+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 8, Issue 42, April 16, 2010. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 42 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: FLASH. 07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 13: TYPOGRAPHY. 11: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. How to Caption Videos in YouTube Tom Babinszki. "Captions in your YouTube video are very helpful to your viewers. This feature enables persons with hearing impairments to understand the spoken parts of your video. Captions also help hearing people who prefer reading content instead of listening to it, and those who wish to learn a new language..." http://www.evengrounds.com/blog/how-to-caption-youtube-videos Cognitive Web Accessibility Assessment, Second Attempt: Site Failure By John Rochford. "This post is my second structured assessment of cognitive Web accessibility. I describe how it is performed in my assessment plan. It is less-detailed than my first assessment, but it again addresses every relevant guideline of WebAIM's Cognitive Web Accessibility Checklist..." http://tinyurl.com/y3dxwm8 Cognitive Web Accessibility Assessments: Lessons Learned So Far By John Rochford. "This is a follow-up to my previous post that described my second structured assessment of cognitive Web accessibility. The work's progression can be seen via this blog's Category of Cognitive Web Accessibility Assessments..." http://tinyurl.com/y649ksb Creating Accessible Links in PDFs By Ted Page. "Creating accessible links in PDFs is a basic accessibility requirement. This article looks at techniques for tagging links correctly to ensure that they are both keyboard operable and usable with a screen reader. It also looks at, amongst other things, how to make URLs more intelligible for screen reader users..." http://www.pws-ltd.com/sections/articles/2010/pdf_links.html +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Why Containers Don't Clear Themselves By Chris Coyier. "One of the hurdles (and 'ah-ha' moments) in learning CSS is this business about clearing floats. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out the classic All About Floats..." http://css-tricks.com/containers-dont-clear-floats/ Child and Sibling Selectors By Chris Coyier. "Do you know what the difference between these selectors are?..." http://css-tricks.com/child-and-sibling-selectors/ A Simple CSS Drop-Cap By James Edwards. "...There are quite a few hacky methods for implementing this effect, but the cleanest and most maintainable is pure CSS, using the :first-letter and :first-line pseudo-classes..." http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2010/04/15/a-simple-css-drop-cap/ +03: COLOR. Accessibility Hack #3: Testing Colours to Enhance Readability By Glenda Watson Hyatt. "According to the University of Washington's Department of Ophthalmology, 2.8 million Americans have colour blindness, which can express itself in many variations and degrees of severity. Colour perception problems are important considerations when developing web sites to ensure that all users have access to the content and the functionality of sites..." http://tinyurl.com/y6awm7y +04: DREAMWEAVER. Dreamweaver CS5 Features Part 1: The All New CSS Starter Pages By: Sheri German. "The big launch has finally come, and now it's time to make a decision. Upgrade or skip this time around? Arm yourself with knowledge of the new features before you decide. Does CMS and Wordpress integration appeal to you? New CSS troubleshooting tools? How about new CSS Starter Pages? These features and many more are yours when you get a Suite or Dreamweaver CS5 by itself." http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?cid=62862 +05: EVALUATION & TESTING. Gathering Variables for A/B Split Testing By Paras Chopra. "A/B split testing is no longer an enigmatic term amongst web professionals; countless articles and books cover the basics. What more, access to tools such as Visual Website Optimizer (disclaimer: this is my startup)-which simplify the setup and maintenance of A/B tests have-have made the testing process itself as straightforward as possible. Despite this, though, A/B split testing isn't part and parcel for UX designers and internet marketers. The question then becomes: why not?..." http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/gathering-variables-for-ab-split-testing/ Debunking the Myths of Online Usability Testing By Bill Albert. "...The motivation for this article is to help UX researchers keep an open mind about online usability testing. There are some researchers who have been using this approach for years and find it useful (in certain situations). Others are new to it, and wanting to learn more about its strength and limitations. Finally, some UX researchers have already formed an opinion about online usability testing, and deemed it not useful for a variety of (unfounded) reasons. I hope by exposing these myths, we (as a UX community) can evaluate this tool based on its actual merits..." http://tinyurl.com/y5gqopm +06: FLASH. Flash Now Importable to HTML5 Canvas By Curt Hopkins. "Adobe will soon introduce its Creative Suite 5 to the public. A tool in the new suite will allow for easy import of Flash animations into HTML5 Canvas code..." http://tinyurl.com/ybc79at +07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Coloring Outside the Wireframe: 3 Tips to Integrating Visual Design in the UX Field By Kim Cullen. "When I interviewed at Adaptive Path a few months ago I was asked a barrage of tough questions. But when the tables turned and I got to ask AP-ers my questions I was interested in one thing in particular: 'What do you see as the role of a visual designer at a UX company?' I got a variety of answers and a few very long pauses..." http://tinyurl.com/y4udawl +08: MISCELLANEOUS. Wendy Chisholm: MinneWebCon Afternoon Keynote "Wendy Chisholm is a Web developer and human factors engineer who lives in Seattle, and is the co-author of Universal Design for Web Applications. She was a staff person for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for 6 years where she focused on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Chisholm's afternoon keynote for MinneWebCon 2010 emphasizes how good accessibility leads to good universal design, or design that benefits everyone. She also provides some great history about how many of today's most popular technology products and features were originally designed as disability accommodations." (Video not captioned.