+++ 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