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: Design BlogWCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has released a last call for comments on the working draft of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0… again:
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group invites you to review the second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft published on 11 December 2007. WCAG 2.0 explains how to make Web sites, applications, and other content accessible to people with disabilities. Please submit any comments on the following document by 1 February 2008.
This second WCAG 2.0 Last Call Working Draft is provided for public review of the document now that it has all resolutions from previous comments incorporated. The WCAG Working Group hopes that it has resolved all substantive issues with this draft, and looks forward to progressing to the next stages in completing WCAG 2.0.
Leave your comments on whether you think any progress has been made here at the W3C site.
Free Podcast: The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
Jason “the designer man” Beaird, author of SitePoint’s The Principles of Beautiful Web Design (currently available in a limited, hard-cover signature edition), recently gave a presentation as a guest lecturer to the User-Centered Interface Design class run by Aarron Walter at The Art Institute of Atlanta.
Jason’s talk drew upon the core design principles he discusses in his book, and provided students with some practical advice on what to expect in an agency environment. After the talk, Jason joined a class critique of a redesign project students had been working on. I think students were a little nervous about being critiqued by the guy who wrote a best-selling book on design, but once they realized how down to earth Jason is, they gained their confidence back.
Aarron has made the audio and slides from Jason’s talk available on his personal site.
Download:
- Jason Beaird’s Guest Lecture Podcast (MP3, 43MB)
- Jason’s Presentation Slides (PDF, 4.3 MB)
Who Said Beautiful Web Design was Hard?
Not to blow our own trumpet (most of you know anyway) but earlier this year we published a pretty awesome book. Of course ALL of our books are awesome, so let’s just say that this book is super awesome. You’d know it as The Principles of Beautiful Web Design written by Jason “the designer man” Beaird…
No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t improve on Jason’s magnificent authoring job, so we’ve decided to do something a little different. I’d like to introduce you to…
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design – Hardcover Signature Edition
Yep, that’s right: this brilliant book is being released in super-durable and simply gorgeous hardcover format…
Don’t bother looking in your local bookstore or Amazon — these puppies are exclusive to sitepoint.com, and they’ll hit our warehouse on December 17.
There are only 1000 signature editions arriving, and we’re giving you, the SitePoint faithful, a chance to get in first!
Place your order before the 17th and it’ll be shipped the second the books arrive. The sooner you order, the more cash you’ll save…
Here’s how it’ll work:
- Order by December 3 and pay only US $39.95 (save …
Vector Magic: Stanford’s AutoTracer Bullet
The following is republished from the Design View #39.
Ah, you’ve got to love those wonderful geeks at Stanford.
Lock ‘em in a room with a computer, a case of Red Bull, and two bags of Skittles, and they’ll invent Google before lunch, then go on to solve one of the most intractable problems of graphic design software in the afternoon.
Whatever you call it — Autotrace, Live Trace, PowerTRACE — the ability to convert bitmap images into vector artwork software has been around since at least Adobe
Streamline’s release in the early 1990s. In fact, I remember spending hours experimenting with Streamline’s many dials and sliders trying to get the perfect result back in the day.
How often have I put the practice to work? Not often.
The problem was always twofold:
Problem A. The vector artwork produced was always spectacularly chaotic, inefficient and tangled — the design equivalent of spaghetti code –
and generally took much longer to clean up than it would have taken to draw the artwork from scratch.
Problem B. The algorithms used to produce the vector shapes invariably impose the same blocky, woodcut effect on all artwork. This was fine if you were looking for a rough-cut, medieval look, …
Design the Cover of SitePoint’s Next Book!
In case you missed it, last week SitePoint’s co-founder Mark Harbottle let slip some big news about the new series of reference books that SitePoint will be publishing in 2008.
Guess what? You have the opportunity to design the first book’s cover!
That’s right, we’re eating our own dog food, and running a design contest for the book cover to be used not only for the first book, but across all titles in The Ultimate Reference series. From the brief:
The desired outcome is simple, elegant, well balanced design that will make our books stand out in a bookstore … On top of the prize, if your design is successful then you’ll receive acknowledgment in the book, as well as copies of the final product.
There are some great designs that have been submitted already. You only have a few days left to get your submission in though.
Good luck to all contestants. I can’t wait to see the final result!
Design Great Billboards
We can learn a lot about designing usable web sites from the offline world.
