+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 8, Issue 29, January 15, 2010. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 29 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: EVENTS. 05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: NAVIGATION. 08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 09: TYPOGRAPHY. 10: USABILITY. 11: XML. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. A Behind-the-Scenes Peek at Automatic Captions on YouTube By Terrill Thompson. "On November 19, 2009 Google announced that it was launching automatic captions in YouTube. The University of Washington recently joined the list of early testers of this feature, so I thought I'd offer a sneak peek of how it works..." http://terrillthompson.com/2010/01/behind-scenes-peak-at-automatic.html Transcripts on the Web By Shawn Lawton Henry. "It's easy and relatively inexpensive for website developers to provide transcripts for multimedia. It many cases transcripts are required by law to provide access to information for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Transcripts are an SEO silver bullet for audio and video, and bring more people to your podcast, videos, and website..." http://www.uiaccess.com/transcripts/transcripts_on_the_web.html Title Attributes By Ian Pouncey. In many articles and blog posts on web accessibility use of the title attribute is promoted. Unfortunately this isn't the magic bullet that many developers think it is, and I will argue for its use as a last resort..." http://ianpouncey.com/weblog/2010/01/title-attributes/ Can Visual Art Be Made Accessible? Tom Babinszki. "...The World Wide Web provides new opportunities for visual artists to promote their paintings and drawings. And it is nice to know that somehow, the Internet can be used to help blind people understand a form of art that is enjoyed by many." http://www.evengrounds.com/blog/can-visual-art-be-made-accessible Office 2010 - Accessibility Investments & Document Accessibility By Larry Waldman. "I'm going to focus today's discussion on Office 2010's new document Accessibility Checker feature. I'll end the post with a few high level bullets of other accessibility features that we might discuss in the future..." http://tinyurl.com/ybcpxlw +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS Background Transparency Without Affecting Child Elements, Through Rgba And Filters By Robert Nyman. "Looking at the design of most web pages today, almost exclusively all of them include some semi-transparency of elements. However, getting the desired effect in CSS is harder than one might think..." http://tinyurl.com/yl9n2ew The Missing CSS Combinator - A Plea for Help By Niels Matthijs. Sometimes a long-lasting, nagging problem can take concrete form in the weirdest of circumstances. Something that's been bothering you for a very long time at a rather subconscious level suddenly leaps forward and calls out for immediate attention. More concretely, this article will be about a css combinator oddly lacking from our list of options, not even mentioned in the latest css3 specs (as far as I know). http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/missing-css-combinator +03: COLOR. ColorAdd: A Color Coding System By Daniel Fluck. "Can this color coding system be an added value for color blind people? This is what the designer claims and what it is actually all about. I don't think so. Here are a few examples in my everyday life to support my point of view..." http://www.colblindor.com/2010/01/13/coloradd-a-color-coding-system/ +04: EVENTS. Designing for Mobile with CSS3 with Dan Rubin April 1, 2010. Birmingham, United Kingdom http://forabeautifulweb.com/announcing/birmingham-010410 Portal 2010 June 8-11, 2010. Gettysburg Pennsylvania, U.S.A. http://cnav.gettysburg.edu/portal/portal10/ Hypertext 2010 June 16-21, 2010. Toronto, Canada http://www.ht2010.org/ +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. FluidIA By Jakub Linowski, Alex Barger, and Chris Thatcher. "fluidIA is an emerging agile design tool for prototyping rich user interfaces. The big idea behind this experiment is whether we as interaction designers, IA's, UX professionals and developers can create our own prototyping tool in an open way. Provided with access to an open design and open source process, this project kicks off with the following vision..." http://www.fluidia.org/ +06: MISCELLANEOUS. Interview with Terrill Thompson By Dennis Lembree. "Dennis speaks with Terrill Thompson, technology accessibility specialist at DO-IT, a program at the University of Washington..." http://tinyurl.com/yf6qf6y W3C's Shawn Henry on Website Accessibility By Freelance Review. "Shawn Henry has honored us by answering a few questions regarding Web accessibility. When she's not busy answering interview questions for bloggers like us, she leads the worldwide education and outreach effort promoting Web accessibility for people with disabilities at the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative..." http://tinyurl.com/yamblv6 +07: NAVIGATION. The Case Against Vertical Navigation By Louis Lazari. "...Naturally there are exceptions to every rule, and I'll discuss those briefly at the end. But first I'm going to present five reasons why vertical navigation should not be used and why designers and architects should almost always construct their sites with horizontal navigation in mind..." http://tinyurl.com/ybgljp9 Guideline 2.4: Focus on Information Architecture By Olga Revilla. "Provide ways to help users navigate, find content, and determine where they are..." http://tinyurl.com/yc3cxax +08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Standards Are Not Just Stuff and Nonesense By John Foliot. "One thing that all the cutting edge designers and boutique shops keep forgetting is that this wonderful thing we know as the 'web' (complete with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and all the newly emerging goodies of HTML5) is also used in the most mundane of ways, on web sites that simply need to communicate information to the end user without being a showcase of CSS mastery, Ajaxian trickery or the cutting edge coding examples of ,