[webdev] Web Design Update: March 26, 2010

Fri Mar 26 06:07:21 CDT 2010

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 8, Issue 39, March 26, 2010.

An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design 
and development.

++ISSUE 39 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: EVENTS.
06: FLASH.
07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
08: JAVASCRIPT.
09: NAVIGATION.
10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
11: USABILITY.
12: XML.

SECTION TWO:
13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Auto-Garbled Captioning
By Sarah E. Bourne.
YouTube recently introduced automatic captioning for its videos. "O 
frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" said people* I work with who are faced 
with the time-consuming and tricky task of creating transcripts for 
videos. Having seen some very … odd … output from high-end, 
state-of-the-art, speech recognition software, I suggested they wait to 
see for themselves before getting too excited.
http://sarahebourne.posterous.com/auto-garbled-captioning

Crowd-Sourced Twitter Captioning of Videos
By Brian Kelley.
"Back in March 2009 Tony Hirst write a post on his Useful blog entitled 
Twitter Powered Subtitles for Conference Audio/Videos on Youtube in 
which he provided a proof-of-concept on how you could take time-stamped 
Twitter posts and synchronize them with a YouTube video to provide 
Twitter captions for videos..."
http://tinyurl.com/yanym5t

The Future Will Be Captioned: Improving Accessibility on YouTube
By youtube.
"Tens of millions of people in the U.S. experience some kind of hearing 
impairment and recent studies have predicted that over 700 million 
people worldwide will suffer from hearing impairment by 2015. To address 
a clear need, the broadcast industry began running captions on regular 
video programming in the early 1970s. Today, closed captions on video 
are more prevalent than ever. But generating captions today can be a 
time-consuming and complicated process..."
http://tinyurl.com/yer3jgd

WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 Refresh Side-by-Side
By uiAccess.
"This is an initial start for comparing the Section 508 refresh draft 
and WCAG 2.0. It is incomplete and may be incorrect. It does not 
represent the opinions of anyone, including myself or my employer."
http://uiaccess.com/drafts/WCAG2n508.html

PDF will be Legally Accessible with the New 508
WebAIM Discussion Thread.
"Well the new 508 requires that visual accommodation only be required 
for individuals with legal blindness. People with print disabilities 
caused by low vision who are not blind must use those accommodations. 
Since everyone can use screen enlargement, everyone must..."
  http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=4150

12 Tips For a More Accessible Website
By Tom Walker.
"...In this article, we explore 12 ways in which you can make your site 
more accessible. Some methods are very cheap and quick to implement, 
others require a little more time and financial investment, but you 
should think of them as business opportunities. With the internet so 
central to all of our lives these days, it's unfair that some people are 
being left behind..."
http://tinyurl.com/y87o45q

Cognitive Web Accessibility Assessment: First Attempt, Part 2 of 3
By John Rochford.
"This post is the second part of my first structured attempt to evaluate 
cognitive Web accessibility.  I am using WebAIM's Cognitive Web 
Accessibility Checklist and its WAVE accessibility evaluation toolbar to 
assess the Web site of Down's Syndrome Scotland..."
http://tinyurl.com/yesjsq7

What Accessibility Means in 25 Words
By Glenda Watson Hyatt.
"...I have finally compiled the responses into a free ebook 'What 
Accessibility Means in 25 Words'. Download the ebook and feel free to 
share widely..."
http://tinyurl.com/y9ecmyw

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Understanding the CSS Float Property
By Rob Glazebrook.
"I want to take a moment today and talk about CSS floats. They're used 
everywhere in modern web design, from navigation bars to building CSS 
columns and dozens of techniques in between. However, despite their 
prevalence, not everyone understands exactly how they work, or what the 
repercussions might be from using them. So let's remedy that..."
http://www.cssnewbie.com/css-float-property/

The Space Combinator/Nothing Important
By Niels Matthijs.
"Combinators are an overlooked part of css development..."
http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/the-space-combinator

CSS Vendor Prefixes Considered Harmful
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"I recently came across a post about border-radius by the IE team, that 
said IE9 supports border-radius (cool!) without vendor prefix (even 
cooler!)..."
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/03/css_vendor_pref.html

CSS Vendor Prefixes Redux
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"Well, reactions to my proposal to abolish vendor prefixes are mixed, 
and I might have overshot my target here..."
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/03/css_vendor_pref_1.html

+03: COLOR.

Colour Blindness and the Web
By Richard Ingram.
"...In the same way you'd test the usability of an interface or the 
quality of your content, testing for potential visual issues caused by a 
colour deficiency should also be added to your quality control list. 
There are some great tools out there that only take a second or two to use."
http://www.richardingram.co.uk/2010/03/colour-blindness-and-the-web/

Color Blindness Tests
By Daniel Fluck.
"...This part of the Color Blind Essentials series focuses on the 
different possibilities to test color vision, how they work, what they 
can be used for and lists some of the well-known and used tests. There 
will be no conclusive enumeration as there are just to many tests 
around, with a lot of them not available anymore but still in use..."
http://www.colblindor.com/2010/03/23/color-blindness-tests/

+04: DREAMWEAVER.

