+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 8, Issue 49, June 4, 2010. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 49 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 & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: FLASH. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 11: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Think About Accessibility Before You Start Developing Your Web Site or Web Application By Tom Babinszki. "Have you ever found out that your web site or web application is not Section 508 compliant after you put all that work into it? Even worse, have you been given a short ultimatum to fix it?..." http://tinyurl.com/36f2zok Future Web Accessibility: HTML5 Extensions By Aaron Andersen. "This is the fourth in a multipost series about the immediate and likely future of web accessibility. Each week or so I'll discuss a different upcoming technology, tag, platform, or system from an accessibility perspective. Additions, corrections, or further thoughts are welcome in the comments..." http://webaim.org/blog/future-web-accessibility-html5-input-extensions/ If You Use the Accesskey Attribute, Specify Unique Values By Roger Johansson. "The HTML accesskey attribute can be used to assign a keyboard shortcut to a link or form control. The intention is to let keyboard users quickly navigate to different parts of a web page or trigger links to other pages..." http://tinyurl.com/26r4g6r Captioning YouTube Videos By John E. Brandt. "So, I've learned a few things here: First, YouTube's 'automatic captioning/machine translation' is far from perfect and must not be used, at this point, for anything other than amusement. I am not sure if Google has a timeline on when this will get better, but until it produces accuracy at a 85% or higher basis, I would not rely on it as a usable transcription. Second, while machine translation, followed by human editing is clearly more accurate than machine translation alone, the time savings may not be all that one might imagine. I'm guessing that a professional transcriptionist using state of the art equipment would have been able to transcribe the three minutes of video a lot faster than I was able to edit the machined version. Last, we are still a long way from fully accurate S-t-T and if you are going to use videos on your websites, and want them to be accessible, you are probably still going to have to pay someone to create a transcript/caption file for you." http://jebswebs.net/blog/2010/05/captioning-youtube-videos/ How Do Web Browsers Perform When Copying and Pasting Alternate Text? By Vlad Alexander. "In HTML, an image is made up of visual and textual data (alternate text). Most Web browsers attempt to render alternate text when visual data is not available. However, only one browser currently uses alternate text when pasting images into other applications..." http://rebuildingtheweb.com/en/how-browsers-export-alt-text/ Blog Mastermind: Combining Two Passions to Create an Accessible Blogosphere By Glenda Watson Hyatt. "On June 14th, I'm launching Blog Accessibility Mastermind - a six-lesson course introducing bloggers the field of web accessibility and giving them ways to increase their blog's accessibility, within the confines of their blog theme and blogging platform. This introductory level course at an one-time introductory price will be limited to 15 people..." http://www.doitmyselfblog.com/2010/announcing-my-secret-project-finally/ Mind of the Blind By Betsi Robinson and Lanita Withers Goins. "Student's research aims to make the internet more accessible for those with vision impairments." http://ure.uncg.edu/inspirechange/2010/05/mind-of-the-blind/ The Business Rationale for Virtual Accessibility By Kel Smith. "Advocacy for inclusive design takes many forms. There is the user-centric position arguing that accommodating those with the highest degree of physical or cognitive challenge improves the usability of products and services for all people. There is the legal perspective, perhaps most notably demonstrated in the 2006 class-action lawsuit between the National Federation of the Blind and Target Corp..." http://anikto.com/wordpress/archives/385 +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. CSS3 and HTML5 It's Everywhere! By Niels Matthijs. "...It's not that I don't welcome html5 and css3. Far from it actually. But for now, people seem more interested in abusing these technologies rather than giving it some good thought first. And I really do understand the need to experiment, trying to find novel and breakthrough uses for these new technologies, but without a word of warning and with a big bold 'sexy' in the topic title these techniques will find their way to the live web, greatly diminishing the web experience for many out there. Think wisely when coming up with css3 and html5 articles. Warn against the pitfalls and don't advertise everything as sexy or cool just because it is html5 and css3. Think of what web design stands for, not about how cool you look using one or other new, flashy and hip technology. Just my two cents and sorry