+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 7, Issue 40, April 3, 2009. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 40 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: FLASH. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: PHP. 08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: TYPOGRAPHY. 12: USABILITY. 13: XML. SECTION TWO: 14: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Accessible Web Applications By Christian Heilmann. Chris explains how to create web applications so they are accessible. http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/accessible-web-applicationss Accessibility Supported? By Roger Hudson. "I recently reviewed a couple of PDF forms for compliance with WCAG 2 and the inconsistent way the test screen readers handled these forms threw up several interesting issues or questions." http://www.dingoaccess.com/accessibility/accessibility-supported/ Accessibility Supported Question Thread on WAI-IG: http://tinyurl.com/dzf3tj http://tinyurl.com/cytz7u Guideline 1.2: Time-based Media (part 1) By Olga Revilla. "You can use this guideline both for time-based media and synchronized media (with another format and/or time-based interactive components), including.." http://tinyurl.com/clhezc Captioning Key By Described and Captioned Media Program. "The Keys to Access guidelines for captioning and description were developed by the DCMP based on the input and guidance of experts in the field of accessible media, master teachers, and consumer leaders." http://www.dcmp.org/captioningkey/index.html Audio Description and the JW FLV Player By Terrill Thompson. "This installment explores an aspect of multimedia accessibility that receives far too little attention: audio description. When people think about making video accessible, they tend to think about captions for the deaf and hard of hearing. However, video can also be inaccessible to people who are blind or visually impaired. These folks can often get the message of a video solely by listening to it. However, if portions of the content are exclusively communicated visually, these portions are inaccessible..." http://terrillthompson.com/2009/01/greetings-from-calwac-2009.html A Costly Gamble By Suzanne Robitaille. "Last summer, Apple found itself in a pickle with the disability community. The state of Massachusetts was threatening to sue Apple for failing to make its iTunes media library accessible to blind students...Time and time again, companies spend heavily on product development and marketing, but fail to consider people with disabilities who might use their products..." http://tinyurl.com/dlsggg Captioning Media for iTunes By Stanford Online Accessibility Program. "Captioning Media for iTunes requires some specialized tools and a bit of time to get right. Sadly, this process can only be done on a Macintosh system so far, but as means and methods emerge for PC based solutions, they will be added..." http://soap.stanford.edu/show.php?contentid=89 Podcast Captions By Automatic Sync. "The following tutorial series will walk you through the various ways of captioning podcast content. They have been captioned with SCC files, so you will be able to see captioning in QuickTime, iTunes, iPods, and iPhones if you have captioning enabled..." http://www.automaticsync.com/caption/podcaption.htm iTunes U and Accessibility Altmedia Thread. "In the near future, Glendale College is going to be offering students access to their instructors' lectures through iTunes U. Are any of your campuses doing this?..." http://htclistserv.htctu.fhda.edu/read/messages?id=40469 Man With Small F (The Inaccessible PDF Song) By Terrill Thompson. "In my day job I'm a technology accessibility specialist at a university. This song was inspired by a blind university student who came to my office and said 'There's something wrong with this document'. It was a PDF file, and I know that some PDF files are more accessible than others. This particular document looked fine visibly, but audibly all the student was hearing was random characters and phrases. When I first listened to this, I was impressed by how rhythmic and poetic it was. My first response of course was to diagnose the problem and figure out how to fix it for the student. But my second response was to record what I was hearing and make a song out of it! Inspiration sure comes from some amazing places..." http://fawm.org/songs/4769/ Device-Independent or Accessible? By Dominique Hazael-Massieux. "During the European Accessibility Forum in Frankfort last Friday, I took part to a panel dedicated to the relationships between making a Web page accessible and making it mobile-friendly, along with Henny Swan, Tomas Caspers, and moderated by Beate Firlinger..." http://tinyurl.com/chl75x +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. 