-increment and counter-reset By Estelle Weyl. "I have never used the counter or increment properties since they aren't supported in IE7 or earlier, nor are the :before pseudo elements, or content property. Since IE8 does support all of these, soon we may be able to include these CSS properties, so I thought I would explain them..." http://tinyurl.com/c6wapq The Problem With Rounded Corners By Niels Matthijs. "Rounded corners. They were already a big deal a couple of years ago, and even though several solutions exist today, they still present a hurdle which can't be taken with much grace. When CSS3 was revealed, one of the first announced features was the border-radius property, enabling us to apply rounded corners through css. Remember how happy we all were? Hold that thought, and run through this article to see how that idea is already failing, even before it found its way into each modern browser..." http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/trouble-with-rounded-corners Better Font Families in CSS By Lorraine Nepomuceno. "font-family is one of the most widely used CSS properties, and with good reason: sometimes you can change the entire feel of a design with this one property. But selecting fonts for your stack also greatly influences your design's readability and accessibility- which, ultimately, is what's most important in any web design. That is, if you want your visitors to actually read your content..." http://www.devlounge.net/design/better-font-families-in-css Zoomfusion By Jeremy Keith. "...Either a whole swathe of my peers are confusing elastic and liquid layouts or I'm missing something fundamental..." http://adactio.com/journal/1576 Shifting my Opinion on CSS Animations By Jonathan Snook. "...I believe I have done a 180 on this. Why and how, you might ask?..." http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/shifting-opinion-css-animations Covering the Implication and Basics of CSS Animation By Jonathan Christopher. "Over the past few months, I've been embracing progressive enhancement on a new(er) level..." http://tinyurl.com/cxmhm6 +03: DREAMWEAVER. Standards and Accessibility with Dreamweaver By Virginia DeBolt. "...Emily Lewis and I gave a talk for Webuquerque. Here's the presentation: Standards and Accessibility with Dreamweaver..." http://tinyurl.com/dcnlh9 +04: EVALUATION AND TESTING. Where Do Heuristics Come From? By Dana Chisnell. "Recently I had the honor and pleasure of working on a project for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop style guidelines for voting system documentation. Yawner, right? Not at all, it turns out. It made me think about where guidelines and heuristics come from for all kinds of design..." http://tinyurl.com/d4rl8m +05: EVENTS. Paris Web October 8-9, 2009. Paris, France. http://www.paris-web.fr/2009/Date-et-lieux-des-conferences +06: FLASH. Effectively Providing Alternate Content for a Flash Application By Todd Perkins. "Flash has an undeserved bad wrap in the Search Engine Optimization world. Some SEO experts even warn not to use Flash, because many search engines have trouble indexing Flash content. While Flash content is searchable by Google, it's critical to use Flash wisely if you want your applications to be searchable by all search engines..." http://www.insideria.com/2009/04/effectively-providing-alternat.html Debugging Flash Applications with Firefox Extensions By Tiffany B. Brown. "...ExternalInterface requires you to test interaction between the movie and its container. One way to do this is using the Firebug console..." http://tinyurl.com/cdopq3 +07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Information Architecture and Design Strategy: The Importance of Synthesis during the Process of Design By Jon Kolko. "During the process of design, Designers attempt to draw connections between seemingly disparate ideas; they examine quantitative data provided from marketing and qualitative data gathered from end users, and before they can begin designing, they must make order out of the chaotic mess of research. The connections that can be formed during this synthesis phase frequently hold the keys to 'innovation'. Designers visually explore large quantities of data in an effort to find and understand hidden relationships. These visualizations can then be used to communicate to other members of a design team, or can be used as platforms for the creation of generative sketching or model making. Frequently, the action of diagramming is a form of synthesis, and is a way to actively produce knowledge and meaning...This paper investigates the elements of Design Synthesis that are common to both Information Architecture and Design Strategy." http://www.jonkolko.com/writingInfoArchDesignStrategy.php Information Architecture: Synthesis Techniques for the Muddy Middle of the Design Process By Jon Kolko. "Information Architecture has arisen as a field related to interaction design. It is commonly found embedded within the profession of computer science, and is associated with the creation of complicated software. This relatively new field exists to make meaning out of data, and can be applied to disciplines that have little to do with computing