if this rant spoiled your fun working with these new technologies." http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/unsexy-css3-and-html5 CSS3 Best Practices By Louis Lazaris. "...Consider this a starting point for discussing best practices for CSS3, especially since there don't seem to be many articles available yet that exclusively discuss CSS3 best practices..." http://www.impressivewebs.com/css3-best-practices/ +03: DREAMWEAVER. CSS Layouts Part 3 - Universal Selectors, Dreamweaver CS5 Site Setup and More By Stefan Mischook. "This is part 3 of our new series on CSS layouts. In this video we set up the project in Dreamweaver CS5, learn about universal CSS selectors and using the Dreamweaver CS5 CSS tools..." http://tinyurl.com/2axpwlu Dreamweaver CS5 and HTML5 By Greg Rewis. "Unless you've been living under a rock, you know the underlying language of the web, HTML, has begun to (finally) evolve once again with the browsers slowly beginning to support pieces of HTML5 and CSS3..." http://blog.assortedgarbage.com/?p=472 +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Ten Usability Testing Tools By Graham Charlton. "There are plenty of tools around which allow website owners to conduct tests and attempt to identify problem areas on their websites." http://econsultancy.com/blog/5932-ten-free-usability-testing-tools +05: EVENTS. Web Directions U.S.A. September 21-25, 2010. Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. http://usa10.webdirections.org/ +06: FLASH. Awe Dee Oh By Jeremy Keith "You may have noticed a lot of 'HTML5 vs. Flash' talk lately. Substitute 'HTML5' for "'HTML5 video.'" http://adactio.com/journal/1669/ +07: JAVASCRIPT. Accessibility Does Not Prevent You From Using JavaScript or Flash By Roger Johansson. "A common misconception is that in order to make a website accessible you have to abstain from using JavaScript or Flash. Almost every time I hold a workshop on Web standards and accessibility there is at least one participant who believes that accessibility limits what they can do on the Web by telling them to stay away from anything that isn't pure HTML." http://tinyurl.com/27ae5ku Progressive Enhancement For Better Performance By Chris Casciano. Last week I had the pleasure of speaking to the great crowd at the New York Web Performance Group Meetup. Fellow presenter Marco Carag (Front End Manager at The Knot) laid down a strong foundation with a discussion of where HTML and CSS sit on the Progressive Enhancement ladder. Following that I came in and talked about JavaScript's different roles in PE, client side performance, and browser support of upcoming Web Standards. Here's the slide deck from my portion of the presentation: JavaScript, Progressive Enhancement & Performance..." http://tinyurl.com/32p46zu +08: MISCELLANEOUS. The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains By Nicholas Carr. "...The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it's becoming an end in itself-our preferred method of both learning and analysis. Dazzled by the Net's treasures, we are blind to the damage we may be doing to our intellectual lives and even our culture. What we're experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: We are evolving from cultivators of personal knowledge into hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. In the process, we seem fated to sacrifice much of what makes our minds so interesting." http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/05/ff_nicholas_carr/all/1 +09: NAVIGATION. Browse Versus Search: Stumbling into the Unknown Unknown By Tom Johnson. "...I will admit that we're a search-driven culture. Our fascination with Google is that it seems to contain answers to nearly any question we ask it. We search for information, and we find it. As a result, we can skip all the old-school navigation and just give users a search box, right? Not exactly..." http://tinyurl.com/37d9m5d A Sitemap Makes Your Website More Google Friendly By Sukrit Dhandhania. "A sitemap is like a table of contents page for a website, offering links to all pages on the site. These links are categorized and organized in hierarchical form, which makes finding them quite easy. When a visitor can't navigate her way to the page she is looking for, she can refer to the sitemap page to find it. Moreover, sitemaps help make your website more search engine friendly. By providing text- or XML-based links to key pages, the sitemap offers search engines a great way to index your website's contents..." http://www.webreference.com/authoring/seo_sitemap/ Experiments in Delinkification By Nicholas Carr. "...The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It's also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What's good about a link - its propulsive force - is also what's bad about it..." http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/05/experiments_in.php +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. The Mission of W3C By Jeff Jaffe. ...W3C needs to: 1. Drive a Global and accessible Web. There is little dispute that we should work towards a Web for All. But so many are deprived sufficient access - for reasons of handicap, language, poverty, and illiteracy - that we need a stronger technical program to improve the situation. 