+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 2, Issue 18, October 25, 2003. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 18 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: EVENTS. 05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: MISCELLANEOUS. 07: PHP. 08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 08: TOOLS. 10: USABILITY. 11: XML. SECTION TWO: 12: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessibility in Distance Education By The University of Maryland University College This site is "A Resource for Faculty in Online Teaching" that "aims to educate online faculty about how people with disabilities navigate the web and the things they (faculty) need to do to ensure that electronic learning materials are accessible. http://www.umuc.edu/distance/odell/cade/ade/index.html Another way of looking at accessibility By Lorraine Ireland "Lorraine Ireland contacted us about her experiences of learning about web accessibility, having been in the business of selling adaptive technology for a number of years. We thought that it deserved somewhere more public than a personal email, so here's what Lorraine had to say." http://tinyurl.com/rxjz +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Sliding Doors of CSS By Douglas Bowman "Image-driven, visually compelling user interfaces. Text-based, semantic markup. Now you can have both! Douglas Bowman's sliding doors method of CSS design offers sophisticated graphics that squash and stretch while delivering meaningful XHTML text. Have your cake and eat it, too!" http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slidingdoors/ Facts and Opinion About Fahrner Image Replacement By Joe Clark "Unfortunately, Fahrner Image Replacement cannot be said to be an accessible web technique when used for text. Screen-reader users either already cannot read any text marked up that way or will not be able to in the future when the software is updated to interpret CSS correctly. Other people with disabilities will probably never be adversely affected by its use, and many will benefit the way nondisabled people do, since a lot of disabled people online have normal vision and enjoy attractive websites. But we cannot exclude screen-reader users from a conception of accessibility." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fir/ How to Design An Accessible Web Site When You Absolutely, Positively Need a Table By elderweb.com "Now that I no longer use tables for formatting my page layout, I find I have to rethink the way I use "real" tables...how to style tables in a CSS layout that are accessible, consistant in appearance throughout the site, and efficiently rendered." http://tinyurl.com/qbrc Last call comments By Ian Hickson Hixie has some details rearding the recently announced CSS2.1 Last Call Working Draft. http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=1063663989&count=1 +03: COLOR. Tip: Understanding colour contrast and accessibility By Jim Byrne "Even when using different colours next to one another (e.g. text and a background colour), if they are similarly light or similarly dark there will still be accessibility issues for some users." http://www.mcu.org.uk/show.php?contentid=65 +04: EVENTS. Call for Position Papers: Making Visualizations of Complex Information Accessible for People with Disabilities December 8, 2003 "The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Research and Development Interest Group announces a Call for Position Papers for a teleconference focusing on research issues of accessibility and visualizing of complex information. This teleconference is the second in a series of discussions that will cover a variety of topics related to accessibility and Web technologies." http://www.w3.org/WAI/RD/2003/09/call-vis-papers.html 6th Annual Accessing Higher Ground Conference Assistive Technology and Accessible Media in Higher Education November 11-14, 2003 University of Colorado - Boulder Campus Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A. http://www.colorado.edu/ATconference/ UPA 2004 13th annual Usability Professionals' Association Conference June 7-11, 2004 Minneapolis, Minnesota, U.S.A. http://tinyurl.com/rwfg +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The Card Sorting Test By Xworld "Sure you know your business and products well, very well, but in some circumstances, this knowledge can be a disadvantage. Planning a good web site is one of those times." http://www.xworld.com/think_cardsortingtest.html Card sorting and cluster analysis By Thomas Myer "This tutorial is designed to assist information architects, usability engineers, and other experienced professionals with card sorting and cluster analysis techniques. Together, these techniques offer statistical methods for gathering user input on how a Web site should be organized, thereby increasing the Web site's usability." http://tinyurl.com/rxqi Web-based Card Sorting for Information Architecture By Larry Wood, Jed Wood and John Anderson "We have devloped a web-based interface which allows designers to do electronic "card sort" studies. With it, designers can provide descriptions of features for which they'd like users to provide labels and to "sort" into categories. The results can be used to organize information and services access for ÒinterfaceÓ design." http://www.acm.org/chapters/nuchi/2002/09mtg_websort/WebSort.html +06: MISCELLANEOUS. Jeffrey Zeldman Interview "The heartache comes as we open the old articles and reformat them for the new templates. With the oldest materials, we're taking multi-page articles that use late 1990s nonsemantic HTML and converting to structural, semantic XHTML, and believe me that is a lot of work. But we only have to do it once, and from hereon in ALA will be what it always should have been (but couldn't be, because browsers in the 1990s didn't let designers create standards-compliant, semantic pages that looked like anything)." http://www.lounge72.com/04/12/ Project Management Process By Phil Wolf http://dijest.com/tools/pmworkbench/pmtemplates/pmoredocs/pmprocess.htm +07: PHP. Random Image Rotation By Dan Benjamin "Readers return to sites that appear fresh and new on each visit. On a news site, magazine, or blog, stories or headlines will be updated frequently. But how can static sites keep that fresh feeling? Dan Benjamin's free image randomizer may do the trick, and you needn't be a programmer to install it." