+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 7, Issue 36, March 6, 2009. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 36 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: DREAMWEAVER. 04: EVALUATION & TESTING. 05: EVENTS. 06: FLASH. 07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 08: MISCELLANEOUS. 09: NAVIGATION. 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. CAPTCHAs, CAPTCHAs Everywhere By Jim Thatcher. "The whole CAPTCHA issue is a can of worms. They are appearing more frequently by the day, whether to sign up for email accounts or to play games. To avoid spam (they assert) some have added CAPTCHAs to the process of commenting on Blog entries. The letters stand for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". The name was coined by folks at Carnegie Mellon University in 2000. The basic idea goes back to Alan Turing which revolves around the idea of distinguishing a human from a computer. The idea of CAPTCHAs as they are used today simple enough. Here are some samples and some complaints..." http://jimthatcher.com/captchas.htm Are Negative CAPTCHAs Any More Accessible? By Glenda Watson Hyatt. "Are negative CAPTCHAs any more accessible? Are they an appropriate alternative to the distorted characters in images used for blocking spam?..." http://tinyurl.com/ad2wsd GOALS By National Center on Disability and Access to Education (NCDAE) and WebAIM. "Project Gaining Online Accessible Learning through Self-study (GOALS) is developing materials to help post secondary education improve web accessibility through system-wide efforts. Below is a draft of 4 statements that, if present at a campus level, would "indicate" an institutional climate that can foster and maintain web accessibility efforts. Each of these indicators is defined by a series of benchmarks and each benchmark has examples of the types of evidence an institution would have if they attained a particular benchmark..." http://ncdae.org/goals/indicators.cfm Send comments or suggestions on Best Practice Indicators for Institutional Web Accessibility (Draft) to Cyndi Rowland. http://ncdae.org/goals/indicators.cfm Understanding Web Accessibility Obstacles By Mike Cherim. "...lists of resources that can help you gain better understanding of disabled users, the web accessibility obstacles they have to put up with, and the equipment they use..." http://green-beast.com/blog/?p=345 Bull in a Caption Shop By Joe Clark. "...There's a proposal floating around for yet another captioning/subtitling file format. This one has three strikes against it - it comes from Google; it's linked to the ill-named, non-starter video format, Ogg, that nobody wants; and it is, furthermore, linked to HTML5..." http://blog.fawny.org/2009/03/01/google-ogg/ Rethinking Web Accessibility for E-Learning By Brian Kelly. "Why would we want to rethink Web accessibility in an elearning context? Surely application of WAI's WCAG guidelines will provide universal accessibility? And the recently released WCAG 2.0 guidelines should improve things further." http://tinyurl.com/afykwk Mobile Accessibly By Mobile Manufacturers Forum. "The Global Accessibility Reporting Initiative (GARI) project was developed to provide a central information source to learn about accessibility in mobile devices. On this website you can learn about the various features that a phone may have and link through to manufacturers websites for specific information on particular models." http://mobileaccessibility.info/index.cfm +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Hiding Content for Screen Readers By Jared Smith. "For years WebAIM has recommended a specific technique for hiding content visually, but allowing it to be read by screen readers. This involved using CSS to position the content above the top of the page. It has now been brought to our attention that if the off-screen content contains a focusable element (a link or form element), that the web browser will attempt to scroll to this element when it receives focus - thus scrolling to the top of the page. This could be confusing for sighted keyboard users." http://webaim.org/blog/hiding-content-for-screen-readers/ When to Separate Style Sheets By Jens Meiert. "Three factors influence whether or not it makes sense to use separate style sheets: Probability, meaning (aka semantics), and granularity. As I'm a bit thinking aloud, and as this is yet another guerrilla post ª, refinement of these thoughts might be pending." http://meiert.com/en/blog/20090305/separate-style-sheets/ Fluid Grids by Ethan Marcotte. "How awesome would it be if you could combine the aesthetic rigor and clarity of fixed-width, grid-based layouts with the device- and screen size independence and user-focused flexibility of fluid layouts? Completely awesome, that's how awesome. And with a little cunning and a tad of easy math, ALA's Ethan Marcotte gets it done. We smell a trend in the offing." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fluidgrids Building HTML/CSS Sites: Use a Template By Stefan Vervoort. "If you are developing HTML/CSS websites with occasionally a little bit of JavaScript (just like myself), it can be very un-productive to write your basic codes over and over again. For example, if you want to include a JS file for your dropdowns, a CSS framework file and print CSS files every time you start working on a new project, you better read this article for some time-solving solutions..." http://tinyurl.com/ccta2r Object Oriented CSS By Nicole Sullivan. "How do you scale CSS for millions of visitors or thousands of pages? Nicole first presented Object Oriented CSS at Web Directions North in Denver. Since then, the response has been overwhelming. OOCSS allows you to write fast, maintainable, standards-based front end code. It adds much needed predictability to CSS so that even beginners can participate in writing beautiful websites..." http://wiki.github.com/stubbornella/oocss 13 Reasons Why CSS Is Superior to Tables in Website Design By Matt Jurmann. "For the past few days, we've been scouring the web searching for the top 13 reasons why Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are superior to table-based layouts when designing a website..." http://tinyurl.com/apqm96 Vertical Centering With CSS By Douglas Heriot. "There are a few different ways to vertically centre objects with CSS, but it can be difficult to choose the right one. I'll show you all the best