+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 8, Issue 35, February 25, 2010. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 35 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 04: EVENTS. 05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: NAVIGATION. 08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 09: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 10: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility is a Human Right By Ian Pouncey. "I'd like to add my own thoughts to those expressed by Vlad Alexander's excellent article Is Web accessibility a human right?..." http://ianpouncey.com/weblog/2010/02/accessibility-is-a-human-right YouAbility's YouTube Channel By Equal Access to Software and Information (EASI). YouAbility's YouTube channel contains several video tutorials on accessibility: video captioning, accessibility in Word, and many more. http://www.youtube.com/user/youability Vancouver Olympics Web Sites Are Inaccessible to Disabled People By Joe Clark. "physical disabilities, and hard to use and understand for blind or deaf people...." http://joeclark.org/access/webaccess/vancouver2010/ Research Proposal: Accessibility Support for Non-HTML Web Technologies By Mark Magennis. "This proposal is for research into the state of 'accessibility support' for key web technologies that present significant barriers for web users with disabilities. Examples include PDF and Flash..." http://tinyurl.com/yddvxfc +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Multiple Class / ID and Class Selectors By Chris Coyier. "Can you spot the difference between these two selectors?..." http://css-tricks.com/multiple-class-id-selectors/ Rotate That Image with CSS By Adrian Senior. "A little unknown and not often used style of CSS is the ability to rotate images through a central axis. Rotation is a very easy thing to achieve and it is not limited to just images, you can apply the same styling to text. The rotate value does require some proprietary code but the affect can be achieved across all the main stream browsers with the exception of Opera; as we shall see..." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=6DA05 CSS Display- inline-block: Why it Rocks, and Why it Sucks By Robert Nyman. Usually when you want a horizontal list, you need to use float in the CSS code to make it work, with all its drawbacks. However, there is an alternative with display: inline-block..." http://tinyurl.com/ycxwyq5 CSS Efficiency Tip Use A Single Stylesheet File For Multiple Media By Roger Johansson. "The way most people link CSS intended for different media types, such as screen, print, or handheld, is to use multiple files. The files are then linked either through link elements with a media attribute or through @import statements with one or more media types specified. There is nothing wrong with splitting your CSS into multiple files and linking them this way (I currently do that here on this site), but there are two drawbacks: it leads to more HTTP requests from the browser to the server and the need to maintain multiple CSS files..." http://tinyurl.com/yg95xj3 +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. What You Really Get From a Heuristic Evaluation By Dana Chisnell. "...Heuristic evaluation may help a team know whether their UI complies with someone else's guidelines. But observing people using a design in a usability test gives a team primary data for making design decisions for their users using their design-especially in a world evolved far beyond command line entry and simple GUIs to options like touchscreens, social media, and ubiquitous connectivity. Separately and in combination, these and other design decisions present subtle, complex problems of usability. For me, observing people using a design will always trump an inspection or audit for getting solid evidence to determine a design direction. There is nothing like that "ah ha!" moment when a user does something unexpected to shed light on how well a design works." http://tinyurl.com/ye3uftp The Ten-Second Usability Test By Joanna Bawa. "Is your site usable? Testing the usability of a site is one of the first things to be done during the search engine optimization process. Keeping tabs on usability is one of the ways to assess how much work your site is going to need to pull it up in the rankings. Every search engine optimization company will have their own usability checklists, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult about SEO analyzes. It's a good idea for every site owner to have their own, to be used as part of their ongoing SEO maintenance. A basic usability test can be done in 10 seconds..." http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article6290.asp Rapid Desirability Testing - A Case Study By Michael Hawley. "There can often be disagreements among the members of a project team on which design direction we should choose..." The Essence of a Successful Persona Project By Jared Spool. "Personas are a flexible and powerful tool for user researchers. They're also one of the most misunderstood. When done well, they ensure the team focuses on the needs and delights of their users. Like other effective user research techniques, personas deliver confidence and insights to the team. Personas help the team make important design decisions with a thorough understanding of who the users are, what they need, and when they need it." http://www.uie.com/articles/essence_personas/ +04: EVENTS. Web Directions @media June 8-11, 2010. London, United Kingdom http://atmedia.webdirections.org/ eduWEB Conference July 26-28, 2010. Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. http://www.eduwebconference.com/ +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Review of Information Architecture Evaluation Tools: Chalkmark and Treejack By Jim Ross. "Recently, Optimal Workshop, the creators of the online, card-sorting tool Optimal Sort, released two new information architecture evaluation tools: Chalkmark and Treejack. Though these tools are not perfect, they do provide the ability to quickly and easily test early designs and information hierarchies with large numbers of participants..." http://tinyurl.com/yhuqu94 +06: JAVASCRIPT. The Seven Deadly Sins Of JavaScript Implementation By Christian Heilmann. "Using JavaScript has become increasingly easy over the last few years. Whereas back in the day we needed to know the quirks of every browser, now many libraries such as jQuery, YUI, Dojo and MooTools allow someone who doesn't even know JavaScript to spruce up boring HTML documents with impressive and shiny effects. By piggy-backing on the CSS selector engine, we have moved away from the complexity and inconsistencies of the DOM and made things much easier..." http://tinyurl.com/ygftkt7 Crockford on JavaScript - Act III: Function the Ultimate (73 min.) By Eric Miraglia. "The third installment of the Crockford on JavaScript series provides a deep-dive on functions in JavaScript..." http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2010/02/24/video-crockonjs-3/ +07: NAVIGATION. Sitemaps - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly By Rob Mills. "Sitemaps are a safety net. They can be a last resort for users before they abandon ship and leave your site having not found what they needed and vowing never to come back." http://tinyurl.com/y9ed2jb +08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. HTML5 - Techniques for Providing Useful Text Alternatives Editor Steve Faulkner. "This document contains best practice guidance for authors of HTML documents on providing text alternatives for images." http://dev.w3.org/html5/alt-techniques/ Make the Table Summary Attribute Valid and Conforming in HTML5 Editor Laura Carlson. "The current editor's draft lacks a valid and conforming way to provide a non-visual, explicitly associated, programmatic, table summary mechanism for users who cannot see the visual rendering of a table. HTML5 currently makes the summary attribute obsolete. It recommends against using the summary attribute. This change proposal: 1. Makes the summary attribute valid and conforming. 2. Requires user agents to make the summary attribute visible on demand with some type of a preference or switch in the user agent/browser. 3. Replaces current spec text with suggested text..." http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/SummaryAttribute20100222 HTML5 Challenges By Jeff Noble. "If you haven't heard about HTML5, then I'm both happy that you have awoken from your coma, and sad that you haven't been following the magic miracle that will finally fix all the browser compatibility problems and give us amazing animation and video without 'a buggy/lazy' plugin. While the development of HTML5 is encouraging, and recent developments like YouTube rolling out HTML5 video for the two browsers out now that support it, as well as Apple refusing to put Flash on the iPad and iPhone, it still might be a bit soon to crown HTML5 the king of the web any time soon. I found the following links below that highlight some of the current challenges, I know, shame on me for bringing it up..." http://uitrends.com/2010/02/20/html5-challenges/ HTML5 Media and Accessibility Presentation By Silvia Pfeiffer. "Today, I was invited to give a talk at my old workplace CSIRO about the HTML5 media elements and accessibility..." http://tinyurl.com/yezb33r +09: USABILITY. Progress in Usability: Fast or Slow? By Jakob Nielsen. "Over the past decade, usability improved by 6% per year. This is a faster rate than most other fields, but much slower than technology advances might have predicted..." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/usability-progress-rate.html We Go Below the 'Fold' By Susan Weinschenk. "For the last year or so there has been a heated debate about 'the fold'. The fold is the idea that there is a place on a web page that is the bottom edge of what people will see when they look at the page in a browser, and that in order to see anything below that line, the visitor has to scroll down the page..." http://tinyurl.com/yl9d9z6 [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +10: 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.]