+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 9, Issue 25, December 18, 2010.

An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design and development. 

++ISSUE 25 CONTENTS.

SECTION ONE: New references.
What's new at the Web Design Reference site?
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/
New links in these categories:

01: ACCESSIBILITY.
02: BOOKS.
03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.
04: DREAMWEAVER.
05: EVALUATION & TESTING.
06: EVENTS.
07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
08: JAVASCRIPT.
09: NAVIGATION.
10: PHP.
11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
12: TOOLS.
13: TYPOGRAPHY.
14: USABILITY.

SECTION TWO: 
15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Colleges Lock Out Blind Students Online
By Marc Parry.
"...Colleges that wouldn't dare put up a new building without wheelchair access now routinely roll out digital services that, for blind people, are the Internet equivalent of impassable stairs..."
http://chronicle.com/article/Blind-Students-Demand-Access/125695/

Chronicle of Higher Education Article "Colleges Lock Out Blind Students Online"
WebAIM discussion of the article.
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=4499

Cal State's Strong Push for Accessible Technology Gets Results
By Josh Keller.
"...Over the past five years, Cal State has waged one of higher education's most aggressive campaigns for accessible technology. It has adopted stringent standards for vendors and employees..."
http://chronicle.com/article/Cal-States-Strong-Push-for/125683/

Text Alternatives For Images: A Decision Tree
By Dey Alexander.
"To help you write better text alternatives for images, I've produced this decision tree.  It asks three key questions. 1. What is the role of the image?...2. Does the image present new information?...3. What type of information is presented in the image?..."
http://www.deyalexander.com.au/blog/2010/12/text-alternatives-for-images-a-decision-tree/

The French Chef Still Waits for The Annoying Orange: Making Online Programming Accessible to People with Disabilities
By Suzanne Robitaille and Michael Janger.
"The new Twenty-first Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act will make it easier for people with disabilities to access TV programs over the Internet. While the law is a tremendous step in the right direction, a surge in new types of online programming, such as Webisodes and streaming movies, are still not captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing. This issue has drawn the attention of federal law enforcers, including the Department of Justice, which is considering the possibility of revising the Americans with Disabilities Act to address accessible web information and services, movie captioning and video descriptions. This white paper lays out the current online programming landscape and attempts to analyze..."
http://abledbody.com/online-video-captions/

Cognitive Disabilities and the Web: Where Accessibility and Usability Meet?
By Heather Mariger.
"...Usability and accessibility, while in the same general family, are distinctive concepts - cousins in the world of User Centered Design. However, when it comes to cognitive disabilities, the lines blur. Can usability principles be used to help increase the accessibility of the web to persons with cognitive disabilities?..."
http://ncdae.org/tools/cognitive/

Thinking Through Accessibility
By John Foliot.
"It's a question I hear frequently - not every day, but often enough that it sticks with me: Why do drive-through ATMs have Braille keyboards?..."
http://john.foliot.ca/thinking-through-accessibility/


+02: BOOKS.

Layon, Kristofer. The Web Designer's Guide to iOS Apps: Create iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad apps with Web Standards (HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript), New Riders, 2010.


+03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

How to Create a 3-Column Layout with CSS
By Roger Johansson.
"One of the most visited pages on this site is the Simple 2 column CSS layout tutorial, where I explain how to create a basic 2-column CSS layout with floats. Many readers have asked for a similar tutorial on how to create a three-column layout, and I've been meaning to write one for a few years..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201012/how_to_create_a_3-column_layout_with_css/

CSS Defaults, Part 2 - The Dirt
By Niels Matthijs.
"...if anything, this is just another lesson that front-end development is never easy, not even the simple parts. Somehow, somewhere, something has to go wrong. It makes are job what it is, so all you can do is sigh, file a bug report and go on to fix the next issue on your way."
http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/css-defaults-pt2-the-dirt

Examples of Flexible Layouts with CSS3 Media Queries
By Zoe Gillenwater.
"In my CSS3 presentation that I've given several times over the past year, the part that seems to impress the audience the most is my demonstrations of media queries..."
http://zomigi.com/blog/examples-of-flexible-layouts-with-css3-media-queries/


+04: DREAMWEAVER.