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MQW5b7q1aA Interview with Don Norman By designresearchconference. "Don Norman, author of many books, including the acclaimed Design of Everyday Things, and co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group, caused a stir earlier this year with an article best summarized by this controversial statement: 'design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs'..." http://www.designresearchconference.org/index.php +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Introducing Media Accessibility Into HTML5 By Silvia Pfeiffer. "In recent months, people in the W3C HTML5 Accessibility Task Force developed two proposals for introducing caption, subtitle, and more generally time-aligned text support into HTML5 audio and video..." http://tinyurl.com/y4k8y3a Captioning Markup By Anne van Kesteren. Now that HTML5 media elements have somewhat reasonable implementations in browsers, time has come to take the next step. You may not be aware of this but lots of features in HTML5 have been incrementally developed, within HTML5 itself. E.g. the 2D graphics API for the canvas element has gained several new features over time, as older features became more widely implemented. I.e. transformations, pixel manipulation, drawing video elements, and focus management have all been added over time. This was - and still is - done this way to ensure that implementations mature in a similar way. And that more attention is paid to the individual features which hopefully leads to better and more consistent.." http://annevankesteren.nl/2010/04/captioning-markup Accessibility is Not About Numbers Alastair Campbell. "There are several reasons why WAI-ARIAis needed...It should help simplify the HTML5 spec...Should HTML5 cover all the elements in WAI-ARIA? For example, should there be a 'tab' element that HTML authors need to know about? There isn't, and I think that's ok." http://alastairc.ac/2010/04/accessibility-and-html5/ HTML5 Input Types By Roger Johansson. "It is a rare day at work when I don't do anything related to forms. Be it creating forms from scratch, modifying existing forms, handling user interaction with them, whatever. I work with forms a lot. So that's why one of the things in HTML5 I'm looking forward to the most is the overhaul of the elements and attributes used to create forms. Among other form-related things, HTML5 adds a whole bunch of new values for the input element's type attribute..." http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201004/html5_input_types/ The figure and figcaption Elements By Richard Clark. "In traditional printed material like books and magazines, an image, chart, or code example would be accompanied by a caption. Before now, we didn't have a way of semantically marking up this sort of content directly in our HTML, instead resorting to CSS class names. HTML5 hopes to solve that problem by introducing the
and
elements. Let's explore..." http://html5doctor.com/the-figure-figcaption-elements/ HTML5 Proposes figure and figcaption Elements By Virgina DeBolt. "The latest working draft of HTML5 proposes two new elements that seem particularly useful to me. These are the figure and figcaption elements. The element name's are fairly self explanatory-the new elements are meant to let you markup figures and captions included in your documents..." http://ur1.ca/v9nz Issue 90 Remove Figure Element (HTML5 Change Proposal) By Shelley Powers. "Based on the March 4th HTML5 specification, remove Section 4.5.12, on the figure element. Also remove any additional references to the figure element. In addition, remove Section 4.5.13, on the figcaption element, and any reference to it, too." http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/removefigure +10: TOOLS. Nu Markup Validation Service - W3C Pilot By Michael(tm) Smith. "An experimental implementation of missing-alt error-reporting in a pilot version a validator.nu-based next-generation W3C markup-validation service." http://www.w3.org/html/check http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-a11y/2010Apr/0165.html The HTML5 test - how well does your browser support HTML5? By Niels Leenheer. "The HTML5 test score is only an indication of how well your browser supports the upcoming HTML5 standard. It does not try to test all of the new features offered by HTML5, nor does it try to test the functionality of each feature it does detect. Despite these shortcomings we hope that by quantifying the level of support users and web developers will get an idea of how hard the browser manufacturers work on improving their browsers and the web as a development platform..." http://html5test.com/ +11: USABILITY. Web Customers Care About Tasks, Not Goals By Gerry McGovern. "Talking about customer goals is the biggest mistake a website can make. That's how you lose the impatient customer." http://tinyurl.com/yatm9ks Our Users are Demanding Simplicity By fwdmovement. "There has been a lot of discussion around Apple's decisions to exclude Flash support from the iPhone and iPad devices, and their reasons for doing so. The ever-evolving nature of the web means that technologies will change, but in web design, the user experience should remain priority. It's not about which technology we choose, it's how well we deliver our content to the broadest audience possible." http://blog.fwdmovement.com.au/?p=37 Natural User Interfaces Are Not Natural By Don Norman. "...All new technologies have their proper place. All new technologies will take a while for us to figure out the best manner of interaction as well as the standardization that removes one source of potential confusion. None of these systems is inherently more natural than the others. The mouse and keyboard are not natural. Speech utterances will have to be learned and gestures carefully developed and standardized through time. The standards don't have to be the best of all possibilities. The keyboard has standardized upon variations of qwerty and azerty throughout the world even though neither is optimal--standards are more important than optimization. Are natural user interfaces natural? No. But they will be useful." http://jnd.org/dn.mss/natural_user_interfaces_are_not_natural.html Designing for iPad: Reality Check By informationarchitects. "I cannot emphasize enough how radically different the frame set is, that iPad interfaces are embedded in. The iPad brings hands and eyes back together. A complex matter that is best explained referring to actual examples. But you need to give me more time to understand the device and to test those apps accordingly..." http://informationarchitects.jp/designing-for-ipad-reality-check/ ++ SECTION TWO: +12: 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.]