+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE. - Volume 9, Issue 05, July 31, 2010. An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. ++ISSUE 05 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: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. 06: JAVASCRIPT. 07: MISCELLANEOUS. 08: PHP. 09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. 10: TOOLS. 11: USABILITY. 12: XML. SECTION TWO: 13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site? [Contents ends.] ++ SECTION ONE: New references. +01: ACCESSIBILITY. Ten Common Accessibility Problems By Gary Barber. "This document outlines ten common accessibility issues I have encountered which could result in a site's failure to fully comply with WCAG 2.0. The document includes links to some of the WCAG 2 advisory Sufficient Techniques provided by the W3C for addressing each issue..." http://www.dingoaccess.com/accessibility/ten-common-accessibility-problems/ Should Photos in Photo-Sharing Sites Have Alternate Text? By Vlad Alexander. "...Photo-sharing sites should leave alternate text blank. Instead, they should encourage users to caption and describe images, with the captions and descriptions being available to all visitors..." http://rebuildingtheweb.com/en/no-alt-text-for-photo-sharing-sites/ Real World Approaches to Accessibility By Brian Kelly. "The theme of the Seventh International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility (W4A 2010), held in North Carolina in April, was 'Developing regions: common goals, common problems?'..." http://www.headstar.com/eablive/?p=449 Critique - New Section 508 Web Site By Dennis Lembree. "Below are suggestions for improving the web accessibility of the new United States government Section 508 web site..." http://webaxe.blogspot.com/2010/07/critique-new-section-508-web-site.html Microsoft Office 2010 and Accessibility By John Eric Brandt. "...For the new version of MS Office (MSO), Microsoft has made accessibility a priority since one of the new features is the Accessibility Checker (MSO-AC) built into three of the core applications..." http://jebswebs.net/blog/2010/07/microsoft-office-2010-and-accessibility/ +02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS. Top 10 CSS3 Commands By Paul McCarthy. CSS3 is here and gives more power to web developers than ever before. Read through our top 10 CSS3 commands and unleash its power. http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/web-dev/css3.shtml Understanding border-image By Nora Brown. "The new CSS3 property border-image is a little tricky, but it can allow you to create flexible boxes with custom borders (or drop shadows, if that's your thing) with a single div and a single image. In this article I explain how the border-image shorthand property works in today's browsers..." http://css-tricks.com/understanding-border-image/ A CSS3 Tip By Dave Shea. "All browsers that support the CSS text-shadow and box-shadow properties also support the new CSS3 RGBa syntax. Which means you can safely combine them today. That's handy, because it means no worrying about matching a precise hex colour shadow to a specific hex colour background. Instead just let the browser blend. An example:" http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2010/07/27/a_css3_tip/ +03: EVALUATION & TESTING. Overcoming the Obstacles of Usability Testing By Jacob Creech. "When people hear about 'usability testing,' many things come to mind-eye-tracking cameras, big HCI labs, a long testing process, a lot of expenses, and maybe a little confusion as well. Even at this stage in the proverbial game, usability testing isn't so well understood, and misconceptions abound." http://www.uxbooth.com/blog/a-test-too-far/ Interviewing Users By Jakob Nielsen. "Despite many weaknesses, interviews are a valuable method for exploratory user research." http://www.useit.com/alertbox/interviews.html Three Important Benefits of Personas By Jared Spool. As part of our research to understand what techniques truly help teams produce better designs, we're still constantly surprised by the number of teams successfully using personas. With personas, teams report that they are producing more usable designs that better match the needs of their audience, increasing the satisfaction of their users. http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2010/07/26/uietips-persona-benefits/ Time to Delight By Joshua Porter. "...As our work becomes more about emotion and less about usability, time to delight might become a metric that has real meaning. The faster we can delight someone the first time, the faster we can re-delight them a second