15 Surefire Ways to Break Your CSS By Rob Glazebrook. "Some of the biggest CSS blunders stem from the simplest of errors. Knowing what those errors are can save you hours of wasted labor..." http://www.cssnewbie.com/15-surefire-ways-to-break-your-css/ Object Oriented CSS - The Video By John Allsopp. "At Web Directions North, the highly talented Nicole Sullivan debuted her 'OOCSS' concept, to much interest. Yahoo Developer Network video recorded a number of the sessions, including Nicole's..." http://tinyurl.com/d3ymat Why CSS Needs No Variables By Jens Meiert. "If you follow web development fora, magazines, blogs, and W3C's www-style, CSS variables or constants seem to be one of the top features web developers are asking for..." http://meiert.com/en/blog/20090401/why-css-needs-no-variables/ Organize Your Stylesheet Madness and Reduce It's File Size With These Tips By Neal Grosskopf. "The other day at work, I had some spare time so I decided to take a look at one of our stylesheets from one of our older websites. The stylesheet was currently over 700 lines long, which I don't consider that long and stood at about 13kb, which again I don't find particularly large..." http://www.nealgrosskopf.com/tech/thread.asp?pid=42 +03: COLOR. Colour Contrast Check Tool Updated By Jonathan Snook. Jonathan updated this took for WCAG 2.0 and added HSV sliders. http://tinyurl.com/cz5wsv +04: EVENTS. Accessibility: Are You Reaching Everyone? May 8, 2009. Cerritos, California, U.S.A. http://www.lacasist.org/events/2009_workshop_accessibility Etre Get Together 2009 (with Lou Rosenfeld and Steve Krug) May 20-21, 2009 London, United Kingdom. http://events.etre.com/events/2009/etre-get-together/?nl=1243 +05: FLASH. Flash Accessibility Webinar Recording By Andrew Kirkpatrick. "The Paciello Group held the Flash accessibility and WCAG 2 webinar today. You can view the recorded event with captioning online. The Paciello Group will be posting the slides..." http://tinyurl.com/cgqxoj Creating Accessible Components in Flash and Flex By Alaric Cole. "It's been in the works for a while, but I finally had the chance to focus on making ASTRA components more accessible. Accessibility is not something many developers look at, but it's slowly gaining ground. For many developers, even figuring out how to enable the built-in accessibility of Flash components is a job. But when you create custom components, implementing accessibility is another job entirely. Accessibility doesn't come for free..." http://tinyurl.com/cwbsah Creating Accessible Components in Flash and Flex (Part 2) By Alaric Cole. "In this article, I'll go over the steps needed to enable accessibility for a custom component..." http://tinyurl.com/armrrr Adobe Flash Accessibility Design Guidelines By Adobe. "Providing captions for video solves accessibility challenges for people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, but people who are blind or who have low vision or other physical disabilities need the video playback controls to be keyboard accessible and to function properly with assistive technologies such as screen readers and screen magnifiers. Flash CS4 Professional offers improvements to the FLVPlayback video component that make the default player controls accessible automatically, without any coding required by the developer..." http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flash/video.html +06: JAVASCRIPT. Contributing WAI-ARIA landmark roles to open source CMS themes By Peter Krantz. "Sometime new technology suffers from a chicken and egg problem. For example, if no websites start using WAI-ARIA there will be few incentives for manufacturers of assistive technology or browsers to include support in their products..." http://tinyurl.com/cg3mhr Patterns for WAI-ARIA landmark roles in existing HTML By Peter Krantz. "This is a short summary of some methods to add WAI-ARIA landmark roles to existing web pages, e.g. an existing template package for a content management system..." http://tinyurl.com/cafpfk ARIA for Google Calendar, Finance and News: In praise of timely information access By T.V. Raman. "From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful." http://tinyurl.com/dlfpmy Are We Losing the Declarative Web? By Philip Fennell. "I saw something the other day that I was both intrigued and bothered by in equal measure. 'Mozilla and the Khronos Group Announce Initiative to Bring Accelerated 3D to the Web'..." http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/are-we-losing-the-declarative.html +07: MISCELLANEOUS. Accessible Web Design CEO Joseph Dolson (Interview) By Kerry Murdock. "Millions of Internet users are blind, deaf or are otherwise unable to use a website in a traditional manner. Ensuring that a site functions well for these users is called accessibility, and our guest for this interview is an expert on that topic. Joseph Dolson is CEO and founder of Accessible Web Design, a St. Paul, MN based firm that designs and consults on accessibility matters. He joins Practical eCommerce's Kerry Murdock." http://tinyurl.com/dj9pyb +08: PHP. PHP and the Cloud By Vito Chin. "Cloud computing refers to the utilization of shared, elastic resources and processing power accessed via the Internet. In some ways, it hails the reversion to the golden age of time-sharing but with significant improvements to the distribution philosophies underlying the delivery infrastructure. So, analogously, we now have the shared wonders of Hyde Park, where everyone and anyone can chill on the bench, throw some Frisbee, instead of having to financially pool money to buy a private park to shoot rabbits..." http://techportal.ibuildings.com/2009/03/31/php-and-the-cloud/ The ABC's of PHP Part 4 - How Variable Am I? By Peter Shaw. "To many beginners the subject of variables is usually pretty scary, and often a reasonably difficult concept