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/randomizer/ PHP Security, Part 3 By John Coggeshall "A malicious user will likely start his attack by using your system in ways you never anticipated. Your system logs are an oft-neglected defense tool. John Coggeshall shows how PHP's error logging and reporting functions can help you secure your applications." http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2003/10/09/php_foundations.html The PHP Scalability Myth By Jack Herrington "Java scales ... but so does PHP. That's the argument Jack Herrington puts forth in comparing how each can be used to create web applications with modern architectures." http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2003/10/15/php_scalability.html +08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Are They Really Separated? By Doug Bowman "...when we make small design adjustments by adding extra
tags or class attributes, then alter the CSS to take advantage of those markup changes, we confuse the concept of independent structure and presentation." http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2003/10/14/separated.html The Incomplete Divorce By Eric A. Meyer "Document structure is like the support beams for a building. The final layout and appearance of the building will depend very heavily on the shape those support beams create. If you ignore that, and assemble the beams with no thought toward the final product (not following the blueprints, as it were), the best you can hope for is an inefficient, almost unusable building. In the worst case, the building will utterly collapse as soon as you try to add anything useful to the structure." http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/200310.html#t200310015 +09: TOOLS. The Web Publishing Accessibility Wizard for Microsoft Office By The University of Illinois Here is a free windows tool to help convert Power Point Presentations to highly accessible HTML versions. It is a Wizard that provides an alternative to the standard save to web feature of Power Point. http://cita.rehab.uiuc.edu/software/office/overview.html +10: USABILITY. Web guru fights info pollution By Jo Twist "To web guru Jakob Nielsen, it is computers which are starting to control us, and it is time to 'rule the computer and put it back in its place'." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3171376.stm User Expectations in a World of Smart Devices By Mike Kuniavsky "As hands-on consultants we spend most of our time thinking about the day-to-day challenges of our practice. We refine and perfect our techniques for the benefit of our clients, and sometimes we share those lessons here..." http://tinyurl.com/r9yc Why personalization hasn't worked By Gerry McGovern The best definition I have found for a portal is as follows: 'A portal costs four times more to buy and operate than a normal website. It delivers half the benefits.' Yes, that big, cumbersome, complex portal of your dreams may well make you long for the days when you were running a simple but effective HTML website." http://tinyurl.com/rl36 Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites By Alison J. Head "As long as personas are developed with diligence, the planning and development tool has three key benefits for interface design projects of all kinds. First, personas introduce teams to hypothetical users who have names, personal traits, and habits that in a relatively short time become believable constructs for honing design specifications. Second, personas are stand-ins with archetypal characteristics that represent a much larger group of users. Third, personas give design teams a strong sense of what users' goals are and what an interface needs to fulfill them." http://www.infotoday.com/online/jul03/head.shtml +11: XML. RSS Workshop By The Utah State Library Publish and Syndicate Your News to the Web "If you build it and have great content, they will come" http://gils.utah.gov/rss/ How easy is XHTML 2? By Anne van Kestere "If we consider that almost nobody understands HTML4 correctly (although lots of people say they do) XHTML 2 will be though. Before you actually understand everything and know where you need to use it for you have probably read the specification and a few other documents. Maybe it is not so bad it is not backwards compatible, though because of this, lots of things have to be learned (again?)..." http://tinyurl.com/rl75 [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 only. For information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit: http://www.d.umn.edu/goto/webdevlist + TEXT EMAIL NEWSLETTER (TEN) STANDARD. As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to the accessible Text Email Newsletter (TEN) Standard. Please let me know if there is anything else we can do to make navigation easier. For TEN Standard information please visit: http://www.headstar.com/ten + SIGNATURE. Laura L. Carlson Information Technology Systems and Services University of Minnesota Duluth Duluth, MN 55812-3009 mailto:lcarlson@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]