For instance, when I was in Adelaide a couple of weeks ago visiting family, I took a drive around the Adelaide Hills. Cruising along the freeway at 120 kms/hr, I passed the sign in the picture on the right. The first thing that popped into my head was “What the heck does that mean?”
I’m not sure what it’s like in your part of the world, but when I was last living in Adelaide, South Australia, the term arrester bed definitely wasn’t common language.
(I was half expecting to see an intimidating king-size mattress in full police uniform step out from the bushes and order me to pull over.)
The second thing that popped into my head — and this is possibly an indication that I spend far too much time online — was this:
“Imagine if something similarly obscure was used to describe a tab on a web site. No-one would know what the text linked to!”
Steve Krug wrote about this very concept — that we should think of our users as driving by in a car, …
Adobe CS3 and the Case of the Disappearing Thumbnails - The Sequel
So, it’s been almost two years since we first published a little a piece on getting your thumbnails to work again in Adobe Creative Suite 2. The exec summary: Adobe disabled many of thumbnails that used to display in Explorer, presumably to ‘motivate’ CS3 users to use Bridge. After some teeth gritting and a little research, we figured out a workaround and published it there.
Two years later, it’s been one of our more popular posts ever since — approaching 140 comments last time I checked, and generally getting another comment or two most weeks.
However, Adobe still like Bridge and still would like you to use Bridge, so responded by making things just that little bit more difficult in CS3. If allowed, Illustrator CS3 checks that thumbnails are disabled every time it starts — if it finds they aren’t, it makes changes to ensure they are.
If you let it that is..
Thankfully the issue has been solved, and I’m keen to pass on the solution and the credit for it.
William M Park is a talented painter, Photoshop power user and apparently sometime registry tweaker.
Along with the DLLs and REG files mentioned in the original solution, William has put …
World Usability Day 2007
World Usability Day is an international, annual event that will be held on November 8th this year with the theme of Health.
The main goal of the event is to promote and encourage usability in the wider community and will be held at various locations world wide .
Last year 40,000 people in 35 countries in 175 cities around the world participated in World Usability Day. This year marks the events 3rd anniversary.
- Sydney UPA
If you’re interested in hearing about what’s going on in your city, have a look on line and think about attending an event if you can. Some events have sessions running all day, which makes it much easier to attend even some of the presentations.
While my focus is always on web usability, the World Usability Day event will look at a usability in a wide array of settings. For example, Melbourne’s event will be touring the learning facility of St Vincents hospital.
If you’re in London, 15 free places are available in a 1 day course offering an Introduction to User Centred Design.
Of course, there are dozens of events going on world wide, so have a look …
Why Accessibility? Because It’s Our Job!
I go through phases of complacency and disbelief when thinking about web accessibility.
Working at SitePoint HQ, I’m fairly lucky in that everybody here is on the same page when it comes to accessibility; we spend time making sure our sites are accessible, that our applications degrade gracefully, that our JavaScript doesn’t create barriers for screenreader users. We do this ad-hoc, without even a firm sense of whether our target demographic ultimately requires it. And for no reason other than it’s our job. In the books, articles and other content we publish, best practice is right at the top of the priorities list.
But not everyone in our community agrees, as the original forum thread over the Target case and the recent catfight on TechCrunch illustrated. And I think that’s pretty sad — not because these folks are disagreeing per se (I’d rather see healthy debate than tacit compliance), but because so many of the anti-accessibility arguments are ignorant rhetoric, which cloud the issue and make useful discussion harder for everyone. They generally follow a familiar pattern, taking a peculiarly American line in favour of market forces determining everything, and criticizing any idealistic intentions as political-correctness gone mad.
Whatever. I’m not …
Usability: More than Skin Deep at Web Directions
At Web Directions South 2007 in Sydney, SitePoint usability blogger Lisa Herrod (aka Scenario Girl) proposed a new way of looking at usability and accessibility within the web design process. Not only does her approach point the way to better user experience design, but it also brings formal accessibility testing within reach of small web development teams!
Lisa led off boldly with what I felt was a tough sell to some members of the audience: that user experience design is by definition incomplete unless it takes accessibility into account at every stage of a project. To soften the blow, however, she demonstrated how the ‘personas’ used in usability work could be adapted to include common disabilities without diminishing their usefulness for gauging other usability factors.
No matter how you approach it, of course, accounting for accessibility within the development of a site is going to mean more work. But whose work should it be? Most businesses can’t afford to have a full-time accessibility expert on staff, and will either call in a contractor to do a last-minute accessibility review, or put the responsibility on the shoulders of the front-end designer.
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