+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 8, Issue 12, September 17, 2009. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 12 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: COLOR. 04: DREAMWEAVER 05: EVALUATION & TESTING. 06: EVENTS. 07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: PHP. 11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. The Caption Conundrum: Problem and Solution By deaftechnyc. "...With the explosion of video content on the internet, many have posted university lectures for all to see. Sites like iTunesU make it possible to learn about everything from Anthropology to Zoology. Without captioning this content is not accessible to the Deaf. An updated law would change that..." http://tinyurl.com/mynlnt Captioning Videos Does Matter By Meryl Evans. "Jen Rohrig and I have something in common. We just avoid videos online because we know the chances of them having captions are slim..." http://meryl.net/ci/2009/09/captioning_vide.html Accessibility Changes Lives By Ricky Buchanan. "This is the first post in a series about assistive technology. I want to show you why accessibility, adaptive technology, assistive technology, and other disability-friendly practices matter. Really matter..." http://atmac.org/accessibility-changes-lives/ Accessibility Testing PDF Creation Tools By Ted Page. "It's clear that, if the production of fully accessible documents is the objective, some care needs to be taken in choosing the right PDF creation tool. To date, despite the number of options available, only the established names (Adobe, Microsoft, OpenOffice) provide the means..." http://www.pws-ltd.com/sections/articles/2009/pdf_conversion_tools.html Keyboard Accessibility Presentation at Future of Web Design Tour 2009 in Glasgow By Patrick H. Lauke. Patrick HTML5 presentation materials. http://tinyurl.com/nnwtfl Google Acquires reCAPTCHA: Potential Boost for Web Accessibility By Lainey Feingold. "Web Accessibility activists take note: Google has just purchased reCAPTCHA, the most widely used audio CAPTCHA on the internet...." http://lflegal.com/2009/09/google-recaptcha/ Accessimobility By Jeremy Keith. "...ThatÕs quite a design challenge: an accessible touch-screen device! I doff my hat in the general direction of the Apple engineers who rose to this challenge..." http://adactio.com/journal/1610/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Wishlist: New Ideas, Debates and Solutions By Kayla Knight. "...CSS will get a number of new changes. Among them are alternative syntaxes, CSS programming concepts and the ability to allow more common design techniques without using images. In this article, we'll go over some current solutions, what we'd like to see in the future and the pros and cons of them all..." http://tinyurl.com/n2mwkk 11 Classic CSS Techniques Made Simple with CSS3 By Vasili. "We've all had to achieve some effect that required an extra handful of divs or PNGs. We shouldn't be limited to these old techniques when there's a new age coming. This new age includes the use of CSS3. In today's tutorial, I'll show you eleven different time-consuming effects that can be achieved quite easily with CSS3..." http://tinyurl.com/lmal7m +03: COLOR. Accessible Colour Combinations By Roger Johansson. "Different people have different needs when it comes to the colour combinations that they can read comfortably (or at all) on screen. But what colour combinations are actually preferred by people with dyslexia or vision impairment?..." http://tinyurl.com/m88t4g Accessibility vs. Alpha Transparency By Ben Buchanan. "...Using transparency has the side effect of reducing contrast; and for some reason it just feels like low-contrast thresholds kick in a little earlier than they do with straight colours. I'm sure it's just the "I wanna use the new toy!" factor, but there it is all the same..." http://tinyurl.com/oz3f7c How Colour Communicates Meaning By Rob Mills. "...Colour is a complex subject with many strands and it has the power to subliminally convey values and stories..." http://tinyurl.com/pnjf9s +04: DREAMWEAVER. (HTML5) Dreamweaver Compatibility By html5tutorial. "...Dreamweaver will not need a core update (this could be a possibility down the track and could be released as a simple update rather than a code update) if you are wondering how to implement HTML5 into your Dreamweaver or other HTML editing application we have a simple solution..." http://html5tutorial.net/examples/dreamweaver-compatibility.html +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Effective A/B Testing By Ben Tilly. A/B testing presentation slides. Covers theory, practice, & stats analysis. http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/ Discount Usability: 20 Years By Jakob Nielsen. Simple user testing with 5 participants, paper prototyping, and heuristi evaluation offer a cheap, fast, and early focus on usability, as well as many rounds of iterative design." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/discount-usability.html +06: EVENTS. Web Accessibility Day September 22, 2009. Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A http://www.nfb.org/nfb/web_accessibility_day.asp Build November 5, 2009. Belfast, Northern Ireland http://buildconference.com/ Future of Web Design November 16-17, 2009. New York, New York, U.S.A http://events.carsonified.com/fowd/2009/nyc Full-Frontal JavaScript November 20, 2009. Brighton, United Kingdom. http://2009.full-frontal.org/ International Day of Disabled Persons December 3, 2009. Everywhere. http://www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?id=109 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Day_of_Disabled_Persons +07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. How I Draft an Information Architecture By Donna Spencer. "When I teach information architecture, the most common questions aren't about the principles, but about the process. Just how do you decide on a particular method, how do you choose categories, how do you know what you've come up with is right?..." http://www.uie.com/articles/creating_ia +08: MISCELLANEOUS. CSS with Rachel Andrew (podcast and transcript) By Kevin Yank. "This week, Kevin Yank (@sentience) has a one-on-one chat with Rachel Andrew, the author of SitePoint's best-selling CSS book, The CSS Anthology, 3rd Edition. http://tinyurl.com/nj6gtq An Interview with Jamie Knight: Autism and Accessible Web Design By Henny Swan. "...Over the last few months I've been lucky enough to get to know an amazing up and coming web designer called Jamie Knight and his trusted side-kick Lion. Jamie also happens to have autism and has a lot to say on the subject of accessible web design and what the web means to him..." http://tinyurl.com/ry35c7 +09: NAVIGATION. Principles of Effective Web Navigation Zach Dunn. "Good navigation gets you places. More importantly, good navigation gets you places without a headache..." http://buildinternet.com/2009/09/principles-of-effective-web-navigation/ SlickMap CSS By astuteo. "SlickMap CSS is a simple stylesheet for displaying finished sitemaps directly from HTML unordered list navigation. It's suitable for most web sites - accommodating up to three levels of page navigation and additional utility links - and can easily be customized to meet your own individual needs, branding, or style preferences..." http://astuteo.com/slickmap/ +10: PHP. How to Debug in PHP By Kieran Masterton. "...This article breaks down the fundamentals of debugging in PHP, helps you understand PHP's error messages and introduces you to some useful tools to help make the process a little less painful..." http://carsonified.com/blog/dev/how-to-debug-in-php/ +11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. The Section Element By Bruce Lawson. "We doctors are a bunch of chums HTML5 and writing about how we do it. Apart from spurious requests for medical advice, the questions we receive most are about using the section element, and we realize that we've been using the section element incorrectly all this time..." http://html5doctor.com/the-section-element/ Updated Video Accessibility Demo By Silvia Pfeiffer. "Just a brief note to share that I have updated the video accessibility demo..." http://blog.gingertech.net/2009/09/14/updated-video-accessibility-demo/ Canvas Examples By html5tutorial. "One of the most talked about features of the upcoming HTML5 code is the