+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 6, Issue 21, November 16, 2007. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 21 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 07: JAVASCRIPT. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: PHP. 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. The Accessibility Cookbook: a Recipe for Disaster By Aaron Cannon. "...It has been my experience that many people who learn about accessibility are led down a similar path as would-be bread bakers. They are handed a recipe and told, 'This is what you are to do, and if you don't do this exactly, those crazy disability advocates will come after you with their blood-thirsty lawyers.' They are told things like, 'mark headings up as such,' and 'put skip-to-content links at the top of pages.' What all too often is not mentioned is why. The reader is not told, for example, that most screen readers have a hotkey which, when pressed, will present the user with a list of all of the headings on the page, and that this is often used to 'skim', just as a sighted user might look down the page to see what was typographically emphasized. No mention is made of the fact that persons who must use the keyboard as a result of limited mobility, find skip links a huge time saver, because they don't have to tab through all those links that one usually finds in abundance at the top of most pages..." http://northtemple.com/1064 Alt Text and Linked Images By Jared Smith. "Alternative text for images is rule number one of web accessibility. While the lack of appropriate alternative text is perhaps the biggest barrier to accessibility for screen reader users, I have noticed a tremendous increase in the use of alternative text and thus, general web accessibility, in recent years. However, I am now noticing a very alarming trend of missing or inappropriate alternative text for images within links..." http://webaim.org/blog/alt-text-and-linked-images/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. The Great Specificity Swindle! By Andrew Tetlaw. "...Among the pages of arcane CSS lore you'll find something called the CSS cascade; the thing that ultimately decides what each element's style will eventually be. It has a reputation for being difficult to understand and is often the cause of those frustrating, obscure CSS problems when what happens in the browser is nothing like what you were expecting to happen. The amount of misinformation on the web certainly doesn't help, so this is my small effort to correct the situation: putting to rest two of the biggest myths about the CSS Cascade..." http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/11/14/the-great-specificity-swindle/ Tips For Creating Great Web Forms By Chris Coyier. "You don't need labels for your form to work, but as one CSS-Tricks reader once put it, it is an accessibility crime not to use them. Labels are what signify what the input box is for and associate them together. The use of the