[webdev] Web Design Update: March 26, 2010
Laura Carlson
lcarlson at d.umn.edu
Fri Mar 26 06:07:21 CDT 2010
+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 8, Issue 39, March 26, 2010.
An email newsletter to distribute news and information about web design
and development.
++ISSUE 39 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: DREAMWEAVER.
05: EVENTS.
06: FLASH.
07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
08: JAVASCRIPT.
09: NAVIGATION.
10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
11: USABILITY.
12: XML.
SECTION TWO:
13: What Can You Find at the Web Design Reference Site?
[Contents ends.]
++ SECTION ONE: New references.
+01: ACCESSIBILITY.
Auto-Garbled Captioning
By Sarah E. Bourne.
YouTube recently introduced automatic captioning for its videos. "O
frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!" said people* I work with who are faced
with the time-consuming and tricky task of creating transcripts for
videos. Having seen some very … odd … output from high-end,
state-of-the-art, speech recognition software, I suggested they wait to
see for themselves before getting too excited.
http://sarahebourne.posterous.com/auto-garbled-captioning
Crowd-Sourced Twitter Captioning of Videos
By Brian Kelley.
"Back in March 2009 Tony Hirst write a post on his Useful blog entitled
Twitter Powered Subtitles for Conference Audio/Videos on Youtube in
which he provided a proof-of-concept on how you could take time-stamped
Twitter posts and synchronize them with a YouTube video to provide
Twitter captions for videos..."
http://tinyurl.com/yanym5t
The Future Will Be Captioned: Improving Accessibility on YouTube
By youtube.
"Tens of millions of people in the U.S. experience some kind of hearing
impairment and recent studies have predicted that over 700 million
people worldwide will suffer from hearing impairment by 2015. To address
a clear need, the broadcast industry began running captions on regular
video programming in the early 1970s. Today, closed captions on video
are more prevalent than ever. But generating captions today can be a
time-consuming and complicated process..."
http://tinyurl.com/yer3jgd
WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 Refresh Side-by-Side
By uiAccess.
"This is an initial start for comparing the Section 508 refresh draft
and WCAG 2.0. It is incomplete and may be incorrect. It does not
represent the opinions of anyone, including myself or my employer."
http://uiaccess.com/drafts/WCAG2n508.html
PDF will be Legally Accessible with the New 508
WebAIM Discussion Thread.
"Well the new 508 requires that visual accommodation only be required
for individuals with legal blindness. People with print disabilities
caused by low vision who are not blind must use those accommodations.
Since everyone can use screen enlargement, everyone must..."
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=4150
12 Tips For a More Accessible Website
By Tom Walker.
"...In this article, we explore 12 ways in which you can make your site
more accessible. Some methods are very cheap and quick to implement,
others require a little more time and financial investment, but you
should think of them as business opportunities. With the internet so
central to all of our lives these days, it's unfair that some people are
being left behind..."
http://tinyurl.com/y87o45q
Cognitive Web Accessibility Assessment: First Attempt, Part 2 of 3
By John Rochford.
"This post is the second part of my first structured attempt to evaluate
cognitive Web accessibility. I am using WebAIM's Cognitive Web
Accessibility Checklist and its WAVE accessibility evaluation toolbar to
assess the Web site of Down's Syndrome Scotland..."
http://tinyurl.com/yesjsq7
What Accessibility Means in 25 Words
By Glenda Watson Hyatt.
"...I have finally compiled the responses into a free ebook 'What
Accessibility Means in 25 Words'. Download the ebook and feel free to
share widely..."
http://tinyurl.com/y9ecmyw
+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.
Understanding the CSS Float Property
By Rob Glazebrook.
"I want to take a moment today and talk about CSS floats. They're used
everywhere in modern web design, from navigation bars to building CSS
columns and dozens of techniques in between. However, despite their
prevalence, not everyone understands exactly how they work, or what the
repercussions might be from using them. So let's remedy that..."
http://www.cssnewbie.com/css-float-property/
The Space Combinator/Nothing Important
By Niels Matthijs.
"Combinators are an overlooked part of css development..."
http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/the-space-combinator
CSS Vendor Prefixes Considered Harmful
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"I recently came across a post about border-radius by the IE team, that
said IE9 supports border-radius (cool!) without vendor prefix (even
cooler!)..."
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/03/css_vendor_pref.html
CSS Vendor Prefixes Redux
By Peter-Paul Koch.
"Well, reactions to my proposal to abolish vendor prefixes are mixed,
and I might have overshot my target here..."
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/03/css_vendor_pref_1.html
+03: COLOR.
Colour Blindness and the Web
By Richard Ingram.
"...In the same way you'd test the usability of an interface or the
quality of your content, testing for potential visual issues caused by a
colour deficiency should also be added to your quality control list.
There are some great tools out there that only take a second or two to use."
http://www.richardingram.co.uk/2010/03/colour-blindness-and-the-web/
Color Blindness Tests
By Daniel Fluck.
"...This part of the Color Blind Essentials series focuses on the
different possibilities to test color vision, how they work, what they
can be used for and lists some of the well-known and used tests. There
will be no conclusive enumeration as there are just to many tests
around, with a lot of them not available anymore but still in use..."
http://www.colblindor.com/2010/03/23/color-blindness-tests/
+04: DREAMWEAVER.
