[webdev] Web Design Update: April 3, 2009

Fri Apr 3 06:08:19 CDT 2009

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 7, Issue 40, April 3, 2009.

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

++ISSUE 40 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: COLOR.
04: EVENTS.
05: FLASH.
06: JAVASCRIPT.
07: MISCELLANEOUS.
08: PHP.
08: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
10: TOOLS.
11: TYPOGRAPHY.
12: USABILITY.
13: XML.

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

[Contents ends.]

++ SECTION ONE: New references.

+01: ACCESSIBILITY.

Accessible Web Applications
By Christian Heilmann.
Chris explains how to create web applications so they are accessible.
http://www.slideshare.net/cheilmann/accessible-web-applicationss

Accessibility Supported?
By Roger Hudson.
"I recently reviewed a couple of PDF forms for compliance with WCAG 2 and 
the inconsistent way the test screen readers handled these forms threw up 
several interesting issues or questions."
http://www.dingoaccess.com/accessibility/accessibility-supported/
Accessibility Supported Question Thread on WAI-IG:
http://tinyurl.com/dzf3tj
http://tinyurl.com/cytz7u

Guideline 1.2: Time-based Media (part 1)
By Olga Revilla.
"You can use this guideline both for time-based media and synchronized 
media (with another format and/or time-based interactive components), 
including.."
http://tinyurl.com/clhezc

Captioning Key
By Described and Captioned Media Program.
"The Keys to Access guidelines for captioning and description were 
developed by the DCMP based on the input and guidance of experts in the 
field of accessible media, master teachers, and consumer leaders."
http://www.dcmp.org/captioningkey/index.html

Audio Description and the JW FLV Player
By Terrill Thompson.
"This installment explores an aspect of multimedia accessibility that 
receives far too little attention: audio description. When people think 
about making video accessible, they tend to think about captions for the 
deaf and hard of hearing. However, video can also be inaccessible to 
people who are blind or visually impaired. These folks can often get the 
message of a video solely by listening to it. However, if portions of the 
content are exclusively communicated visually, these portions are 
inaccessible..."
http://terrillthompson.com/2009/01/greetings-from-calwac-2009.html

A Costly Gamble
By Suzanne Robitaille.
"Last summer, Apple found itself in a pickle with the disability 
community. The state of Massachusetts was threatening to sue Apple for 
failing to make its iTunes media library accessible to blind 
students...Time and time again, companies spend heavily on product 
development and marketing, but fail to consider people with disabilities 
who might use their products..."
http://tinyurl.com/dlsggg

Captioning Media for iTunes
By Stanford Online Accessibility Program.
"Captioning Media for iTunes requires some specialized tools and a bit of 
time to get right. Sadly, this process can only be done on a Macintosh 
system so far, but as means and methods emerge for PC based solutions, 
they will be added..."
http://soap.stanford.edu/show.php?contentid=89

Podcast Captions
By Automatic Sync.
"The following tutorial series will walk you through the various ways of 
captioning podcast content. They have been captioned with SCC files, so 
you will be able to see captioning in QuickTime, iTunes, iPods, and 
iPhones if you have captioning enabled..."
http://www.automaticsync.com/caption/podcaption.htm

iTunes U and Accessibility
Altmedia Thread.
"In the near future, Glendale College is going to be offering
students access to their instructors' lectures through iTunes U.  Are
any of your campuses doing this?..."
http://htclistserv.htctu.fhda.edu/read/messages?id=40469

Man With Small F (The Inaccessible PDF Song)
By Terrill Thompson.
"In my day job I'm a technology accessibility specialist at a university. 
This song was inspired by a blind university student who came to my 
office and said 'There's something wrong with this document'. It was a 
PDF file, and I know that some PDF files are more accessible than others. 
This particular document looked fine visibly, but audibly all the student 
was hearing was random characters and phrases. When I first listened to 
this, I was impressed by how rhythmic and poetic it was. My first 
response of course was to diagnose the problem and figure out how to fix 
it for the student. But my second response was to record what I was 
hearing and make a song out of it! Inspiration sure comes from some 
amazing places..."
http://fawm.org/songs/4769/

Device-Independent or Accessible?
By Dominique Hazael-Massieux.
"During the European Accessibility Forum in Frankfort last Friday, I took 
part to a panel dedicated to the relationships between making a Web page 
accessible and making it mobile-friendly, along with Henny Swan, Tomas 
Caspers, and moderated by Beate Firlinger..."
http://tinyurl.com/chl75x

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

15 Surefire Ways to Break Your CSS
By Rob Glazebrook.
"Some of the biggest CSS blunders stem from the simplest of errors. 
Knowing what those errors are can save you hours of wasted labor..."
http://www.cssnewbie.com/15-surefire-ways-to-break-your-css/

Object Oriented CSS - The Video
By John Allsopp.
"At Web Directions North, the highly talented Nicole Sullivan debuted her 
'OOCSS' concept, to much interest. Yahoo Developer Network video recorded 
a number of the sessions, including Nicole's..."
http://tinyurl.com/d3ymat

