[webdev] Web Design Update: February 27, 2009

Fri Feb 27 18:26:45 CST 2009

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 35, February 27, 2009.

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

++ISSUE 35 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: DREAMWEAVER.
04: EVENTS.
05: JAVASCRIPT.
06: MISCELLANEOUS.
07: NAVIGATION.
08: PHP.
09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
10: TOOLS.
11: TYPOGRAPHY.
12: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Celebrating a Newly Discovered Ability
By Glenda Watson Hyatt.
Tech mashup for accessible presentations (audio, video, transcript, 
caption, screen sharing via Mikogo, Skype).
http://tinyurl.com/dlhme5

EDUCAUSE Accessibility Guidelines
By EDUCAUSE.
"This guide is a working draft developed by the IT Accessibility 
Constituent Group at the request of EDUCAUSE staff. It is designed to 
provide guidance to authors, reviewers, and publishers associated with 
EDUCAUSE Quarterly (EQ), and to the larger EDUCAUSE community, on how to 
ensure that web content is accessible to all users, including those with 
disabilities..."
http://connect.educause.edu/wiki/EDUCAUSE+Accessibility+Guidelines

ADA Changes: The New Definition of Disability
By Tim Moore.
"The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was enacted in 1990 and became 
effective on July 26, 1992 to protect those with major disabilities in 
the workplace. Since then, much has changed, especially the definition of 
the term 'disability' On January 1, 2009, the definition of 'disability' 
was changed drastically."
http://tinyurl.com/d6a3sw

Understanding the Impact of Accessibility
By Glenda Sims.
"Ever tried to explain to a software vendor why making their products 
accessible is important? I often get that privilege. In fact, some of the 
brightest moments in my work are when I have the opportunity to open a 
person’s mind to the intrinsic value of accessibility..."
http://www.glendathegood.com/blog/?p=392

LSAC Discriminates Against Blind Law School Applicants
By Chris Danielsen, National Federation of the Blind.
"National Federation of the Blind Sues Law School Admissions Council for 
inaccessible web site and LAST preparation materials"
http://www.nfb.org/nfb/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=414&SnID=737988356

LSAC Inaccessible Web Lawsuit
By Cynthia Waddell.
On Thursday, February 19th, the National Federation of the Blind filed a 
complaint against the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) in California 
today for violations of California's Unruh Act and Disabled Persons Act 
as a result of LSAC's inaccessible web site and LAST preparation on 
materials..."
http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=3781

Usable Accessibility: Making Web Sites Work Well for People with 
Disabilities
By Whitney Quesenbery.
"...In the spirit of the column Ask UXmatters, I spoke to a number of 
leading advocates for accessibility to find out what they think about 
usable accessibility..."
http://tinyurl.com/d5uzwq

New Accessibility Guidelines A 'Welcomed Update'
By Joseph C. Dolson.
"...This article is part one in a series discussing the impact of WCAG 
2.0 on your website..."
http://tinyurl.com/aqw4so

Survey on Social Networking Sites
By The American Foundation for the Blind.
Tell AFB what you think of the accessibility of social networking sites 
their survey.
http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?Mode=Survey&SurveyID=102

Social Accessibility Project
By IBM.
"The Social Accessibility Project is a utility that enables volunteers to 
make Web pages accessible to the visually impaired. Using an innovative 
new system, it gathers information about accessibility problems directly 
from visually impaired users. To address these problems, the Social 
Accessibility Project provides a tool to members of the open community 
that allows them to externally modify Web pages, successfully making the 
pages accessible while leaving all original content untouched."
http://sa.watson.ibm.com/

Facebook Accessibility
By Project Possibility Wiki.
"The purpose of this project is to make the social network, Facebook, 
accessible to the visually impaired..."
http://tinyurl.com/bvcg7f

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

CSS3 Feedback: Graphical Thoughts
By Eric Meyer.
"My few thoughts on the 'Graphical Effects' part of the feedback 
document."
http://tinyurl.com/aprayj

Sprite Optimization
By Dave Shea.
"Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention, but over the past 
few years an interesting variation of CSS Sprites has been getting a lot 
of play on large web sites that serve millions of users."
http://mezzoblue.com/archives/2009/01/27/sprite_optim/

CSS Background Position/Unforseen Limitations
By Niels Matthijs.
"After a little break from the web it is time to tackle one of the more 
irritating (but recently very popular) subjects of css in combination 
with background images. This series will tackle the pros and cons of 
sprites, it will tell you why sprites don't work very well yet (in some 
regards) and what should be changed to make it work flawlessly. To start 
off, this article will dig a little deeper into the issues of css 
background positioning..."
http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/css-background-position-limitations

+03: DREAMWEAVER.

