+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 9, Issue 44, April 29, 2011.

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

++ISSUE 44 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: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.
03: COLOR.
04: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: PHP.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
09: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]


++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

In Defense of Checklist Accessibility
By Karl Groves.
"Frequently on mailinglists, blog posts, and Twitter, I read about accessibility advocates decrying the sins of what they call 'Checklist' accessibility. What the arguments attempt to assert is, essentially, that 'Checklist' accessibility is not good enough, either because the checklists themselves are flawed or that the checklist takes the disabled user out of the equation and relegates their challenges to the level of a series of check items..."
http://www.karlgroves.com/2011/04/12/in-defense-of-checklist-accessibility/

Accessible PDF
By Bim Egan.
"Lots of folk have spent time and effort bringing their web site content up to current accessibility standards, but due to an oversight, some may be inaccurately claiming that their site is fully conformant to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0)..."
http://www.rnib.org.uk/professionals/webaccessibility/wacblog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=be9c76d3-7ad0-4e03-a1a0-e6f6953b8178&ID=46

Time to Make the Title Attribute Device Independent
By Roger Johansson.
"In a response to the Working Group Decision on ISSUE-31 / ISSUE-80 validation survey to make images that have no alt attribute conforming (what we normally call 'valid') in HTML5 if they have a title attribute, Steve Faulkner posted a message about device independent title attribute support in browsers..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201104/time_to_make_the_title_attribute_device_independent/

HTML5 Accessibility Chops: The alt Decision
By Steve Faulkner.
"A recent decision by the W3C HTML working group has caused much discussion and some consternation within the accessibility community and wider web development community..." 
http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog/2011/04/html5-accessibility-chops-the-alt-decision/

Longdesc and Other Long Image Description Solutions, Part 1: The Issues
By Dennis Lembree.
"You may have heard some discussion about 'longdesc' recently which spiked when much debate broke out on whether to keep it in the HTML5 specification. Unless you're a 'veteran'web professional, you may not even heard of 'longdesc' So what is it, you ask, and should you be using it? Let's examine..."
http://designfestival.com/longdesc-and-other-long-image-description-solutions-part-1-the-issues/


+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Hypermile Your CSS
By Virginia DeBolt.
"Have you heard these rules for best practices in web design?  1. Keep your HTML as lean as possible - stick with plain old semantic HTML (POSH) 2. Put all your presentation rules in the CSS. Well, it's possible to do #2 while failing at #1. That's because of a condition known as classitis. Classitis is a condition in which your HTML is cluttered up with multiple classes when just one would do the trick. Classitis happens when the class attribute gets attached to the wrong element in your HTML."
http://www.webteacher.ws/2011/04/22/hypermile-your-css/

Speed Up Your Website With CSS 3
By Scott Gilbertson.
"The drive behind the adoption of new web technologies often revolves around experimentation - developers use HTML5 or CSS 3 because it's something new and exciting. That experimental drive is great for pushing boundaries and discovering cool new possibilities. But there's another, more practical reason, to start using the newest features of the web, particularly in the case of CSS 3, which can make not only speed up your development time, but make your site faster as well..."
http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/04/speed-up-your-website-with-css-3/

Automating CSS 3 Gradients
By Nicole Sullivan.
"CSS 3 is full of ways to reduce our dependence on background images, one of which is pure CSS gradients. They have several features, which I'm sure designers are salivating over, like multiple color stops, and angled, radial, and linear gradients. Many people had built cool designer-focused tools to make interacting with a somewhat confusing gradient syntax a little easier. The issue for me has been that I'm not a designer. I generally work off of photoshop comps or (when doing big re-architecture projects) the site itself, as if the old version were a design. This means that, for the most part, I was trying desperately to match CSS gradients to an image with zero information about how that image would have been created. Because of my focus on fixing old and broken CSS, the original designer may not even still work at the company..."
http://www.stubbornella.org/content/2011/04/25/css-3-gradients/

Setting CSS3 Border-Radius with Slash Syntax
By Louis Lazaris.
"What could I possibly say about the CSS3 border-radius property that hasn't been said before? Well, I can't claim that anything I'll be saying in this article will be completely new to anyone who regularly reads articles covering front-end technologies..."
http://blogs.sitepoint.com/setting-css3-border-radius-with-slash-syntax/


+03: COLOR.

