+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 7, Issue 41, April 10, 2009. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 41 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: EVALUATION & TESTING. 04: EVENTS. 05: JAVASCRIPT. 06: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 07: USABILITY. SECTION TWO: 08: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Inclusive Design, Part 1 By Bruce 'Tog' Tognazzini. "Have you ever thought about what it would be like to be disabled? Well, you better start thinking about it..." http://tinyurl.com/cplf7h Contacting Organizations with Inaccessible Websites (draft) By Web Accessibly Initiative. This page has information that may help people who are encountering accessibility barriers with Web pages to advise those organizations about the Web accessibility difficulties they might be experiencing. It may also assist people and organizations working with or supporting people with disabilities and older people to report inaccessible Web pages. It describes an approach to contacting organizations whose Web pages are difficult or impossible to use, explaining that there are barriers on the pages, and following up..." http://www.w3.org/WAI/EO/Drafts/responding/ Opencast Project Open House at UC Berkeley By UC Berkeley. "Opencast is an initiative driven by higher education institutions to empower: 1. institutions - to make informed choices about capture, processing, and distribution infrastructure for audio/video. 2. faculty - to teach courses and share knowledge with their students and learners worldwide without technology getting in the way. 3. students - to access and shape media into a more meaningful tool for learning. 4. everyone - to easily find and engage with educational video, audio, and other rich media from instructors and institutions around the world." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WJez1XjI88 Accessible Lecture Capture Workshop "Presentations included keynote presentation by Phil Bravin, longtime Gallaudet University board member and former President and CEO of National Captioning Institute, and presentations by Gallaudet University and George Washington University on their use of the Echo360 system. To watch the Echo captured version of this workshop go to:" http://tinyurl.com/c7xgbb Fewer than 10 Percent of Blind Americans Read Braille By Associate Press. "Jordan Gilmer has a degenerative condition that eventually will leave him completely blind. But as a child, his teachers did not emphasize Braille, the system of reading in which a series of raised dots signify letters of the alphabet. Instead, they insisted he use what little vision he had to read print. By the third grade, he was falling behind in his schoolwork..." http://tinyurl.com/dh44zu 9 Ways to Make Your Site More Accessible By Douglas T. The obvious follow up question to 9 Reasons Why Accessibility Matters is 'How do I do that' ItÕs not really as difficult as it might seem. Answer these nine questions, and see how your siteÕs accessibility can be improved..." http://douglast.com/thoughts/archives/406 Lynx Browser and Accessibility By Steve Grobschmidt. "As I covered in Web Accessibility 101: Assistive Technologies, the text browser Lynx is particularly useful for stripping down a web site to its raw, GUI-less nature. Why is this useful?..." http://www.theaccessibility.com/?p=150 Accessible Twitter, Accessible Tweets By Matthew Smith. "Twitter is one of a host of web-based social networking tools, excellent in concept, but (in my opinion) less-than-perfect in implementation - especially when it comes to usability/accessibility. Whilst this article discusses Twitter and Twitter messages (updates, tweets,) certain aspects apply equally to other contexts..." http://tinyurl.com/cbxphx Accessibility Study, Why We All Fail? By Jagat Jasjit Singh. "This website is part of University research work being done to find out why we are not able to make our websites accessible. Today almost 95% of the websites don't pass required accessibility levels. We are thinking from Webmasters point of view, trying to find the bottleneck for the whole problem. Your comments suggestions are welcome" http://accessibility-study.blogspot.com/ WCAG 2.0 and the Future of Web Accessibility: Q and A Part 1 By IBM. "Judy, can you tell us the primary differences between WCAG 1.0 and WCAG 2.0?..." http://www-03.ibm.com/able/news/wcag20q&a1.html Accessibility Is More Than 'Possible to Access' By Roger Johansson. "When those of us who care about accessibility try to make the web sites or web applications we build accessible, we sometimes forget to think beyond making them possible to access." http://tinyurl.com/dlgpkq +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. The Art of CSS Positioning By Rob MacKay. "CSS Positioning is one thing I used to struggle with, hopefully I can help you understand how positioning works and what it's affected by, and iron out some of those kinks..." http://tutshelf.com/the-art-of-css-positioning/ +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Website Evaluation Rubric By Denny Lancaster. "Among the ancients, according to Columella, Vitruvius, and Pliny, the word rubrica, or rubric, signified the red earth used by carpenters to mark on wood the line to follow when cutting it; according to Juvenal the same name was applied to the red titles under which the jurisconsults arranged the announcements of laws. Soon the red colours, at first used exclusively for writing the titles, passed to the indications or remarks made on a given text.." http://www.faeriekeeper.net/criteria38.htm Future of Web Management is Evidence-Based By Gerry McGovern. "...This is the age of evidence, not opinion. Strong leadership is about saying: "let's test this idea." It is not a sign of weakness to observe and listen. Strength comes from understanding customer behavior data, and the Web is a perfect environment in which to gather such data." http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2009/nt-2009-04-06-web-management.htm Findings From the Web Design Survey, 2008 by A List Apart. "If we, the people who make websites, want the world to know who we are and what we do, itÕs up to each of us to stand up and represent. This year, 30,055 of you did just that, taking time out of your busy work day to answer the detailed questions in the second A List Apart Survey. Find out what we learned about our profession and ourselves...." http://alistapart.com/articles/findingsfromthewebdesignsurvey2008 15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website By Lee Munroe. "This article reviews some important and necessary checks that web-sites should be checked against before the official launch Ñ little details are often forgotten or ignored, but Ð if done in time Ð may sum up to an overall greater user experience and avoid unnecessary costs after the official site release." http://tinyurl.com/cprnms +04: EVENTS. Real World Accessibility for Ajax and Web Apps June 15, 2009. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada http://furtherahead.com/workshops/ottawa2009/ Web Design World July 20-22, 2009. Seattle, Washington, U.S.A. http://webdesignworld.com/2009/seattle/ +05: JAVASCRIPT. Javascript + HTML5: The Future of Education Software By Bryan W. Berry. "Several months ago, I wrote how to make activity designers happy by making it easier to create simple learning activities using popular software development tools, particularly for the Sugar learning environment. Back then, I concluded that Adobe's Flash player and Flex libraries were the proper tools for this purpose. I was wrong..." http://tinyurl.com/cs6z72 Augmenting Button Text with ARIA By Becky Gibson. "Say you have a set of invitations to connect to colleagues in your favorite social networking software. These might be listed one after another with an accept and reject button associated with each request. But, if someone is using a screen reader to just tab through the buttons on the page, how would you know which button is associated with each invite? Certainly the designers are not likely to want to put the user name within the button text, so how can we make this easier for the person using a screen reader or screen magnifier to access the page?..." http://www.weba11y.com/blog/2009/04/09/augmenting-button-text-with-aria/ +06: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. What Are Web Standards? (Video) By Jeffrey Zeldman. "What are web standards? And why should I care? A fun new clip from the BigThink marathon Zeldman interview..." http://www.zeldman.com/2009/04/08/what-are-web-standards/ Help Tidy HTML 5 (and get your name in lights) By Bruce Lawson. "The editor of the HTML 5 spec, Ian Hickson, calls for input on issues in the spec-typos, contradictions, or simply confusing bits. If everything goes according to plan, all issues will get a response from the editor before October..." http://www.webstandards.org/2009/04/02/1709/ What's New in HTML5? By Richard Heyes. "HTML4 has been with us for a while now, roughly ten years. And it hasn't really seen a major update. Sure there's XHTML, but that did little more than make things slightly stricter - making you write better quality code if you were at all concerned with compliance. HTML5 does more than that. For one thing it adds a few new features. Not a huge amount, but the ones that it does add are very useful. Work on HTML5 started way back in 2004, and now it's starting to get interesting. Browser support is increasing, and the element I'm most interested in - CANVAS - is supported by four out of the major five browsers. It is however though, not really feasible though to use it since MSIE doesn't have any support for it..." http://www.phpguru.org/static/html5.html Making <time> Safe for Historians By Peter-Paul Koch. "The HTML 5 spec introduces the <time> element to mark up a date or time. Although I support the inclusion of these semantics in HTML, I believe that the current specification of the <time> element is vague because it avoids the question whether the element is safe for historians. Right now it hurts historical research more than it helps. In this entry I'll explain why..." http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/04/making_time_saf.html This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 29 By Mark Pilgrim. "...The big news for the week of March 30th is the addition of a synchronous database API to the Web Storage spec (which was split out from the HTML 5 spec a few weeks ago). This new API defines a DatabaseSync object whose methods return SQLTransactionSync objects. This directly mirrors the asynchronous database API, which had already defined a Database object whose methods return SQLTransaction objects..." http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html-5-episode-29 HTML Reunification By Sam Ruby. "...perhaps we can get a candidate recommendation out next year for the browser behavior portions of the document." http://intertwingly.net/blog/2009/04/08/HTML-Reunification Everyone Wants Their Thing to be HTML By Rob Sayre. "My plan is to produce a draft that is smaller than my last one. It will not include XHTML of any kind, and it will characterize elements and attributes that are not defined by the HTML specification as Ònot part of HTMLÓ. This characterization will apply to the <audio> element and RDFa alike..." http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2009/04/08/htmlwg/ New Standards to Facilitate eLearning By Dennis Carter. "Common Cartridge reportedly will allow any digital content to work with any standards-based software..." http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=57976 +07: USABILITY. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) By John M. Carroll. History, implications and learning more. http://tinyurl.com/dz2wfy First 2 Words = A Signal for the Scanning Eye By Jakob Nielsen. "Testing how well people understand a link's first 11 characters shows whether sites write for users, who typically scan rather than read lists of items." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/nanocontent.html How Relying on 'User Education' is a Failed Strategy By Frank Spillers. "Maybe you have heard the saying 'we'll take care of that in user training'. The notion that problems users have can be resolved by user training is severely flawed. Yet entire departments rally around this belief and worse many companies seem to wrap product management around it. The idea that you can educate users about how to use a user interface is misguided. The goal of usability is to create intuitive user interfaces..." http://tinyurl.com/ctokf5 The Study of Visual Aesthetics in Human-Computer Interaction M. Hassenzahl, G. Lindgaard, A. Platz, N. Tractinsky, editors. "This seminar intended to gather a group of about 25-30 participants who will exchange ideas, views, and case study results that address the seminar's themes. We aimed at discussing methodologies and measures in the study of visual aesthetics in HCI, to explore design antecedents of aesthetic interactive systems, as well as consequences of aesthetic design or aesthetic experience in HCI. We anticipated that the outcome of the seminar will contribute to clarifying the concept, provide an overview of existing practical resources such as measurement scales, solidify the body of knowledge in this area, and generally spark interest in aesthetics in the HCI community." http://drops.dagstuhl.de/portals/index.php?semnr=08292 [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +08: 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.]