ways I've seen and also how to create a nice little centered website..." http://blog.themeforest.net/tutorials/vertical-centering-with-css +03: DREAMWEAVER. Fast Publishing of RDFa with Dreamweaver By David Peterson. "One of the biggest hurdles in adopting any new technology is the availability of good tools to work with. RDFa has suffered from that for too long. So it was with much enthusiasm that I read this morning of the launch of an RDFa extension for Dreamweaver version 8 to CS4. This is great news as it hasn't been the easiest to publish RDFa by hand." http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/03/05/publish-rdfa-with-dreamweaver/ +04: EVALUATION & TESTING. Consensus on Observations in Real Time: Keeping a rolling list of issues By Dana Chisnell. "Design teams often need results from usability studies yesterday. Teams I work with always want to start working on observations right away. How to support them while giving good data and ensuring that the final findings are valid?.." http://tinyurl.com/bqza6r Looking for Love: Deciding What to Observe For By Dana Chisnell. "Last winter I worked with a team that wanted to find out whether a prototype they had designed for a new intranet worked for users. Their new design was a radical change from the site that had been in place for five years and in use by 8,000 users. Going to this new design was a big risk. What if users didn't like it? Worse, what if they couldn't use it?..." http://tinyurl.com/ces9kp Thinking Inside the Right Box: Developing Tasks for Usability Test Participants By Dana Chisnell. "One question I get in workshops on usability testing is How do I get participants to do the tasks I want them to do?..." http://tinyurl.com/bvnpfp Yes or No: Make your Recruiter Smarter By Dana Chisnell. "Basically what we're talking about is giving your recruiter enough literacy in the domain you're in to be intelligent when screening rather than a human SurveyMonkey..." http://tinyurl.com/7fg2wx Project GOALS Evaluates 100 Pages in Higher Education for Accessibility against Section 508 Standard By National Center on Disability and Access to Education (NCDAE) and WebAIM. "Of the 100-page sample, 97% contained accessibility errors..." http://ncdae.org/community/newsletter/april2008/#eval508 +05: EVENTS. CSUN Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference Tweetup (Event will be webcast and real-time captioned.) March 18, 2009. Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. http://csuntweetup.com/ Higher Ed Experts' Webinar Series March 24-26, 2009. Online http://tinyurl.com/55jzd3 The Chronicle Technology Forum April 5-7, 2009. Arlington, Virginia, U.S.A. http://chronicle.com/technologyforum/ Technical Communication Summit 2009 May 3-6, 2009. Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. http://conference.stc.org/ Max Design CSS and Accessibility May 28-29, 2009. Brisbane, Australia http://maxdesign.com.au/workshop2009 Workshop on Human Computer Interaction (WoHCI 2009) July 20-24, 2009. Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. http://conferences.computer.org/compsac/2009/workshops/WOHCI2009.htm UX Australia 2009 August 25-27, 2009. Canberra, Australia http://www.uxaustralia.com.au/conference-2009 +06: FLASH. Adobe Flash - pros and cons By Robert Nyman. "It seems to be a constant fight whether to use Adobe Flash in web pages, so I thought I'd share my views on it..." http://www.robertnyman.com/2009/03/02/adobe-flash-pros-and-cons/ +07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. The Elements of Social Architecture By Christina Wodtke. "While our designs can never control people, they can encourage good behavior and discourage bad. In this excerpt from Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web 2nd Edition, Christina Wodtke tells us how to make products that delight people and change their lives by remembering the social in social architecture..." http://www.alistapart.com/articles/theelementsofsocialarchitecture Card Sorting - Downloads By Syntagm. "This page has the downloads you need you need to start printing and processing card sorts." http://www.syntagm.co.uk/design/cardsortdl.shtml +08: MISCELLANEOUS. An Interview with CSS Guru Christopher Schmitt By Karlyn Morissette. "Today I'm bringing you my interview with author, speaker and CSS Guru Christopher Schmitt..." http://tinyurl.com/dfvuy8 See Me Speak By Jeremy Keith. "While I was in Nashville for the Voices That Matter conference, I sat down for an enjoyable little chat with Nikki McDonald. It began with a discussion of my uncanny resemblance to Severus Snape before moving on to more webby matters..." http://adactio.com/journal/1556 +09: NAVIGATION. Old News Reduces Search Results Quality By Gerry McGovern. "News shouldn't be kept on a website longer than one month. After that it only gets in the way..." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2009/nt-2009-03-02-news-search.htm The Dos and Don's of Website Navigation Usability By Matt Jurmann. "Having poor website usability is like driving your car without a map through an area that you've never visited before. Unless you have an incredible aptitude for finding your way around, you're going to get lost." http://tinyurl.com/byt6ro Simple Scalable CSS Based Breadcrumbs By Veerle Pieters. "A few days ago I was implementing breadcrumbs in a website I'm working on. Not that I sincerely believe every site needs this, but on some occasions and to some users breadcrumbs are practical. Anyhow, it gave me the idea to write an article about it because it's been a while since I last wrote about anything CSS-related. The one I'll share with you is a very simple one. It uses only one simple graphic. The rest is basic CSS styling with an unordered list as HTML code..." http://tinyurl.com/cuvqhx +10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Lost in Translation By Henny Swan. "Opinions are split on whether the battle for web standards in won or not with many claiming that web standards are now no longer the vanguard but mainstream. Awareness is higher, laws exist to reinforce it and there is a good grass roots army of developers out there who will do their darnedest to built accessible standards compliant websites..." http://www.iheni.com/lost-in-translation/ The Road to HTML 5: spellchecking By Mark Pilgrim. "The feature of the day is spell checking, by which I mean client-side in-browser checking of text in standard