Accessibility for Web Writers, part 5
By Dey Alexander.
"Not all web users can see or identify colours. About 8% of men and 0.5% of women are colourblind. Older people and those with partial sight may not see colours well either. And blind users who use screen readers to read web content may also miss out on colour information. As a web writer, you need to avoid creating content that relies on colour for meaning. For instance, you should avoid writing things like 'Required fields are in red' or 'error messages are shown in red'."
http://www.4syllables.com.au/2011/04/accessibility-web-writers-part-5/


+04: EVALUATION & TESTING.

Are Both Positive and Negative Items Necessary in Questionnaires?
By Jeff Sauro.
"There is a long tradition of including items in questionnaires that are phrased both positively and negatively to minimize extreme response and acquiescent biases. An analysis of an all positively worded version of the SUS found little evidence for these biases but did find real negative effects of miscoding by researchers and misinterpreting by users..."
http://www.measuringusability.com/positive-negative.php


+05: EVENTS.

Web Design Conference
June 27-28, 2011.
San Francisco, California, U.S.A.
http://webdesign2011.voicesthatmatter.com/


+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

Usability Testing With Card Sorting
By Kayla Knight.
"...Card sorting is a usability methodology that has been used by information architects for years to organize web designs and web content more effectively. It involves placing content, groups, keywords and the like on physical note cards and allowing study participants to move the cards into groups to see how the cards can be organized into categories..."
http://sixrevisions.com/usabilityaccessibility/card-sorting/


+07: PHP.

Simple Object Iterators in PHP
By Craig Buckler.
"...Iterators is a subject which strikes fear into the heart of many developers. They sound complex and are often explained with indecipherable abstract references. They're best explained with a simple example so we'll create a basic class which defines a list of web technologies..."
http://blogs.sitepoint.com/php-simple-object-iterators/


+08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

When Standards Go Awry
By Marc Drummond.
"...But after that, I'd hear about decision after decision on HTML5, and if there was one consistent theme, it seemed to be that accessibility concerns were tossed out the window..."
http://marcdrummond.com/xhtml/2011/04/26/when-standards-go-awry

Why are Tool and AT Vendors Not Participating in HTML5 Development?
By Vlad Alexander.
"Jared Smith from WebAIM asks on Twitter 'Want to help fix HTML5 accessibility? Convince AT vendors to be actively and adamantly involved in the process.' Why are authoring tool and assistive technology vendors not actively participating in HTML5 development? Will simply asking tool/AT vendors convince them to get engaged in the process?"
http://rebuildingtheweb.com/en/why-vendors-not-participating-in-html5-dev/

The HTML5 Switch
By Ben Buchanan.
"Depending on who you talk to, you should have been using HTML5 months, nay years ago; or it's something you might be using in 2022. As usual the truth is somewhere between the glib extremes..."
http://weblog.200ok.com.au/2011/04/html5-switch.html


+09: USABILITY.

Redesign Out, Continuous Improvement In
By Gerry McGovern.
"Big redesigns are a very dangerous strategy. Continuous improvement of your customers' top tasks is much better..."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2011/nt-2011-04-25-Redesign-out.htm

On CSS Galleries
By Dmitry Fadeyev.
"...CSS galleries focus on one specific thing: aesthetics. Because CSS galleries celebrate the best of web design, they misleadingly shift the focus of web design from the underlying product design and problem solving, to style and decoration. The galleries cannot function otherwise because visitors cannot evaluate the usability of a site at a glance-something they can do with looks. Good design becomes associated with good style, rather than what it really is: good product design..."
http://www.usabilitypost.com/2011/04/23/on-css-galleries/

Content First
By Jeremy Keith.
"I'm perplexed by the reasoning that concludes that if a website is suffering from clear usability issues, the solution is to create a splinter site for some users while leaving everyone else to suffer on. Note that I'm not suggesting that everyone get the same experience - far from it. Thanks to progressive enhancement (and let's face it, responsive design done right is a perfect example of progressive enhancement) we can serve up the content that people want and display it to the best ability of any particular device. That's the key difference: start with the content, not the device." 
http://adactio.com/journal/4523/


[Section one ends.]


++ SECTION TWO:

+10: 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:
http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/training/online/webdesign/webdev_listserv.html
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.]