[webdev] Web Design Update: May 20, 2011

Fri May 20 04:23:58 CDT 2011

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 9, Issue 47, May 20, 2011.

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

++ISSUE 47 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: COLOR.
05: EVALUATION & TESTING.
06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
07: JAVASCRIPT.
08: NAVIGATION.
09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
10: USABILITY.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Accessibility Checklists Can be Helpful if Used Right
By Roger Johansson.
"It is sometimes argued that using checklists when implementing or
evaluating accessibility will lead to 'checklist accessibility', where
developers blindly follow a checklist and do what they have to do to
be able to check each item off the list without understanding why..."
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201105/accessibility_checklists_can_be_helpful_if_used_right/

Keyboard Accessible YouTube Controls
By Derek Featherstone.
"Full keyboard functionality is a must-have for accessibility. Here's
how we solve one of the problems with keyboard access for embedded
YouTube videos..."
http://simplyaccessible.com/article/keyboard-accessible-youtube-controls/

No One Ever Asks Us For Accessibility
By Catherine Roy.
"...How do we ensure clients, big and small, get what they need and
what they pay for, all the while contributing to make the Web a more
accessible space, whether they do business with you or not?..."
http://www.catherine-roy.net/blog/2011/05/16/no-one-ever-asks-us-for-accessibility/

Federal Government Not Complying with Web Site Accessibility
Requirements, Study Indicates
By yahoo.com.
"...of one-hundred Web sites operated by federal government agencies,
over 90 percent do not comply with government accessibility guidelines
and likely cannot be used by people who are blind or have other
perceptual or motor disabilities..."
http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/Federal-Government-Not-bw-792316812.html?x=0

Accessibility Glossary
By Glenda Watson Hyatt.
Glenda has added a glossary to her Blog Accessibility.
http://blogaccessibility.com/glossary/

How Do You Detect a Screen Reader?
By Leonie Watson.
"The short answer is that you can't. At the time of writing there
isn't a way to reliably detect whether someone visiting your site is
using a screen reader (or screen magnifier). You might have heard that
Flash will do the trick, but that might not be quite the solution
you're expecting..."
http://www.nomensa.com/blog/2011/how-do-you-detect-a-screen-reader/

+02: BOOKS.

Powers, Shelley. HTML5 Media Integrating audio and video with the Web,
O'Reilly, 2011.

+03: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

New Properties and Values in Backgrounds with CSS3
By Russ Weakley.
"There are a lot of articles that have appeared over the last few
years, showing us all sorts of cool things that can be done with CSS3.
However, one aspect of CSS3 that is often overlooked is CSS3
backgrounds. With CSS3, we have a range of new properties and values
to give us more control over our background images. However, before we
talk about these new properties and values, we need to understand
three important boxes..."
http://blogs.sitepoint.com/new-properties-and-values-in-backgrounds-with-css3/

Getting Unspecific With CSS
By Jonathan Nicol.
"Anyone who writes CSS will have encountered the concept of
specificity, a nifty mechanism that allows web browsers to resolve
conflicts between CSS declarations. In a nutshell, specificity ensures
that whenever two rules try to set the same property of the same
element, the one with the greatest weight will take precedence..."
http://f6design.com/journal/2011/05/19/being-unspecific-with-css

WYSIWYG Is Hard #4, Editing StyleSheets...
By Daniel Glazman.
"Editing stylesheets in a wysiwyg editor can be hard. For multiple reasons..."
http://www.glazman.org/weblog/dotclear/index.php?post/2011/05/18/Wysiwig-is-hard-4-editing-StyleSheets

CSS Sprite or Accessibility? ALT or TITLE
By quora.
"Engineers likes to use CSS sprites to enhancement web page
performance, they like to migrate every picture into one piece,
include company logo. I defined 'alt' attribute for company logo, but
they said they are using css sprites, so can not add "alt" attribute,
they suggest to use 'title' attribute to instead of every pic which
are using css sprites to implemented. Does it make sense?"
http://www.quora.com/Web-Accessibility/CSS-sprite-or-Accessibility-ALT-or-TITLE?srid=Wz5

Full Browser Width Bars
By Chris Coyier.
"Block level elements are naturally as wide as their parent element.
So let's say you put an <h1> in your <body> (and you've used reset CSS
so there is no padding on the body) that <h1> is automatically the
full width of the browser window. It doesn't need any help..."
http://css-tricks.com/full-browser-width-bars/

+04: COLOR.

