+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 9, Issue 06, August 7, 2010. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 06 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: JAVASCRIPT. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: PHP. 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 - WCAG20 Validation Rules From Open Ajax Wiki. "The accessibility validation rules enumerated in this document directly support WCAG 2.0, some with reference to the Document Object Model (DOM) and some with reference to the WAI-ARIA specification and WAI-ARIA best practices..." http://openajax.org/member/wiki/Accessibility_-_WCAG20_Validation_Rules The ADA and the Web: Concerns and Misconceptions By Jared Smith. "WebAIM is often approached by individuals and organizations concerned about 'ADA compliance' of their web site. This is a bit of a misnomer. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 pre-dates and does not address web accessibility at all. That may soon be changing..." http://www.badeyes.com/?p=236 Dept. of Justice Considers Web for ADA By Cyndi Rowland. "Department of Justice seeks public comment on making the web part of covered regulations within the ADA..." http://webaim.org/blog/dept-of-justice-considers-web-for-ada/ Web Accessibility for Cognitive Disabilities and Learning Difficulties By Ian Pouncey. "In this article we will cover a few of the problems users with cognitive disabilities may have that can affect their ability to use the Web, as well as the things that developers can do to alleviate these problems and things they should avoid. A lot of what is covered will be well known and common sense to many, but is here for completeness." http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/cognitive-disability-learning-difficulty/ Problems with Dynamically Assigned Accesskeys By Terrill Thompson. "In HTML, the accesskey attribute serves as a hotkey for triggering or giving focus to an element on a web page. Typically it's used in combination with one or more additional keys, and each browser defines those differently..." http://terrillthompson.blogspot.com/2010/08/problems-with-dynamically-assigned.html What Should be the Minimum / Maximum Length of Alternate Text? By Vlad Alexander. "Different guidelines recommend different maximum lengths for alternate text. Some recommend 80, 100, or 150 characters. Some have even calculated different maximum lengths based on language (e.g. 100 for English versus 115 for German). Some accessibility checkers also raise warnings if alternate text is too short. So what should be the minimum and maximum lengths for alternate text?" http://rebuildingtheweb.com/en/min-max-alt-text-length/ Ten Common Accessibility Problems By Roger Hudson. (Misattributed last week. Apologies to Roger. Hat tip to Russ Weakley.) "This document outlines ten common accessibility issues I have encountered which could result in a site's failure to fully comply with WCAG 2.0. The document includes links to some of the WCAG 2 advisory Sufficient Techniques provided by the W3C for addressing each issue..." http://www.dingoaccess.com/accessibility/ten-common-accessibility-problems/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Getting Vertical With CSS By Kyle Weems. "On Monday I discussed over at CSSquirrel my annoyance with vertically centering text with CSS. Any of you that have tackled this task have likely realized the chore that it is. For those of you who aren't aware, it's not as easy as it seems. Today, I'll help show you how we can make it happen, despite CSS's shortcomings..." http://www.mindfly.com/blog/post/2010/07/28/Getting-Vertical-With-CSS.aspx The Perfect 'Left Menu' 2 Column Liquid Layout (Percentage widths) By Matthew James Taylor. "No CSS hacks. SEO friendly. No Images. No JavaScript. Cross-browser & iPhone compatible." http://matthewjamestaylor.com/blog/perfect-2-column-left-menu.htm +03: EVENTS. Refresh Bellingham August 18, 2010. Bellingham, Washington, U.S.A. http://refreshbellingham.org/ UX Brighton 2010 September 13, 2010. Brighton, United Kingdom. http://2010.uxbrighton.org.uk/ WebAIM Training September 22-23, 2010. Logan, Utah, U.S.A. http://webaim.org/training/ Information Architecture Summit September 24-25, 2010. Paris, France http://www.euroia.org/ IDEA 2010 September 30-October 2, 2010. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. http://ideaconference.org/2010/promo AEGIS International Conference October 6-9, 2010. Seville, Spain http://www.aegis-conference.eu/index.html Full Frontal JavaScript Conference November 12, 2010. Brighton, United Kingdom http://2010.full-frontal.org/ +04: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Do You Know The Way to Good IA By Kim Krause Berg. "...You can spot a web site that has not had a proper information architecture prepared for it. The homepage shows everything at once..." http://cre8pc.com/2010/08/03/good-ia/ +05: JAVASCRIPT. ARIA Examples By Illinois Center for Information Technology and Web Accessibility (iCITA). "The ARIA examples on the CITA website have been updated to use JQuery for abstracting browser dependencies. The overviews now provide information on browser compatibility for each example." http://test.cita.illinois.edu/aria/ ARIA Live Regions Screen Reader Demo By Aaron Cannon. "Demonstrates ARIA live regions, including the aria-live and aria-atomic attributes. Includes a demo of their effects with the Jaws screen reader, version 11." http://www.cannonaccess.com/2010/05/live-regions/ PHP and Javascript Video Tutorial - Form Validation, part 1 By Stefan Mischook. In this series of video tutorials, we look at Javascript and PHP based form validation by discussing what form validation is, why you should use it and then build an example using PHP and JQuery. http://www.killerphp.com/articles/php-javascript-form-validation-part-1-video-tutorial/ +06: MISCELLANEOUS. No One Nos: Learning to Say No to Bad Ideas By Whitney Hess. "You can't create what clients need when you're too busy saying yes to everything they want. As a user experience designer, it's your job to say no to bad ideas and pointless practices. But getting to no is never easy. Proven techniques that can turn vocal negatives into positive experiences for you, the client, and most importantly, the end-user include citing best practices and simple but powerful business cases; proving your point with numbers; shifting focus from what to who; using the "positive no"; and, when necessary, pricing yourself out." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/no-one-nos-learning-to-say-no-to-bad-ideas/ Beyond 'I Hate Green': Managing Productive Visual Design Reviews by Kim Cullen. "It's a common challenge in visual design: creating a feedback structure that respects the subjective nature of visual design, yet also generates actionable items for moving forward. In reviews, clients need to know that their opinions are heard and the design team needs to walk away confident that they have clear next steps. This can be especially challenging when reviewing visual design comps, often considered more subjective then the no-nonsense wireframe..." http://www.adaptivepath.com/blog/2010/08/01/%E2%80%A8beyond-i-hate-green%E2%80%9D-managing-productive-visual-design-reviews/ +07: PHP. OOP With PHP: Finishing Touches By Lorna Jane Mitchell. "This article is the last entry in the series of posts about using PHP 5 with object-oriented programming. The series began with an introduction, followed by some more advanced concepts. We then looked specifically at the magic methods in PHP and how Exceptions work." http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/oop-with-php-finishing-touches/ +08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. HTML5: The New hgroup Element By Virginia DeBolt. "In HTML5, the new hgroup element serves an interesting purpose. I want to build you an example, starting with the hgroup element and working outwards to show how it could be part of the new article element." http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/08/02/html5-the-new-hgroup-element/ Document Outlines in HTML5 By Virginia DeBolt. "There was some discussion about HTML5 document outline in the comments to my recent post HTML5: the new hgroup element. I thought the topic deserved a post of its own..." http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/08/06/document-outlines-in-html5/ Dive Into HTML5 Video With The Masters - Webinar Replay Video By Mark R. Robertson. "Last week, we held our second ReelSEO webinar event titled, 'Dive Into HTML5 Video - Learn From The Masters.' The webinar was a great success and we had more than 1100 attendees join us for the first hour with more than 500 remaining online past the hour as we extended the Q&A session an additional 45 minutes. As promised, the following is a complete video recording of the webinar for those who may have missed it. 'd like to express my sincere thanks our presenters, Jeroen 'JW' Wijering, Chief Video Deity at LongTailVideo and Philip Jagenstedt, Core Developer at Opera, for offering up their time and expertise to help educate ReelSEO readers on the subject of HTML5 video..." http://www.reelseo.com/html5-video-webinar-replay/ An Introduction To The Canvas 2D API By Remy Sharp. "If the