Video and HTML5 - Part 1: Understanding HTML5 
By Stephanie Sullivan Rewis.
"Get a crash course on how to think about HTML5 when delivering video and dynamic content for the web." (7:18 Adobe TV Video)
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adc-presents/videoandhtml5part1understandinghtml5/


+05: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Top-Box Scoring of Rating Scale Data View More Blog Posts
By Jeff Sauro.
"...Top-box scoring has is its place for quickly assessing results and especially for stand-alone studies when there's no meaningful comparison or benchmark. If the results ever get compared though, you'll want  a more precise scoring system to have a good chance of detecting any differences in attitudes from design changes."
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/top-box.php

Testing Content
By Angela Colter.
"Whether the purpose of your site is to convince people to do something, to buy something, or simply to inform, testing only whether they can find information or complete transactions is a missed opportunity: Is the content appropriate for the audience? Can they read and understand what you've written? Angela Colter shows how to predict whether your content will work (without users) and test whether it does work (with users). While you can't test every sentence on your site, you don't need to. Focus on tasks that are critical to your users and your business. Learn how to test the content to find out if and where your site falls short."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/testing-content/

We Manage What We Can Easily Measure
By Gerry McGovern.
"HITS is a totally and utterly useless metric. For the vast majority of websites, volume-based metrics are useless, counter-productive and encourage the worst possible practice when it comes to web management...The proper way to manage a website is to measure whether people are able to complete their top tasks..."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2010/nt-2010-12-13-EASILY.htm

How Many People Cheat in Online Surveys?
By Jeff Sauro.
"...Detecting cheaters is best done with a simple "Select this response" or a conflicting question. Using responses to semi-conflicting items like those in the SUS, are detecting only a fraction of the cheaters. Unfortunately, cheaters either answer too haphazardly or have caught on to this detection method and avoid picking the same response to all items. Conflicting questions are also viable but be careful how you word the item. You may inadvertently trip up users who didn't see the "NOT" or just misinterpreted the item..."
http://www.measuringusability.com/blog/cheat-survey.php


+06: EVENTS.

Two Apps Per Day Workshop: Design Native iOS apps with Web Standards
January 22, 2011.
New York, New York U.S.A.
http://www.twoappsperday.com/

MinneWebCon: Minnesota's Web Conference
April 11, 2011.
Saint Paul, Minnesota U.S.A.
http://www.minnewebcon.umn.edu/

Mobilism
May 12-13, 2011.
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://mobilism.nl/2011


+07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

7 Myths About Paper Prototyping
By David Travis.
"Paper prototyping is probably the best tool we have to design great user experiences. It allows you to involve users early in the design process, shows you how people will use your system before you've written any code, and supports iterative design. So why are some design teams still resistant to using it? Here are 7 objections I've heard to paper prototyping and why each one is mistaken..."
http://www.userfocus.co.uk/articles/paperprototyping.html


+08: JAVASCRIPT.

Accessibility and JavaScript Drag and Drop
By Gabriele Romanato.
"The point of all JavaScript coding is to enrich the user experience without burdening the user with a cognitive and physical overload. The problem with JavaScript drag and drop is that it forces the user to perform additional gestures to get the desired result (moving an item to the shopping cart, moving it again to the trash and so on). For users with physical disabilities this can actually turn out to be very stressing and frustrating..."
http://networkedblogs.com/bMX4N


+09: NAVIGATION.

Trends For University Web Site Search Engines
By Brian Kelly.
"What search engines are Universities using on their Web sites?..."
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/trends-for-university-web-site-search-engines/


+10: PHP.

Everyone Loves PHP
By Scott MacVicar.
"...Take a look at the top hundred sites by traffic, size, or whatever other metric you fancy, and there is a high chance that they're using PHP. One of the main reasons I think PHP has become so popular is the critical mass that it acquired while it was growing up, but what was the original cause of that? It all comes down to its simplicity and the other options that were available at the time..."
http://phpadvent.org/2010/everyone-loves-php-by-scott-macvicar


+11: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Postcards From TPAC
By Bruce Lawson.
"Every year, the top Standardistas of the world jet off to TPAC...Anne van Kesteren attended on Opera's behalf. Accessibility...The a11y Task Force made a list of user requirements (about 100). During the meeting Frank Olivier from Microsoft went through the requirements with the HTML WG and we organized them. It turns out about 10 of them are applicable to the HTML5 specification and are not addressed yet. The HTML WG Co-Chairs as well as the W3C Interaction Domain Lead put their foot down with respect to accessibility potentially delaying the HTML5 Last Call. It was made clear that HTML5 is time driven, not feature driven. So if the work on these requirements is not complete by May next year, it will not happen..."
http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/show.dml/22020902

Opera's TPAC Minutes
By Shelley Powers.
"...One area of major failing at the W3C is how accessibility has been handled...The focus is on the 'cool' stuff, like HTML5 video and captioning, at the expense of the more mundane, like alt, longdesc, table summary-yet the majority of web pages will never use any of the cool stuff, but will make use of the mundane..."
http://realtech.burningbird.net/web/html5/operas-tpac-minutes