Why CSS Needs No Variables
By Jens Meiert.
"If you follow web development fora, magazines, blogs, and W3C's 
www-style, CSS variables or constants seem to be one of the top features 
web developers are asking for..."
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20090401/why-css-needs-no-variables/

Organize Your Stylesheet Madness and Reduce It's File Size With These Tips
By Neal Grosskopf.
"The other day at work, I had some spare time so I decided to take a look 
at one of our stylesheets from one of our older websites. The stylesheet 
was currently over 700 lines long, which I don't consider that long and 
stood at about 13kb, which again I don't find particularly large..."
http://www.nealgrosskopf.com/tech/thread.asp?pid=42

+03: COLOR.

Colour Contrast Check Tool Updated
By Jonathan Snook.
Jonathan updated this took for WCAG 2.0 and added HSV sliders.
http://tinyurl.com/cz5wsv

+04: EVENTS.

Accessibility: Are You Reaching Everyone?
May 8, 2009.
Cerritos, California, U.S.A.
http://www.lacasist.org/events/2009_workshop_accessibility

Etre Get Together 2009 (with Lou Rosenfeld and Steve Krug)
May 20-21, 2009
London, United Kingdom.
http://events.etre.com/events/2009/etre-get-together/?nl=1243

+05: FLASH.

Flash Accessibility Webinar Recording
By Andrew Kirkpatrick.
"The Paciello Group held the Flash accessibility and WCAG 2 webinar 
today. You can view the recorded event with captioning online. The 
Paciello Group will be posting the slides..."
http://tinyurl.com/cgqxoj

Creating Accessible Components in Flash and Flex
By Alaric Cole.
"It's been in the works for a while, but I finally had the chance to 
focus on making ASTRA components more accessible. Accessibility is not 
something many developers look at, but it's slowly gaining ground. For 
many developers, even figuring out how to enable the built-in 
accessibility of Flash components is a job. But when you create custom 
components, implementing accessibility is another job entirely. 
Accessibility doesn't come for free..."
http://tinyurl.com/cwbsah

Creating Accessible Components in Flash and Flex (Part 2)
By Alaric Cole.
"In this article, I'll go over the steps needed to enable accessibility 
for a custom component..."
http://tinyurl.com/armrrr

Adobe Flash Accessibility Design Guidelines
By Adobe.
"Providing captions for video solves accessibility challenges for people 
who are deaf or hard-of-hearing, but people who are blind or who have low 
vision or other physical disabilities need the video playback controls to 
be keyboard accessible and to function properly with assistive 
technologies such as screen readers and screen magnifiers. Flash CS4 
Professional offers improvements to the FLVPlayback video component that 
make the default player controls accessible automatically, without any 
coding required by the developer..."
http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flash/video.html

+06: JAVASCRIPT.

Contributing WAI-ARIA landmark roles to open source CMS themes
By Peter Krantz.
"Sometime new technology suffers from a chicken and egg problem. For 
example, if no websites start using WAI-ARIA there will be few incentives 
for manufacturers of assistive technology or browsers to include support 
in their products..."
http://tinyurl.com/cg3mhr

Patterns for WAI-ARIA landmark roles in existing HTML
By Peter Krantz.
"This is a short summary of some methods to add WAI-ARIA landmark roles 
to existing web pages, e.g. an existing template package for a content 
management system..."
http://tinyurl.com/cafpfk

ARIA for Google Calendar, Finance and News: In praise of timely 
information access
By T.V. Raman.
"From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use 
Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that 
sighted people, among others, may also find useful."
http://tinyurl.com/dlfpmy

Are We Losing the Declarative Web?
By Philip Fennell.
"I saw something the other day that I was both intrigued and bothered by 
in equal measure. 'Mozilla and the Khronos Group Announce Initiative to 
Bring Accelerated 3D to the Web'..."
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/are-we-losing-the-declarative.html

+07: MISCELLANEOUS.

Accessible Web Design CEO Joseph Dolson (Interview)
By Kerry Murdock.
"Millions of Internet users are blind, deaf or are otherwise unable to 
use a website in a traditional manner. Ensuring that a site functions 
well for these users is called accessibility, and our guest for this 
interview is an expert on that topic. Joseph Dolson is CEO and founder of 
Accessible Web Design, a St. Paul, MN based firm that designs and 
consults on accessibility matters. He joins Practical eCommerce's Kerry 
Murdock."
http://tinyurl.com/dj9pyb

+08: PHP.

