Category: A List Apart

From pixels to prose, coding to content.

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A List Apart Accessibility Design Publishing

WCAG Controversy and Human Design

As law, “Speed Limit 55 MPH” is enforceable. “Don’t drive too fast” is not. Although heeded by too few U.S. web teams, W3C accessibility standards are the law in many nations. That’s one reason the W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group has been under pressure to increase the specificity and clarity—and thus the enforceability—of its guidelines.

Because organizations must be able to state positively whether or not they have complied with a legally mandated guideline, the Working Group has introduced the notion of “testability” in its new WCAG 2.0 documents. In place of vague guidlines like, “Ensure sufficient contrast between foreground and background,” WCAG 2.0 provides technical specifications that can be measured by machines.

The trouble is, some criteria are inherently untestable, argues former working group invited expert Gian Sampson-Wild in Issue No. 240 of A List Apart for people who make websites. Rather than admit the problem and rethink testability, says Sampson-Wild, WCAG 2.0 jettisons needed guidelines that cannot be defined in a testable manner. In so doing, she claims, WCAG 2.0 hurts the very people it is intended to help.

Read Testability Costs Too Much and decide for yourself. Then share your comments with the W3C. The deadline for comments is 29 June 2007. That’s right, three days from now. So please read, think, and decide.

Also in this issue, new A List Apart author Sharon Lee discusses using linear and non-linear narrative and other techniques of engagement to create a rich, sensory experience that immerses people in your website, encouraging deeper involvement with your message and brand.

The principles of good human-to-computer interface design are simplicity, support, clarity, encouragement, satisfaction, accessibility, versatility, and personalization. While it’s essential to heed these, it’s also important to empathize with and inspire your audience so they feel you’re treating them less like a faceless user and more like a human being.

Find out more in Human-to-Human Design.

Issue No. 240 also brings back Joe Clark’s absolutely essential 22 August 2005 piece, Facts and Opinions About PDF Accessibility:

Contrary to popular opinion—and also contrary to quasi-judicial claims in some places—PDF documents can be no less accessible than HTML. … This article will explain how PDF does and does not support accessibility.

All this, plus the painfully brilliant and hilariously insightful illustrations of ALA artist and rock star Kevin Cornell. And ALA T-Shirts on sale cheap. What more, we ask, could you ask?

Comments off. (Comment at ALA.)

[tags]alistapart, accessibility, design, wcag, wcag2, pdf[/tags]

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12 years A List Apart An Event Apart Design Happy Cog™ industry Standards work Zeldman

Hi, Mom!

A Business Week slide show, “Thinking Outside the Design Box,” profiles “10 professionals working at the very edges of their disciplines in order to redefine their industries.” Included are designers Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram, who helped design the interface for One Laptop Per Child; Robin Chase, the founder of Zipcar; and (ulp!) me.

I’m in there because they needed a pretty face, and because of the whole web standards thing.

The piece is part of “Cutting-Edge Designers 2007,” a Business Week Special Report focusing on innovation that arises out of crossing disciplines and combining technologies.

It’s worth reading, which is lucky, because I would have blogged it no matter what.

[tags]design, innovation, businessweek, designers, zeldman[/tags]

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A List Apart Design Publishing

ALA 239: Designer frameworks and robot designers

In Issue No. 239 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

Frameworks for Designers

by Jeff Croft

Frameworks like Rails, Django, jQuery, and the Yahoo User Interface library have improved web developers’ lives by handling routine tasks. The same idea can work for designers. Learn how to harness the power of tools, libraries, conventions, and best practices to focus creative thought and energy on what is unique about each project.

You Are Not a Robot

by Jonathan Kahn

Are we not (wo)men? Cut us and we bleed. Present us with a problem and we solve it—using judgement, experience, and the ability to generalize. Learn why machines will never be able to do our jobs, and how knowing that fact can build respect for the profession.

Plus, in Editor’s Choice, this memento from our 22 August 2005 relaunch:

When You Are Your Own Client, Who Are You Going To Make Fun Of At The Bar?

by Jim Coudal

Should your blog have a business? Jim Coudal shares insights into the adventure of transitioning from client services to product creation.

A List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. Explore our articles or find out more about us.

[tags]alistapart, jeff croft, coudal, jonathan kahn, frameworks[/tags]

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A List Apart Design industry Standards writing

ALA 238: copywriting 101, evangelizing 102

In Issue No. 238 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

Evangelizing Outside the Box: Web Standards and Big Companies

by Peter-Paul Koch

Nearly a decade after The Web Standards Project named the core standards for web development and began persuading browser makers to support them, the negative rap on web standards is that they’re fine for bloggers, freelancers, and small shops, but somehow inappropriate for big corporate and e-commerce sites. This is a lie. Contrary to popular belief, designers and developers at many big companies use web standards in their work every day. They just don’t talk about it. For standards awareness to reach the next level, they’ll have to start talking, says PPK.