HTML4, XHTML, HTML5 DOCTYPES: What's a Teacher To Do?
By Virginia DeBolt.
"...HTML5 hasn't been implemented fully enough to be mainstream at the present time. Beginners trying to cope with new HTML5 elements with spotty implementation would have more frustration than they need when trying to learn the basics of web design. Learning something that is currently best practice, and rigorous enough to work in any situation seems like a better choice. However, using the HTML5 DOCTYPE is simply easier and will work, even if the rest of the document is formatted as HTML 4. And it eliminates the need for one of those long-winded earlier DOCTYPES..."
http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/12/13/html4-xhtml-html5-doctypes-whats-a-teacher-to-do/

Some Tests on the aside Element
By Virginia DeBolt.
"I built a page of HTML5 and tried a few CSS styling rules on it to see what browsers do with rendering a page of HTML5. The tests I want to talk about today involve an aside element. In this test, I used the aside in the footer of an article element to display information about the author of the article. (Note the use of an ARIA role in the aside element.)..."
http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/12/16/some-tests-on-the-aside-element/

Accessibility to Web Video for the Vision-Impaired
By Silvia Pfeiffer.
"In the past week, I was invited to an IBM workshop on audio/text descriptions for video in Japan. Geoff Freed and Trisha O'Connell from WGBH, and Michael Evans from BBC research were the other invited experts to speak about the current state of video accessibility around the world and where things are going in TV/digital TV and the Web..."
http://blog.gingertech.net/2010/12/12/accessibility-to-web-video-for-the-vision-impaired/


+12: TOOLS.

HTML Lint
By Marko Mrdjenovic et al.
"HTML Lint is a tool that makes sure your code looks good. While XHTML was very strict with syntax HTML 5 is more lenient like previous versions of HTML, which means keeping consistent code styles will become more difficult. Validating is not good enough anymore..."
http://lint.brihten.com/html/


+13: TYPOGRAPHY.

Use Uppercase (Capitalised) Text Judiciously
By Roger Johansson.
"...I'm not saying that you should never use capitalised text, just that it's good to be aware of and consider the potential drawbacks of it before making an informed decision."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201012/use_uppercase_capitalised_text_judiciously/


+14: USABILITY.

College Students on the Web
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Students are multitaskers who move through websites rapidly, often missing the item they come to find. They're enraptured by social media but reserve it for private conversations and thus visit company sites from search engines." 
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/students.html

Universal Design, Usability, and Accessibility
By George Williams.
"...Many (most?) college and university web sites are poorly designed for any user, much less for users with disabilities...Many (most?) college and university web sites are poorly designed for any user, much less for users with disabilities..."
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/universal-design-usability-and-accessibility/29501

Universal Design for the Digital Environment: Transforming the Institution
By Cyndi Rowland, Heather Mariger, Peter M. Siegel, and Jonathan Whiting.
"A revolution is about to transform higher education.To participate in this revolution, all of us in higher education need to explore a critical concept: 'universal design'..."
http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume45/UniversalDesignfortheDigitalEn/218700

Myth #28: White Space is Wasted Space
By Zoltan Kollin.
White space or "negative space", referring to the empty space between and around elements of a design or page layout, is often overlooked and neglected. Although many may consider it a waste of valuable screen estate, white space is an essential element in web design and 'is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background,' Jan Tschichold wrote in 1930. Not only is white space responsible for readability and content prioritization, it also plays an important role in the visual layout and brand positioning."
http://uxmyths.com/post/2059998441/myth-28-white-space-is-wasted-space


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+15: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?

Accessibility Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/accessibility.html

Association Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/associations.html

Book Listings.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/books.html

Cascading Style Sheets Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/css.html

Color Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/color.html

Dreamweaver Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/dreamweaver.html

Evaluation & Testing Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/testing.html

Event Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/events.html

Flash Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/flash.html

Information Architecture Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/architecture.html

JavaScript Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/javascript.html

Miscellaneous Web Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/misc.html

Navigation Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/navigation.html

PHP Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/php.html

Sites & Blogs Listing.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/sites.html

Standards, Guidelines & Pattern Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/standards.html

Tool Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/tools.html

Typography Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/type.html

Usability Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/usability.html

XML Information.
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/xml.html

[Section two ends.]


++END NOTES.


+ SUBSCRIPTION INFO.

WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription. For information on how to subscribe and unsubscribe please visit:
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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:
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+ 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.]