Adobe Tools and HTML5/CSS3
By Ryan Stewart.
"...I've always thought that once HTML5 got a bit more concrete, you'd
see design tools from Adobe that took advantage of it. The benefit of
Flash is that we control the run time and can tie features to the
development cycle of our tools. Not the case with HTML5 and CSS3. But
now that the standards have started to coalesce and have support in more
browsers, we can make those features part of our design tools..."
http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/2010/03/adobe-tools-and-html5css3/
+05: EVENTS.
The Aiming for Accessibility Conference
June 8-9, 2010.
Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
http://www.accessconf.open.uoguelph.ca/
+06: FLASH.
Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4 Released with Accessibility Improvements
By Andrew Kirkpatrick.
"...The open-source Flex SDK includes many accessibility improvements in
the components to ensure that users of assistive technologies can access
Flex applications more easily..."
http://tinyurl.com/ybqge7g
HTML Versus Flash: Animation Benchmarking
By Cameron Adams.
"I've written before about why you shouldn't let your current tool set
dictate what it is you create and I still firmly hold to that mantra..."
http://www.themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2010/03/22/
+07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
There Is No Such Thing As Jesse James Garrett
By Dan Klyn.
"The president of a firm that's synonymous with User Experience and who
literally 'wrote the book' on the elements of User Experience making an
impassioned call for everybody who's called information architect or
interaction designer to change their business cards to omit mention of
these competing paradigms, and then insisting that the way your firm
does its work is different than every other kind of design approach
that's come before it? It's a sell job, if not a sales pitch. I think he
doth protest too much."
http://danklyn.com/blog/?p=570
Lifecycle of a Wireframe
By Nick Finck.
Nick Finck presentation from MIX10.
http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/DS04
Prototyping: Picking the Right Tool
By Todd Zaki Warfel.
"This article is a chapter from Todd's book Prototyping: A
Practitioner's Guide."
http://www.uie.com/articles/prototyping_tools/
+08: JAVASCRIPT.
Accessible JavaScript Techniques
By Patrick Fox and Becky Gibson.
"Accessibility is all around us in the real world - curb cuts, access
ramps, closed captioning. Accessibility is and should be ubiquitous.
Accessibility benefits all of us - we watch closed captions when we're
watching a basketball game in a bar, we use curb cuts for strollers and
bikes..."
http://sarahdavies.cc/2010/03/14/accessible-javascript-techniques/
+09: NAVIGATION.
Heading Navigation in Web Browsers
By Roger Johansson.
"All screen readers that I know of have keyboard shortcuts that allow
the user to navigate within a web page by jumping from heading to
heading. This can really speed things up when you want to skip to a
particular section of a page..."
http://tinyurl.com/y8po8oy
+10: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.
Authoring Conformance Requirements
By Sam Ruby.
"The HTML5 validator will produce both errors and warnings. I personally
believe that many of the so-called 'errors' are at best shoulds and at
worst pose no real interoperability problems and are so frequently
violated that the message produced only serve to obscure real problems..."
http://tinyurl.com/yjzq4ta
Browsers are Rails, Web Sites are Trains (Authoring Conformance
Requirements)
By Larry Masinter.
"There's some ongoing debate about whether or how the HTML specification
should or shouldn't contain "authoring requirements". I thought I'd
write about the general need..."
http://tinyurl.com/yfw9fel
HTML5: <section> v. <article>
By Estelle Weyl.
"I have been asked several times 'when do you use <article> and when do
you use <section> in HTML5?'..."
http://www.standardista.com/html5-section-v-article
The hgroup Element
By Richard Clark.
"One of the new elements defined in HTML5 is <hgroup>, used for grouping
titles with their associated subtitles. But why do we need <hgroup> when
we've already got the <header> element? In this article, we'll do our
best to answer that question..."
http://html5doctor.com/the-hgroup-element/
+11: USABILITY.
Don't Put Hints Inside Text Boxes in Web Forms
By Caroline Jarrett.
"...The short version of my advice: Don't do it! Hint text is rarely
effective as a way of helping users, but instead becomes a default
input. Read on, and I'll explain..."
http://tinyurl.com/yexhdvv
Scrolling and Attention
By Jakob Nielsen.
"Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page
fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their
attention below the fold."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html
Don't Just Edit Terrible Web Content-Rewrite It
By Rachel McAlpine.
"When editing web content, be bold. Speak the truth..."
http://tinyurl.com/y8goxcu
The Opposite of Fitts' Law
By Jeff Atwood.
"...what should we do with UI elements we don't want users to click on?
Like, say, the 'delete all my work' button?...uncommon or dangerous UI
items should be difficult to click on"
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/03/the-opposite-of-fitts-law.html
+12: XML.
SVG Browser Chart
By Jeff Schiller.
"SVG 1.1 became a W3C recommendation on January 13, 2003. Seven years
later, this page records my results of running various SVG
implementations (web browsers and browser plugins) through the official
SVG Test Suite."
http://www.codedread.com/svg-support.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 two ends.]
++END NOTES.
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+ TEXT EMAIL NEWSLETTER (TEN).
As a navigation aid for screen readers we do our best to conform to the
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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 at d.umn.edu
[Issue ends.]
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