[webdev] Web Design Update: April 3, 2010

Sat Apr 3 16:19:32 CDT 2010

+++ WEB DESIGN UPDATE.
- Volume 8, Issue 40, April 3, 2010.

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: EVALUATION & TESTING.
05: EVENTS.
06: FLASH.
07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.
08: MISCELLANEOUS.
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.

How-To Guide for Creating Accessible Online Learning Content
By Hadi Rangin.
"Online learning is exploding! Most students will take at least one 
online class before graduating from high school or college.  Today, 
students with disabilities struggle to use these new tools because 
websites, learning management systems and course content are not created 
with them in mind. Ironically, online learning could be a place where 
students with disabilities can achieve their goals of independence and 
preparation for careers and jobs. The online world provides the place 
where disability anonymity is possible and students are honored for 
their ideas and contributions..."
http://projectone.cannect.org/index.php

Evaluating Cognitive Web Accessibility with WAVE
By WebAIM.
"WAVE is a web accessibility tool that can greatly assist in the 
evaluation of web content. Rather than providing a complex technical 
report, WAVE shows the original web page with embedded icons and 
indicators that reveal the accessibility of that page. Before 
proceeding, be sure to read the Help page for an overview of using WAVE 
and details on specific things you may encounter..."
http://wave.webaim.org/cognitive

Cognitive Web Accessibility Assessment: First Attempt, Part 3 of 3
By John Rochford.
"This post is the third 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/ya9jzao

5 Tips To Immediately Improve Your Website Accessibility From a Visually 
Impaired Web Developer
By Jeff Noble.
"I recently got an email from David Reynolds, a visually impaired web 
developer, that got me thinking (it's rare - but it happens) about how 
it's easy to say you care about website accessibility, but difficult to 
identify with being visually impaired and understand the challenges 
someone like David faces when surfing the Web. I asked David a few 
questions and got some really great answers below..."
http://tinyurl.com/ylmpxnb

Web Accessibility Fears and Ways to Conquer Them
By Tom Babinszki.
"Here, I've compiled five fears which I've heard from people over the 
months and have included the ways to overcome them. You may or may not 
have these fears, but I can assure you that you'll find something of 
interest in the discussions below..."
http://www.evengrounds.com/blog/web-accessibility-fears

Living Without Mice
By Charles McCathieNevile.
"...Once upon a time, Web applications were pretty simple. You had 
forms, and they sent information. Or you had JavaScript, and it didn't 
do anything very important. Then came interaction events..."
http://my.opera.com/chaals/blog/2010/03/31/living-without-mice

+02: CASCADING STYLE SHEETS.

Adding Borders to Data Tables with CSS
By Virginia DeBolt.
"How do you add borders to data tables with CSS? Depending on how you 
want the borders to display, it can normally be accomplished with three 
steps..."
http://tinyurl.com/ybyzsue

CSS Child Selectors - Using Your Offspring
By Niels Matthijs.
"Since the early days, css has taken a serious interest in identifying 
immediate dom-children. Through a combination of combinators (+ and ~) 
and pseudo-selectors (:first-child and :last-child) it became possible 
to target specific elements simply based on the dom's structure. Now 
css3 is giving us a whole new range of options, but the question remains 
whether they'll suffice, despite their relative complexity..."
http://www.onderhond.com/blog/work/css-child-selectors

Whenever You Use :hover, also use :focus
By Roger Johansson.
"Probably one of the most common accessibility oversights is neglecting 
to apply CSS to the :focus state of links whenever you style the :hover 
state. How much of a problem this oversight leads to for non-mouse users 
depends on what CSS is applied to the :hover state."
http://tinyurl.com/y9pj7wa

CSS Generated Content Techniques
By Divya Manian.
"In this article, we will look at the basics of using generated content, 
and then break out into specific techniques you can employ it in..."
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/css-generated-content-techniques/

+03: COLOR.

Contrast is King
By Leslie Jensen-Inman.
"Being colorblind doesn't mean not seeing color. It means seeing it 
differently. If colorblindness challenges the colorblind, it also 
challenges designers. Some of us think designing sites that are 
colorblind-friendly means sticking with black and white, or close to it. 
But the opposite is true. Using contrast effectively not only 
differentiates our site's design from others, it's the essential 
ingredient that can make our content accessible to every viewer, 
including the colorblind. By understanding contrast, we can create 
websites that unabashedly revel in color."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/contrast-is-king/

5 Questions About Color Blindness
By Daniel Fluck.
"Lily is working on a school project about color vision deficiency. 
She's on the way to write a paper about it and has some questions which 
I would like to answer in this article..."
http://www.colblindor.com/2010/03/28/5-questions-about-color-blindness/

+04: EVALUATION & TESTING..