time." http://52weeksofux.com/post/866407309/time-to-delight +04: EVENTS. Usability Week 2010 Conference August 9-14, 2010 in Toronto, Canada. October 3-8, 2010 in San Francisco, California, U.S.A. October 18-22, 2010 in Copenhagen, Denmark. October 25-29, 2010 in Edinburgh, Scotland. http://www.nngroup.com/events +05: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Wireframing is Not a Religion By Joshua Brewer. "...There is no right way to wireframe. You must understand the context and the requirements for the project and move ahead accordingly. Know that regardless of the fidelity of the wireframe, it is still simply a tool in the design process that you can utilize to quickly get feedback, prove out your design decisions and help you make a better product. " http://52weeksofux.com/post/866406780/wireframing-is-not-a-religion +06: JAVASCRIPT. WAI ARIA How Useful? By WebAIM Thread. "How useful is WAI Aria to the average screen reader user who may not be technically inclined? Does this also help the mobility impaired user who is not visually impaired?" http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=4288 +07: MISCELLANEOUS. The 7 Sins of Managing Web Projects By Rob Mills. "Managing web projects is both tough and satisfying in equal measures. Every project is a new learning curve and even though I'm educated from every project I work on, new problems are presented to me on a daily basis. Some problems and challenges on the other hand, rear their head time after time, and I have classified these in line with the 7 deadly sins, renaming them of course as the 7 sins of managing web projects." http://thinkvitamin.com/business/the-7-sins-of-managing-web-projects/ Woman in Technology By Nicole Sullivan. Women may be less likely to be a code-cowboy, but they can be amazing developers. We are not trying to give anything to anyone that doesn't deserve it, but instead, to counteract the subtle prejudices that leave women feeling invisible, excluded, and unrecognized for their accomplishments. Now, with that in mind, let's look at the twit-storm I found after leaving a seven hour mediation session on Saturday. I'll put my comments inline since I was unavailable to tweet that day. http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2010/07/26/woman-in-technology/ +08: PHP. Exception Handling in PHP5 By Lorna Jane Mitchell. "This article follows on from my earlier posts, introducing OOP in PHP, taking a closer look at OOP concepts in PHP, and also covering the various magic methods on offer in PHP 5. We'll now move on to look at exceptions, which is how PHP 5 handles errors in an object-oriented way." http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/exception-handling-in-php5/ +09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS. Opera Rep Provides HTML5 Overview By Adrian Roselli. "Patrick H. Lauke is the Web Evangelist at Opera Software and ran the Accessibility Task Force for the Web Standards Project (WaSP). Last week (July 13) he gave a talk to the Institutional Web Management Workshop on HTML5..." http://blog.adrianroselli.com/2010/07/opera-rep-provides-html5-overview.html +10: TOOLS. Unicorn - W3C's Unified Validator By W3C. "Unicorn combines a number of popular tools in a single, easy interface, including the Markup validator, CSS validator, mobileOk checker, and Feed validator, which remain available as individual services as well." http://validator.w3.org/unicorn/ CSS Frame Generator By lab.xms.pl. "Put your XHTML code below, we will grab it and send over to one of our scientists. He will do his voodoo and in return you will get a corresponding CSS frame." http://lab.xms.pl/css-generator/ +11: USABILITY. Life Below 600PX By Paddy Donnelly. "...The digital fold concept evolved into 'squash as much content as you can above a certain number of pixels'. This is wrong, wrong, wrong. Gone was the intent of putting your most eye catching content at the entrance point to entice your visitors to come in and explore the rest of the site. Now you were being pressured By ""'web design rule enforcers' to sell everything on the front doorstep. .." http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/ +12: XML. XHTML5 in a Nutshell By Sergey Mavrody. "...The W3C first public working draft of "Polyglot Markup" recommendation describes polyglot HTML document as a document that conforms to both the HTML and XHTML syntax by using a common subset of both the HTML and XHTML and in a nutshell the HTML5 polyglot document is..." http://blog.whatwg.org/xhtml5-in-a-nutshell [Section one ends.] ++ SECTION TWO: +13: 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.]