Does Stripping Your Blog of Colour Leave It Readable?
By Glenda Watson Hyatt.
"Digging into my Web Accessibility Toolbox, the grayscale conversion
accessibility tool GrayBit converts a webpage into grayscale to ensure
there is sufficient visual contrast between elements. Sufficient
colour contrast is essential for improving readability..."
http://blogaccessibility.com/does-stripping-your-blog-of-colour-leave-it-readable/

+05: EVALUATION & TESTING.

The Science Behind User Experience UX Design and Usability Testing
By Charles L. Mauro.
"A recorded interview with Charles Mauro CHFP conducted by Robynn McCarthy..."
http://www.mauronewmedia.com/blog/2011/03/the-science-behind-user-experience-ux-design-and-usability-testing/

How much does the usability test affect perceptions of usability?
By Jeff Sauro.
"It is one of the most important questions to ask when measuring
usability. Just how much does the process of measuring impact the
metrics we collect? In measuring perceived usability of five popular
websites, I found that a single difficult task lowered post-test
usability scores by 8%..."
http://www.measuringusability.com/task-effect.php

+06: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

How to Choose a UX Prototyping Tool
By Design for Use.
"A feel of the real is very important in User Experience Design and we
often find clients asking for prototypes (proof-of-concept) during the
design process. Prototypes better communicate the interactions and
navigation of the proposed design than static wireframes and mockups.
Prototypes can be created at various stages of the design process
(Analysis, Design or actual Test), for an informed user and client
feedback to reduce number of design iterations. There is a broad array
of prototyping applications available to suit the purpose, skill set
and the fidelity required of a deliverable. In this blog we present a
brief survey of common prototyping tools."
http://designforuse.net/?p=722

+07: JAVASCRIPT.

Javascript Mistakes You Must Avoid
By iFadey.
"If you are new to javascript and you write raw javascript or use any
framework (jQuery, Mootools, Dojo, YUI) with it, you must avoid few
mistakes. Actually these are my experiences when I was learning
javascript..."
http://www.ifadey.com/2011/05/javascript-mistakes-you-must-avoid

Writing Maintainable JavaScript (Video)
By Andrew Dupont.
Andrew Dupont's Mix11 presentation.
http://channel9.msdn.com/events/mix/mix11/EXT23

+08: NAVIGATION.

Should I Create a Sitemap or HTML Site Map?
By S.R. Emerson.
"There seems to be a big confusion between Sitemaps and a HTML site
map for those new to websites. We are going to run through what each
is and what they are used for today to try and undo the confusion..."
http://www.webpagemistakes.ca/create-sitemap-or-html-site-map/

+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

HTML Working Group Update
By Paul Cotton and Sam Ruby.
Paul and Sam's HTML WG status report to the W3C Advisory Committee.
http://www.w3.org/2011/Talks/0516-htmlupdate/

Unlocking the power of HTML5 audio
By Giorgio Sardo.
"Sounds form the background of our life. Today the HTML5 <audio>
element enables Web developers to embed sounds in their applications.
The flexibility of the control coupled with the integration with the
rest of the platform allows several scenarios, from simple sound
effects to background audio to gaming experiences to more
sophisticated audio engines. This blog post walks through some of the
best practices for using the <audio> tag in your Web applications, and
includes useful tips from real-world sites..."
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2011/05/13/unlocking-the-power-of-html5-lt-audio-gt.aspx

How HTML5 Will Transform the Online Video Landscape
By Christina Warren.
"...One of the big promises of HTML5, at least for video, is that it
will be possible to serve and play back hardware-accelerated video in
the browser, on a smartphone or tablet, or in an embedded device, all
without having to do lots of special coding. Let's look at some of the
ways HTML5 is already influencing the future of online video, as well
as some of the challenges that still exist..."
http://mashable.com/2011/05/17/html5-video-future/

+10: USABILITY.

Improving Usability with Fitts' Law
By Jason Gross.
"Back in 1954, psychologist Paul Fitts published an article the
detailed his theory on human mechanics as it pertained to aimed
movement. It was Fitts' observation that the action of pointing to or
tapping an target object could be measured and predicted
mathematically."
http://sixrevisions.com/usabilityaccessibility/improving-usability-with-fitts-law/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+11: 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 at d.umn.edu

[Issue ends.]