Adobe Tools and HTML5/CSS3
By Ryan Stewart.
"...I've always thought that once HTML5 got a bit more concrete, you'd 
see design tools from Adobe that took advantage of it. The benefit of 
Flash is that we control the run time and can tie features to the 
development cycle of our tools. Not the case with HTML5 and CSS3. But 
now that the standards have started to coalesce and have support in more 
browsers, we can make those features part of our design tools..."
http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/2010/03/adobe-tools-and-html5css3/

+05: EVENTS.

The Aiming for Accessibility Conference
June 8-9, 2010.
Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
http://www.accessconf.open.uoguelph.ca/

+06: FLASH.

Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 Released with Accessibility Improvements
By Andrew Kirkpatrick.
"...The open-source Flex SDK includes many accessibility improvements in 
the components to ensure that users of assistive technologies can access 
Flex applications more easily..."
http://tinyurl.com/ybqge7g

HTML Versus Flash: Animation Benchmarking
By Cameron Adams.
"I've written before about why you shouldn't let your current tool set 
dictate what it is you create and I still firmly hold to that mantra..."
http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2010/03/22/

+07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

There Is No Such Thing As Jesse James Garrett
By Dan Klyn.
"The president of a firm that's synonymous with User Experience and who 
literally 'wrote the book' on the elements of User Experience making an 
impassioned call for everybody who's called information architect or 
interaction designer to change their business cards to omit mention of 
these competing paradigms, and then insisting that the way your firm 
does its work is different than every other kind of design approach 
that's come before it? It's a sell job, if not a sales pitch. I think he 
doth protest too much."
http://danklyn.com/blog/?p=570

Lifecycle of a Wireframe
By Nick Finck.
Nick Finck presentation from MIX10.
http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/DS04

Prototyping: Picking the Right Tool
By Todd Zaki Warfel.
"This article is a chapter from Todd's book Prototyping: A 
Practitioner's Guide."
http://www.uie.com/articles/prototyping_tools/

+08: JAVASCRIPT.

Accessible JavaScript Techniques
By Patrick Fox and Becky Gibson.
"Accessibility is all around us in the real world - curb cuts, access 
ramps, closed captioning. Accessibility is and should be ubiquitous. 
Accessibility benefits all of us - we watch closed captions when we're 
watching a basketball game in a bar, we use curb cuts for strollers and 
bikes..."
http://sarahdavies.cc/2010/03/14/accessible-javascript-techniques/

+09: NAVIGATION.

Heading Navigation in Web Browsers
By Roger Johansson.
"All screen readers that I know of have keyboard shortcuts that allow 
the user to navigate within a web page by jumping from heading to 
heading. This can really speed things up when you want to skip to a 
particular section of a page..."
http://tinyurl.com/y8po8oy

+10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Authoring Conformance Requirements
By Sam Ruby.
"The HTML5 validator will produce both errors and warnings. I personally 
believe that many of the so-called 'errors' are at best shoulds and at 
worst pose no real interoperability problems and are so frequently 
violated that the message produced only serve to obscure real problems..."
http://tinyurl.com/yjzq4ta

Browsers are Rails, Web Sites are Trains (Authoring Conformance 
Requirements)
By Larry Masinter.
"There's some ongoing debate about whether or how the HTML specification 
should or shouldn't contain "authoring requirements".  I thought I'd 
write about the general need..."
http://tinyurl.com/yfw9fel

HTML5: <section>  v. <article>
By Estelle Weyl.
"I have been asked several times 'when do you use <article> and when do 
you use <section> in HTML5?'..."
http://www.standardista.com/html5-section-v-article

The hgroup Element
By Richard Clark.
"One of the new elements defined in HTML5 is <hgroup>, used for grouping 
titles with their associated subtitles. But why do we need <hgroup> when 
we've already got the <header>  element? In this article, we'll do our 
best to answer that question..."
http://html5doctor.com/the-hgroup-element/

+11: USABILITY.

Don't Put Hints Inside Text Boxes in Web Forms
By Caroline Jarrett.
"...The short version of my advice: Don't do it! Hint text is rarely 
effective as a way of helping users, but instead becomes a default 
input. Read on, and I'll explain..."
http://tinyurl.com/yexhdvv

Scrolling and Attention
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page 
fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their 
attention below the fold."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html

Don't Just Edit Terrible Web Content-Rewrite It
By Rachel McAlpine.
"When editing web content, be bold. Speak the truth..."
http://tinyurl.com/y8goxcu

The Opposite of Fitts' Law
By Jeff Atwood.
"...what should we do with UI elements we don't want users to click on? 
Like, say, the 'delete all my work' button?...uncommon or dangerous UI 
items should be difficult to click on"
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/03/the-opposite-of-fitts-law.html

+12: XML.

SVG Browser Chart
By Jeff Schiller.
"SVG 1.1 became a W3C recommendation on January 13, 2003.  Seven years 
later, this page records my results of running various SVG 
implementations (web browsers and browser plugins) through the official 
SVG Test Suite."
http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.php

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+13: 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 at d.umn.edu

[Issue ends.]