Tableless Layouts with Dreamweaver CS4
By Stephanie Sullivan.
"Learn to create a two-column CSS layout from scratch and understand what 
you need to consider in the process."
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/css_2c_tableless.html

+04: EVENTS.

2009 PHP Quebec Conference
March 4-6, 2009.
Montreal, Canada
http://conf.phpquebec.com/

Ben Shneiderman - Information Visualization for Knowledge Discovery
March 5, 2009.
Cambridge, United Kingdom
http://cambridge-upa.eventbrite.com/

Gerry McGovern Masterclass - Utrecht
April 09, 2009.
Utrecht, Netherlands
http://www.sabelcommunicatie.nl/masterclass

Gerry McGovern Masterclass - Oslo
April 27, 2009.
Oslo, Norway
http://tinyurl.com/bm93xv

ASSETS 09
October 26-28, 2009.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
http://www.sigaccess.org/assets09/

Fronteers 2009
November 5-6, 2009.
Felix Meritis, Amsterdam
http://fronteers.nl/congres/2009

Accessing Higher Ground
November 10-14, 2009.
Westminster, Colorado, U.S.A
http://www.colorado.edu/ATconference/

+05: JAVASCRIPT.

Call for Review: WAI-ARIA Last Call and New Document for Browsers
By Shawn Henry.
"The Protocols and Formats Working Group invites you to review the 
following documents published 24 February 2009..."
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig/2009JanMar/0037.html

WAI-ARIA, Last Call For Comments and What You Think Counts
By Henny Swan.
"...WAI-ARIA is the accumulation of a lot of hard from  people who are 
far cleverer than me so when I read that it had gone to last call I 
thought to myself 'I'll have a look but I'm not sure what I can add'. 
How wrong I was. Not long after it was announced Micheal Cooper of W3C 
sent round an email the asking a few specific questions. Many of these 
relate to not just the technical aspects of the specification but also 
the understandability for non-JavaScript people such as myself..."
http://tinyurl.com/bepqoo

Improving Accessibility Through Focus Management
By Todd Kloots.
"A core requirement for developers using ARIA is to provide keyboard 
access for widgets, as users of screen readers rely on the keyboard to 
navigate web sites and applications. A large part of providing keyboard 
access is managing focus of a widget's descendants (e.g., buttons in a 
toolbar, tabs in a tablist, menuitems in a menu, etc.), and the W3C 
guidelines provide two different approaches for doing so. This article 
explains both approaches and provides some practical advice for choosing 
between them..."
http://yuiblog.com/blog/2009/02/23/managing-focus/

Spoolcast: AJAX Aids Accessibility?
By Jared Spool.
"Yes, if you do it right, using Ajax techniques can improve 
accessibility. Surprised? You shouldn't be. Ajax is like most techniques 
and technologies on the web?they are what you make of them..."
http://tinyurl.com/dde8ft

+06: MISCELLANEOUS.

Five Questions With Jonathan Snook
By opensourcereleasefeed.
"People in the web design and development world surely know the name 
Jonathan Snook but, for those among us that do not know you, or do not 
know you that well, please give us a little background about yourself and 
what makes you tick..."
http://tinyurl.com/byjuuy

Roundtable with Jeremy Keith, Steve Krug and Christopher Schmitt
By Christopher Schmitt.
"At last year's Voices That Matter Web Design Conference in Nashville, 
Peachpit's Nancy Ruenzel sat down with Steve Krug, Jeremy Keith and 
myself for a roundtable discussion..."
http://tinyurl.com/bx98r5

Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design
By Joseph Selbie.
"Gone, thankfully, are the days when the user experience and the user 
interface were an afterthought in the website design process, to be added 
on when programming was nearing completion. As our profession has 
increasingly gained importance, it also become increasingly specialized: 
information design, user experience design, interaction design, user 
research, persona development, ethnographic user research, usability 
testing-the list goes on and on. Increased specialization, however, 
doesn't always translate to increased user satisfaction."
http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/bringing-holistic

+07: NAVIGATION.

Improving Your First Page of Search Results
By Gerry McGovern.
"If your customers can't find what they want on the first page of
results, very few of them will go to the second page."
http://tinyurl.com/agahw7

Can Your Blog Readers Find Your Hyperlinks?
By Glenda Watson Hyatt.
"In the last web accessibility post, three tips were offered for making 
the content of hypertext links more usable. Today, consider the 
appearance of these links.  Can your blog readers easily spot your 
hyperlinks?.."
http://tinyurl.com/ctrqhd

+08: PHP.