PHP and the Cloud
By Vito Chin.
"Cloud computing refers to the utilization of shared, elastic resources 
and processing power accessed via the Internet. In some ways, it hails 
the reversion to the golden age of time-sharing but with significant 
improvements to the distribution philosophies underlying the delivery 
infrastructure. So, analogously, we now have the shared wonders of Hyde 
Park, where everyone and anyone can chill on the bench, throw some 
Frisbee, instead of having to financially pool money to buy a private 
park to shoot rabbits..."
http://techportal.ibuildings.com/2009/03/31/php-and-the-cloud/

The ABC's of PHP Part 4 - How Variable Am I?
By Peter Shaw.
"To many beginners the subject of variables is usually pretty scary, and 
often a reasonably difficult concept to grasp, the reason for this 
however is usually because most modern languages require some kind of 
indication as to what type of data a variable will hold, this in turn 
often confuses beginners because they don't know what type of data 
relates to what kind of type..."
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/peter_shaw04012009.php3

Select a Certain Number of Words from a String
By Tiffany B. Brown.
"An alternative to subset() that selects entire words rather than a 
specified number of characters. I used this on a recent project where I 
needed to create a meta tag description from text and HTML stored in a 
database..."
http://tinyurl.com/d93spw

+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Accessibility Dependencies of the Successor to HTML 4.01
By Gregory Rosmaita.
"This document accurately reflects the  acknowledged Accessibility 
Dependencies of HTMLx..."
http://esw.w3.org/topic/HTML/AccessibilityDependencies

Standards are for Catholics
By Brian Kelly.
"...are there policy makers and authors of standards and specifications 
who really do feel that must means must, whereas the developers interpret 
must as should? Is the problem that we have a non-interoperable mix of 
religions involved?"
http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/standards-are-for-catholics/

Introduction to hCard, Part two: Styling hCards
By Christopher Schmitt.
"In the first part of this tutorial, I showed you the basics of the hCard 
microformat - what it is, how you implement on in HTML, and what tools 
are available to extract tem form web pages. Now that we know how to 
create hCards, let's go through a couple of examples that demonstrate how 
we might style hCards with CSS to make them fit into the visual design of 
a web page..."
http://tinyurl.com/dckq8f

This Week in HTML 5 - Episode 26
By Mark Pilgrim.
"The big news for the week of March 16th is this announcement from Ian 
Hickson: 'I've now split out the Server-sent Events and Storage APIs out 
of HTML5, and I've removed the text for Web Sockets, which was split out 
earlier. By popular demand I've also done some tweaks to the styling of 
these specs'."
http://blog.whatwg.org/this-week-in-html-5-episode-26

+10: TOOLS.

NVDA - A Free, Open Source Screen Reader
By Roger Johansson.
"Testing your work with a screen reader, especially if you're building 
something that is more advanced than a basic info website, is likely to 
help you create a more accessible website..."
http://tinyurl.com/d6ncn9

Styleneat
"organizes and standardizes your CSS - selectors, sub-selectors and 
properties - in a structure that makes it easier to define page areas and 
see how they relate to each other..."
http://www.styleneat.com/

+11: TYPOGRAPHY.

Web Typography Panel at SxSW
By Richard Rutter.
"...thought I'd jot down some of the topics we discussed, and some we 
talked about beforehand but didn't have time for..."
http://www.clagnut.com/blog/2253/

+12: USABILITY.

Season of Usability 2009
Season of Usability is a series of sponsored student projects to 
encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction 
design to get involved with Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS)."
http://season.openusability.org/

Defining User Experience
By Luke Wroblewski.
"A while back, Michael Cummings at UX Design asked me what my definition 
of "user experience" was..."
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?797

Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities
By Jakob Nielsen.
User research finds significant deficiencies in non-profit organizations' 
website content, which often fails to provide the info people need to 
make donation decisions.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/nonprofit-donations.html

Intuition and Usability
By Kevin Godby.
"Yesterday in class, the use of the word intuitive came up. In HCI, when 
people talk about an interface being intuitive, what they really mean is 
that it's learnable?that is, the interface can be learned in a very short 
period of time. After that short learning period, the interface seems 
natural, easy to use, and so obvious. If this learning period is short 
enough (or not obvious), then we blithely claim that the interface is 
intuitive..."
http://kevin.godby.org/2009/03/27/intuition-and-usability/

Great Websites Work Beautifully
By Gerry McGovern
"...The Web reflects a society that is maturing. It is a more 
questioning, probing, skeptical, probing society. Is it totally rational 
and logical? Absolutely not. Of course, we like our websites and products 
to look beautiful. But it is much more important to the Web customer that 
websites and products work beautifully."
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/nt/2009/nt-2009-03-30-visual-design.htm

Enough UX Chumbaya!
By Dave Malouf.
"Interaction Design is NOT Information Architecture..."
http://davemalouf.com/?p=1556

+13: XML.

Resources for Learning SVG
By Virgina DeBolt.
"Shelley Powers from Burningbird sent out a tweet this morning that IE 
8.1 is going to include support for SVG. If you haven't started paying 
attention to SVG yet, now is the time..."
http://www.webteacher.ws/2009/03/31/resources-for-learning-svg/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+16: 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 at d.umn.edu

[Issue ends.]