or even technology. This paper provides an overview of established Information Architecture modeling techniques, and discusses how they can be applied to the industrial design process during the synthesis phase of design. The text reflects on the nature of this messy and critical period in the design process, and offers methods of quickly making information and even knowledge out of data. Finally, the text briefly describes the changing nature of professional demands on students entering industry, indicating that Information Architect may be a lucrative alternative job title for students graduating from Industrial Design programs." http://www.jonkolko.com/writingInfoArchAsSynthesis.php +08: JAVASCRIPT. Using Fieldsets Outside of Forms By Mike Davies. "The focus on using the most appropriate markup in JavaScript enhanced pages has raised an interesting problem about the use of form elements outside of a form. And using a fieldset to group these elements together is proving to be a very useful way of making them accessible..." http://tinyurl.com/co3c8c Debugging JavaScript: Handling Runtime Exceptions By Rob Gravelle. "The Error object provides a number of properties to help you display more meaningful error messages to the client and more useful debugging information to you, the developer. In this article, we'll go over how to use the Error object to handle runtime exceptions." http://www.webreference.com/programming/javascript/r32/ Jaws Scripting Accessibility Links By Leonie Watson. "...The script enables the user to move backwards and forwards between links with the rel="accessibility" attribute value. Where no such links are present, Jaws reports using the standard short or long message formats, depending on the user's verbosity settings..." http://www.tink.co.uk/content/jaws-script-accessibility-links.php +09: MISCELLANEOUS. Multitasking is a Myth By Rachel McAlpine. "It's about concentration..." http://www.contented.com/contented/?p=554 +09: NAVIGATION. The Shelf Life of a Skip Link By Henny Swan. "Most things have a shelf life and technology on the web is no different. Tricks and hacks that once seemed to save the day sometimes need to be retired as newer technologies or techniques get implemented..." http://www.iheni.com/the-shelf-life-of-a-skip-link/ Swine Flu, H1N1 Virus, Novel Flu By Gerry McGovern. "...if you want to tap the full potential of search you must add human management: analysis, trend spotting, connecting the dots. Search is the greatest laboratory of human behavior that has ever existed. When words such as "swine flu" go wild on the Web, you must use those words because otherwise you will not be found. If you are not found then you are not useful. Before you have any chance of shifting the debate, you must first become part of it. Using the wrong words is like ships passing in the night: you are going one way and your customer is going another." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2009/nt-2009-05-04-swine-flu.htm +10: PHP. Introduction to Arrays and Hashes in PHP By Peter Shaw. "An array is a list of a certain variable type, where each item in the list can be referenced by a unique index number, usually starting at 0. Think about it in real terms as you might think about a shopping list..." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/peter_shaw04282009.php3 Loops and Decisions in PHP - The ABC's of PHP Part 8 By Peter Shaw. "In any given computer language (PHP is no exception) there has to be a way to allow the running code to decide between doing 2 different things..." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/peter_shaw05062009.php3 +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Whipping Boy By Shelley Powers. "I noticed a passing twitter message from Laura Scott. It said One word: standards. Firefox follows w3c standards. Internet Explorer does not. She wrote it in response to another Twitter message from tutu4lu, who was having problems with a web page appearing differently with IE than Firefox..." http://realtech.burningbird.net/web/browsers/whipping-boy Comic Update - HTML5 Manners By Kyle Weems. "...These people aren't average developers trading insults about trivial code snippets on small-scale projects. These are industry movers-and-shakers who are supposed to be working together to help create the standards that will define how we use HTML and other web technologies for years to come. I expect professional disagreement to occur (I'd be worried and concerned if that didn't happen). But to start insulting one another personally in a public discussion (or frankly, privately) is shameful to the entire process and the entire community that is depending on them to do a good job..." http://www.cssquirrel.com/2009/05/04/comic-update-html5-manners/ Accessibility of HTML 5 Video and Audio Elements By Bruce Lawson. "HTML 5 has the audio and video elements that conveniently allow an author to add multimedia to their pages in an intuitive way. The advantage to the consumer is that the files will play in the browser with no plugins, and the data will be in the browser and therefore can be manipulated with scripts..." http://tinyurl.com/cgkxpm Multimedia Accessibility