2. Provide a Better Value Proposition for Users. Everyone is a consumer and everyone is an author. Yet our focus has been on vendors that build products. We need to complement that with a better user focus. 3. Make W3C the best place for new standards work. I blogged last month about the expanding Web platform. There is so much new innovation and we must encourage the community to bring their work rapidly to W3C. 4. Strengthen our core mission. With the expansion of innovation on the Web, we cannot do it all. We must be very crisp about what we achieve in W3C, what companion organizations achieve, and how do we relate..." http://www.w3.org/QA/2010/06/the_mission_of_w3c.html Linked Data: It's is Not Like that; It's Like a Bag of Potato Chips By Dan Connolly. "...W3C has established principles including Web for All and Web on Everything. We've established a technical vision as well. There is broad agreement to these principles and technical vision. People are asking us to be more tangible and specific in how we achieve this. There are many ways of summarizing the requests, but four recurring themes best capture the idea. W3C needs to..." http://www.w3.org/QA/2010/05/linked_data_its_is_not_like_th.html Future of Web Design: HTML5 Coding Demo By Bruce Lawson. "I was privileged to be invited to speak at Future of Web Design last week. I gave a live coding demo rather than slides, so view the source of the (intentionally-ugly) page I built over the 40 minutes. " http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/future-of-web-design-html5-coding-demo +11: USABILITY. The Role of Accessibility in the Usability Profession Today - and Tomorrow By David Sloan. "I had the honor of taking part in a panel session discussing How Does Accessibility Fit into Today's Usability Practice? at the Usability Professionals' Association Conference (UPA 2010) in Munich last week..." http://tinyurl.com/2b8drrw The Discipline of Content Strategy By Kristina Halverson, Brain Traffic. "We, the people who make websites, have been talking for fifteen years about user experience, information architecture, content management systems, coding, metadata, visual design, user research, and all the other disciplines that facilitate our users' abilities to find and consume content..." http://www.uie.com/articles/discipline_content_strategy Language and the Role of the Web Writer By Dey Alexander. "...The main goal of online content is to communicate. If web writers have an educative role to play it is a narrow one - to educate users in the subject matter at hand. To do that, we must ensure we choose words that our users understand, present information they need and want to know, and do so in a way that works well for on-screen reading. We are not hired to teach language skills. It is not our job to challenge the reading skills of our users by using words with which they may not be familiar..." http://www.deyalexander.com.au/blog/tag/plain-language/ Don't Use 'Humpty Dumpty' Words - Speak Your Customer's Language By Dey Alexander. "...If you use a word to mean something other than its common meaning, you run the risk of giving people the wrong message...If laws or rules require a special use of terms that people may then misunderstand, say so." http://tinyurl.com/2uvzmd4 Web Content and the Burden of Time By Dey Alexander. "...People don't want to read web pages that look like dense walls of text - it takes too much time. They don't want to waste time reading things that aren't relevant to their current task or goal. They want the answer to their question as fast as they can get it..." http://tinyurl.com/3yehosy Writing for Dollars, Writing to Please By Joseph Kimble. "For years, plain-language advocates have sought to debunk the myths and misconceptions about plain language.(1) I'll briefly mention them again only because they are so stubborn and lawyers can be so blinded by them. They need to be exposed at every opportunity. First, plain language does not mean baby talk or dumbing down the language. It means clear and effective communication - the opposite of legalese - and it has a long literary tradition..." http://www.plainlanguagenetwork.org/kimble/dollars.htm Gestural Interfaces: A Step Backwards In Usability By Donald A. Norman. "...the lack of consistency, inability to discover operations, coupled with the ease of accidentally triggering actions from which there is no recovery threatens the viability of these systems. We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers." http://tinyurl.com/3xllrgx Perception and the Design of Forms - Part 1 Shape By Jessica Enders. "This is the first in a 6-part series on human visual perception and its influence on the design of forms. After introducing the series, we look at our first key visual element: shape." http://formulate.com.au/articles/padf-part1-shape/ [Section one ends.] ++ 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.]