+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 7, Issue 31, January 30, 2009. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 31 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: EVENTS. 04: FLASH. 05: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 06: TOOLS. 07: USABILITY. 08: XML. SECTION TWO: 09: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. The Stanford Captioning Project By John Foliot and Sean Keegan. "Having identified the three biggest obstacles in creating captioned media on campus, a pilot project has been proposed that seeks to remedy or lessen the impact of these impediments..." http://captioning.stanford.edu/service.php Why Captioning? By John Foliot and Sean Keegan. "While captioning audio/video presentations is a lifeline for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, captioning can also be used to improve your media product and enhance its accessibility to a much larger community..." http://captioning.stanford.edu/ WCAG 2.0 Checklist By Jared Smith. "The following is NOT WCAG 2.0. It is, however, a simple checklist that presents the principles and techniques of WCAG 2.0 in a more user-friendly, understandable format. The language has been significantly changed and simplified from the official WCAG 2.0 specification to make it more easily tested and verified for web pages. While this checklist may be very handy in pursuing accessibility and WCAG conformance, please reference WCAG 2.0 documentation to verify actual conformance." http://webaim.org/standards/wcag/checklist Requiring the alt Attribute in HTML5 By Gez Lemon. "I'm putting together a list of pros and cons about making the alt attribute required in HTML 5. The following is a list of reasons for and against making the alt attribute required. What is your opinion?..." http://juicystudio.com/article/requiring-alt-attribute-html5.php Testing Times: Recession Busting Accessibility Tips By Henny Swan. "...If you get it right at the start of a redesign or new build by including user feedback, especially feedback from users with disabilities, you're more likely to have a slicker, faster and more effective website than if you don't user test. And we all know what that means: better ROI, easier maintenance and a substantially bigger user base - all the things the money men like to hear about..." http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/testing-times Captcha Cracking in JavaScript with Canvas and Neural Nets By Ajaxian. "Everybody's favourite glass shield to protect web apps are CAPTCHAS. These are the distorted characters displayed on a page that a user has to enter before gaining access or sending off a form. They annoy normal users, are largely inaccessible to blind users or dyslexic people and are not that safe as we think they are. PWNtcha continually reports successful cracks of various captchas on the web using OCR algos and backend systems. What is pretty amazing though is that now you can even crack the images using JavaScript and Canvas..." http://tinyurl.com/d3y6s5 Bringing More Readers In By Desiree Sturdevant. "...With respect to social medias and my experiences so far, some are more accessible than others, but there are still barriers..." http://universallydesigned.net/uncategorized/bringing-more-readers-in Headings, Heading Hierarchy, and Document Outlines By Roger Johansson. "Recently my coworkers and I have been discussing HTML headings and heading hierarchy. This may not sound like something you need to spend a lot of time discussing, but there are some situations when it seems very difficult to find a solution without compromises..." http://tinyurl.com/bexb5f Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) Directory By Even Grounds. "The following directory contains a list of companies which provide a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template of their products..." http://www.evengrounds.com/resources/vpat-directory +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Using HTTP Headers to Serve Styles By Eric A. Meyer. "How many times have you played out the following scenario?..." http://tinyurl.com/cke9gh z-index: Sandwich Filler By Karl Dawson. "Working with z-index can be a little counter-intuitive at times..." http://tinyurl.com/d5ferq +03: EVENTS. The Exciting Future of CSS and XHTML with Eric Meyer March 9, 2009. London, United Kingdom. http://carsonworkshops.com/2009/ericmeyer/ E-Access '09 April 23 2009. London, United Kingdom. http://www.headstar-events.com/eaccess09/ @media June 25-26, 2009. London, United Kingdom http://www.vivabit.com/atmedia2009/ eduWeb Conference July 20-22, 2009. Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. http://www.eduwebconference.com/ OSCON 2009 July 20-24, 2009. San Jose, California, U.S.A. http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009 AHEAD July 20-25, 2009. Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.A. http://www.ahead.org/conferences/2009 HighEdWeb 2009 October 4-7, 2009. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, U.S.A. http://www.highedweb.org/ Writing for the Web 1 April 8, 2009 in Washington D.C., U.S.A. May 20, 2009 in London United Kingdom. June 25, 2009 in San Francisco, California, U.S.A. July 30, 2009 in Sydney Australia. http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/writing_for_web.html Writing for the Web 2 April 9, 2009 in Washington D.C., U.S.A. May 21, 2009 in London United Kingdom. June 26, 2009 in San Francisco, California, U.S.A. July 31, 2009 in Sydney Australia. http://www.nngroup.com/events/tutorials/content_2.html +04: FLASH. HTML 5 Flash Embedding and Other Validation Errors By Bruce Lawson. "When I completed the first round of my HTML 5 redesign, some validation errors remained..." http://tinyurl.com/btegrn +05: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Validator Donation Program: The First Numbers Are In! By Olivier Thereaux. "...With the donation program entering its 7th week, and more big things to come, it felt like a good time to start analyzing some of the data and sharing them with you..." http://tinyurl.com/d6nxc2 Microformats, Accessibility, HTML 5 (again) By Bruce Lawson. "Microformats are a good idea, but some have accessibility problems because they expose machine data to humans by misusing the abbr element. These problems led to the BBC removing those microformats from their sites..." http://tinyurl.com/clbszu 12 Standard Screen Patterns Luke Wroblewski. "As part of the release of their upcoming book, Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interactions, Bill Scott and Theresa Neil have published a full set of principles and patterns for rich interaction design. The first set consists of 12 Standard Screen Patterns and 100 examples of them in action. Get your hands on this great resource at the book's site." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?762 Pattern Languages for Interaction Design By Will Evans. "An Interview with Erin Malone, Christian Crumlish, and Lucas Pettinati..." http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/pattern-languages +06: TOOLS. Normalisation tool By Richard Ishida. "This tool allows you to normalize short pieces of text to Unicode forms NFC or NFD..." http://rishida.net/tools/normalizer/ +07: USABILITY. Occam's Razor in Web Design, Simplicity Wins By Ross Johnson "...All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best...' http://tinyurl.com/ado9pj User Experience Deliverables By Peter Morville. "...I'm rethinking my role, redefining my deliverables, and embracing new forms of interdisciplinary collaboration..." http://semanticstudios.com/publications/semantics/000228.php What the Web is Really Good For By Gerry McGovern, "The Web helps us make better decisions based on us doing often very detailed research. But certain decisions don't require any research at all." http://tinyurl.com/bh6a93 President Obama: Vision for Usability? By Frank Spillers. "...What should Obama do to ensure that the people getting the technology can use it?..." http://tinyurl.com/cafxt2 +08: XML. RDFa vs. RDF/XML By ESW Wiki. "This is a note comparing RDFa and RDF/XML in terms of features, usage, etc..." http://esw.w3.org/topic/RDFa_vs_RDFXML XHTML Users: Grow Up! Interview with Tommy Olsson. "The ongoing work with HTML5 seems to ignore semantics to a large degree. Yes, it proposes to add a handful of semantic element types, but it also adds purely presentational stuff that - in my opinion - doesn't belong in a markup language. Even worse is that it redefines long-established semantics of existing element types. For instance, the P element type no longer denotes a paragraph; it becomes a generic block-level container - nothing more than a synonym for DIV. The contempt for accessibility is even more worrying. The drafts propose to eliminate several important attributes (or at least make them non-required). The reason appears to be a lack of support in contemporary assistive technology..." http://www.webscienceman.com/2009/01/24/html-xhtml-html5-future-html/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +09: 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@d.umn.edu [Issue ends.]