to grasp, the reason for this however is usually because most modern languages require some kind of indication as to what type of data a variable will hold, this in turn often confuses beginners because they don't know what type of data relates to what kind of type..." http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/peter_shaw04012009.php3 Select a Certain Number of Words from a String By Tiffany B. Brown. "An alternative to subset() that selects entire words rather than a specified number of characters. I used this on a recent project where I needed to create a meta tag description from text and HTML stored in a database..." http://tinyurl.com/d93spw +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Accessibility Dependencies of the Successor to HTML 4.01 By Gregory Rosmaita. "This document accurately reflects the acknowledged Accessibility Dependencies of HTMLx..." http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/AccessibilityDependencies Standards are for Catholics By Brian Kelly. "...are there policy makers and authors of standards and specifications who really do feel that must means must, whereas the developers interpret must as should? Is the problem that we have a non-interoperable mix of religions involved?" http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/standards-are-for-catholics/ Introduction to hCard, Part two: Styling hCards By Christopher Schmitt. "In the first part of this tutorial, I showed you the basics of the hCard microformat - what it is, how you implement on in HTML, and what tools are available to extract tem form web pages. Now that we know how to create hCards, let's go through a couple of examples that demonstrate how we might style hCards with CSS to make them fit into the visual design of a web page..." http://tinyurl.com/dckq8f This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 26 By Mark Pilgrim. "The big news for the week of March 16th is this announcement from Ian Hickson: 'I've now split out the Server-sent Events and Storage APIs out of HTML5, and I've removed the text for Web Sockets, which was split out earlier. By popular demand I've also done some tweaks to the styling of these specs'." http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html-5-episode-26 +10: TOOLS. NVDA - A Free, Open Source Screen Reader By Roger Johansson. "Testing your work with a screen reader, especially if you're building something that is more advanced than a basic info website, is likely to help you create a more accessible website..." http://tinyurl.com/d6ncn9 Styleneat "organizes and standardizes your CSS - selectors, sub-selectors and properties - in a structure that makes it easier to define page areas and see how they relate to each other..." http://www.styleneat.com/ +11: TYPOGRAPHY. Web Typography Panel at SxSW By Richard Rutter. "...thought I'd jot down some of the topics we discussed, and some we talked about beforehand but didn't have time for..." http://www.clagnut.com/blog/2253/ +12: USABILITY. Season of Usability 2009 Season of Usability is a series of sponsored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design to get involved with Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS)." http://season.openusability.org/ Defining User Experience By Luke Wroblewski. "A while back, Michael Cummings at UX Design asked me what my definition of "user experience" was..." http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?797 Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities By Jakob Nielsen. User research finds significant deficiencies in non-profit organizations' website content, which often fails to provide the info people need to make donation decisions. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/nonprofit-donations.html Intuition and Usability By Kevin Godby. "Yesterday in class, the use of the word intuitive came up. In HCI, when people talk about an interface being intuitive, what they really mean is that it's learnable?that is, the interface can be learned in a very short period of time. After that short learning period, the interface seems natural, easy to use, and so obvious. If this learning period is short enough (or not obvious), then we blithely claim that the interface is intuitive..." http://kevin.godby.org/2009/03/27/intuition-and-usability/ Great Websites Work Beautifully By Gerry McGovern "...The Web reflects a society that is maturing. It is a more questioning, probing, skeptical, probing society. Is it totally rational and logical? Absolutely not. Of course, we like our websites and products to look beautiful. But it is much more important to the Web customer that websites and products work beautifully." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2009/nt-2009-03-30-visual-design.htm Enough UX Chumbaya! By Dave Malouf. "Interaction Design is NOT Information Architecture..." http://davemalouf.com/?p=1556 +13: XML. Resources for Learning SVG By Virgina DeBolt. "Shelley Powers from Burningbird sent out a tweet this morning that IE 8.1 is going to include support for SVG. If you haven't started paying attention to SVG yet, now is the time..." http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/03/31/resources-for-learning-svg/ [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +16: 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.]