Personas
By Alistair Gray.
"Conducting user research can produce some amazing insights... but how 
do you communicate these findings to the rest of your team? This is 
where personas can step in. Personas, when used effectively can 
communicate the results of user research in ways that means the results 
are taken into account throughout the design/development cycle..."
http://tinyurl.com/yhgbknf

+05: EVENTS.

Introduction to W3C's Mobile Web Best Practices
Eight Week Online Course Beginning May 10, 2010.
http://www.w3.org/2009/03/mobitrain_course_description.html

World Congress on Software Engineering (WCSE 2010)
December 19-20, 2010.
Wuhan, China.
http://world-research-institutes.org/conferences/WCSE/2010

+06: FLASH.

Adobe Expanding the Accessibility of Acrobat and Flash!
By Jeff Singleton.
"...t was announced that the next release of Acrobat, Acrobat Reader, 
Flash Player and Flex will support the iAccessible2 API. MSAA is what 
these products currently use which limits the accessible API to Windows 
platforms. This is great news as this will expand accessibility for 
these products beyond the Windows platform and allow users of OS2 and 
Linux to make use of the accessibility features in these products..."
http://tinyurl.com/yejmx9q

+07: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE.

What Am I?
By Andrew Hinton.
"My interests and skills in the universe that is Design tack heavily 
toward using information to create structured systems for human 
experience. I'm obsessed with the design challenges that come from 
linking things that couldn't be linked before the Internet - creating 
habitats out of digital raw material. That, to me, is the heart of 
information architecture."
http://www.inkblurt.com/2010/03/26/what-am-i/

What is Information Architecture?
By Mickey McManus.
"I'd like to take a few minutes to talk about Information Architecture 
as we understand and practice it at MAYA..."
http://www.maya.com/the-feed/what-is-information-architecture

+08: MISCELLANEOUS.

Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte on the Future of the Web (Interview)
By Paul Boag.
"Jeffrey Zeldman and Ethan Marcotte talk about the third edition of 
Designing with Web Standards as well as discuss the future of the web..."
http://boagworld.com/design/zeldman-marcotte

CSUN Disabilities Conference Webcast
Webcasts captured at the CSUN disabilities conference which was held 
March 22-27, 2010. (Not captioned yet.)
http://tinyurl.com/yg8jwtu

+09: STANDARDS, GUIDELINES & PATTERNS.

Using HTML5 Web Workers to Have Background Computational Power
By Robert Nyman.
"When performing advanced load-heavy operations in a web browser, both 
the web page it is run in as well as the web browser UI becomes 
unresponsive till it's finished. However, there's a way to address that 
with HTML5 Web Workers...Basically, Web Workers offers you a possibility 
to load a JavaScript file dynamically and then have it process code in a 
background process, not affecting the user interface and its response 
level. You can continue to do whatever you want, selecting thing, 
clicking etc, while all Web Worker computation is in the background..."
http://tinyurl.com/ydoyr3m

HTML5 Forms Are Coming
By Jonathan Snook.
"HTML forms have been, to date, quite simplistic. We've had limited 
options: the text field, the checkbox, the radio button, the textarea 
and finally the select drop down. Any complex data like phone numbers, 
email addresses or dates had to be checked by JavaScript. (And you 
should always and I mean always do server-side validation of the data.)..."
http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/html5-forms-are-coming

HTML5 Markup for Blog Posts
By Virginia DeBolt.
"Writing about HTML5 while it is still in a state of flux is like 
standing upright on a water bed while shooting a carnival rifle at a 
moving row of ducks. What I'm about to tell you is based on the HTML 5 
working draft dated 4 March 2010..."
http://www.webteacher.ws/2010/03/26/tip-html5-markup-for-blog-posts/

+10: USABILITY.

Clarity Is More Important Than Persuasion
By Gerry McGovern.
The most important thing a webpage can do is be crystal clear about 
exactly what you can do on that webpage.
http://tinyurl.com/ycmwlgj

Menus and Web Content Must be Skim-Readable
By Rachel McAlpine.
"Basic rule for any communication in writing: it must be legible..."
http://tinyurl.com/y85dty2

There is no Fold!
By Steve Grobschmidt.
This just in...The Earth is not flat. In other news, there is no fold on 
the web..."
http://www.theaccessibility.com/2010/03/there-is-no-fold/

Infrequently Asked Questions of FAQs
By R. Stephen Gracey.
"We take FAQs for granted as part of our sites' content, but do they 
really work, or are they a band-aid for poor content? FAQ-hater R. 
Stephen Gracey explores the history and usability of FAQs. Learn how to 
collect, track, and analyze real user questions, sales inquiries, and 
support requests-and use the insights gained thereby to improve your 
site's content, not just to write a FAQ. Find out when FAQs are an 
appropriate part of your content strategy, and discover how to ensure 
that your FAQ is doing all it should to help your customers."
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/infrequently-asked-questions-of-faqs/

[Section one ends.]

++ SECTION TWO:

+11: 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 
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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 
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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.]