Closures Coming in PHP 5.3 and That's a Good Thing
By Jani Hartikainen.
"PHP 5.3 will be introducing closures to PHP. Closures, also known as 
anonymous functions, will allow you to declare functions "inline" and 
store them in variables. While the syntax may seem a bit weird compared 
to how it is in languages like JavaScript, closures will be a useful 
addition to the language. However, like reflection, it's a feature that 
may not immediately show it's usefulness..."
http://tinyurl.com/cvc3qo

Upgrading from PHP V5.2
By John Mertic.
"...In this article, learn about changes and considerations when 
upgrading from PHP V5.2..."
http://tinyurl.com/bnwul7

The ABC's of PHP: Introduction to PHP
Peter Shaw.
"Hey ma...I've just heard that the latest and greatest thing is PHP, so 
I'm gonna go learn me some PHP and write a web-based game that will rock 
the world..."
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/peter_shaw20090226.php3

+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Web Standards in Indonesia - a university web developer perspective
By Henny Swan.
"When in Indonesia Bruce Lawson, co-lead of the Accessibility Task Force, 
got the opportunity to interview Widianto Nugroho from Institut Teknologi 
Bandung. What follows is the transcript of their chat as well as links to 
useful resources for anyone interested in web standards in Indonesia..."
http://tinyurl.com/at6awl

To Hell With Bad Browsers - the Sequel
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"Almost exactly eight years ago, Jeffrey Zeldman wrote To Hell With Bad 
Browsers, in which he implored web developers to start ignoring Netscape 
4 because its standard support sucked majorly. Yesterday several large 
Norwegian sites placed a warning against IE6 on their pages..."
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/02/to_hell_with_ba.html

Fallback Options for HTML5 Video
By Chris Double.
"The HTML5 <video> element only works on a few, often bleeding edge, 
browsers. For tinyvid I've been only supporting this subset of browsers. 
Recently I put in support for a simple fallback option for other 
browsers..."
http://tinyurl.com/box6yz

This Week Day In HTML 5 - Episode 22
By Mark Pilgrim.
"The big news for February 11, 2009 is the addition of an algorithm to 
parse a color in an IE-compatible way. r2776 lays it all out.."
http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-day-in-html-5-episode-22

+10: TOOLS.

ACTF Accessibility Probe
By Eclipse.
"The Accessibility Probe (AccProbe) is a standalone, Eclipse Rich-Client 
Product (RCP) application that provides a view of the  Microsoft Active 
Accessibility (MSAA) or IAccessible2 hierarchy of a currently running 
application or rendered document and of the properties of the accessible 
objects of that application or document. It can also serve as an event 
monitor for tracking the events fired by these accessible objects. It is 
meant to combine the functionality of tools like Microsoft's Inspect32, 
AccExplore, and AccEvent into one easy-to-use application for 
accessibility testing and debugging..."
http://www.eclipse.org/actf/downloads/tools/accprobe/

+11: TYPOGRAPHY.

IE 8 Still Does Not Resize Text Sized in Pixels
By Roger Johansson.
"As most accessibility and usability aware web professionals know, 
Internet Explorer does not by default allow the user to increase the size 
of text whose size has been specified in CSS pixels..."
http://tinyurl.com/b8tc2u

+12: USABILITY.

9 Common Usability Mistakes In Web Design
By Dmitry Fadeyev.
"By now, all good designers and developers realize the importance of 
usability for their work. Usable websites offer great user experiences, 
and great user experiences lead to happy customers. Delight and satisfy 
your visitors, rather than frustrate and annoy them, with smart design 
decisions. Here are 9 usability problems that websites commonly face, and 
some recommended solutions for each of them..."
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/02/18/9-common-usability-blunders/

US State Tourism Web Site Design: Two Years On (Part 2)
By Christian Watson.
"In part one of my review of how US state tourism web sites have 
progressed over the last two years, I covered the first 25 states. Here 
are the remainder..."
http://www.smileycat.com/miaow/archives/001516.php

Reviewing User Interfaces
By Rhonda Bracey.
"Has your boss or a client ever asked you to review a user interface for 
a Web or desktop application? Perhaps the request went something like 
this: Can you just look over these new screens for us? Oh, and can you 
check the error messages, too? It won't take long! And, by the way, we 
ship next month."
http://tinyurl.com/cpw4ro

Patterns in UX Research
By Steve Baty.
"One of the key objectives of user research is to identify themes or 
threads that are common across participants. These patterns help us to 
turn our data into insights about the underlying forces at work, 
influencing user behavior."
http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2009/02/patterns-in-ux-research.php

[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 Ends.]

++END NOTES.

+ SUBSCRIPTION INFO.

WEB DESIGN UPDATE is available by subscription. For information on how to 
subscribe and unsubscribe please:
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 at d.umn.edu

[Issue ends.]