Who Needs Headlines?

by Shaun Crowley

A designer formats and places text. Technically, the job ends there. But some designers go further, sharpening their clients’ content to grab and focus user attention. In so doing, they create more effective sites—and gain an advantage over other designers. Drawing on decades of copywriter lore, Shaun Crowley discusses seduction by headline and other principles of writing that sells.

The Web Design Survey
The Web Design Survey has closed. Thanks to all who took time to answer the 36 questions it posed. Our findings will be published in an upcoming issue of the magazine.

[tags]alistapart, copywriting, writing, webstandards, web standards evangelism[/tags]

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A List Apart An Event Apart Community Design development Diversity industry work

Web Design Survey closes soon

I took it! And so should you. The Web Design Survey, 2007.

As it turns out, the profession that dare not speak its name has a lot to say for itself. Over 30,000 people have taken a few minutes to help create the first (soon-to-be) publicly available data about people who make websites. And you?

If you haven’t yet filled out The Web Design Survey, now is the time: the survey closes on 22 May. Our thanks to all who have already participated.

[tags]webdesign, survey, web design survey, ala, alistapart, design, development[/tags]

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A List Apart business Design project management

ALA 237: client school

Generally, Issue 237 of A List Apart, for people who make websites, is all about education. Specifically, it’s about educating bosses and clients to approve good design and make better strategic decisions.

Stand and Deliver

by David Sleight

You’ve got thirty seconds to sell your work to the well dressed nemesis who’s paying you. Handle the next few moments gracefully, and the project will be one you can be proud of. Flub an answer, and you can kiss excellence goodbye. Are you prepared? Can you deliver?

David Sleight is the Deputy Creative Director of BusinessWeek.com, and writes about design, the web, and anything else that strikes his fancy at Stuntbox. When he’s not pushing pixels or punching code he can be found exploring the wilds of New York.

Educate Your Stakeholders!

by Shane Diffily

Who decides what’s best for a website? Highly skilled professionals who work with the site’s users and serve as their advocates? Or schmucks with money? Most often, it’s the latter. That’s why a web designer’s first job is to educate the people who hold the purse strings.

Shane Diffily is author of The Website Manager’s Handbook and webmaster with one of Ireland’s largest companies. He also publishes regular features about the challenges of website administration on http://www.diffily.com.

A List Apart explores the design, development, and meaning of web content, with a special focus on web standards and best practices. Explore our articles or find out more about the magazine.

[tags]selling design, design, development, webdesign, webdevelopment, education, client education, project management, alistapart[/tags]

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A List Apart Design development industry work

The profession that dare not speak its name

I took it! And so should you. The Web Design Survey, 2007.

Question: If web design makes the new information age possible—if it creates new markets and new products, generates significant global cash flow, changes the way companies and non-profits interact with the public, and employs untold legions of specialists—why, until now, hasn’t anybody tried to find out more about it as an industry?

Hypothesis: No one has tried to measure web design because web design has been a hidden profession.

The hypothesis is neither far-fetched nor particularly insightful. If you think about it, it’s obvious. Web design has been hidden because its workers have, for the most part, been masked by old business and old media categories. Call it death by org chart:

  • A producer, designer, and developer collaborate daily on their non-profit’s rather unwieldy website. The producer’s business card claims she is an Associate Communications Coordinator. The designer’s title is Art Director. The developer is called an Assistant Director of IT. All three are really web professionals—but nobody calls them that, and nobody at the organization solicits their opinions except on small, technical matters. This, even though the website handles nearly all public communication and fund-raising, and these three are the only people in the organization who know about usability and design.
  • On paper, a large law firm employs only one web employee despite having a vast public website and an even bigger intranet site. Her title is webmaster, although she is really a graphic designer with HTML, CSS, PHP, and usability expertise. On the corporate org chart, she reports to one of the partners, who is charged with supervising the website in his free time. He knows nothing about websites, so she handles everything. Once a month they have lunch; once a year she gets a nice raise. Because she reports to an attorney, she is part of Legal.
  • On paper, a daily news magazine employs just one “web” employee. His title is webmaster, although he is really a developer, and he is slowly being squeezed out. The actual web development work—and there is a ton of it, every day—is performed by two IT staffers. A half dozen other folks work on page templates and site image production; on paper, they are graphic designers. The site is directed by a committee representing the editorial, advertising, and marketing departments. But regardless of their placement on the org chart, they are really web people, making web content and web layout decisions that are then executed by the “graphic designers” and “IT guys.” In all, nearly fifteen workers toil over the magazine’s website each day, yet the magazine’s web “staff” consists of one guy who’s about to take an early retirement.

There are many self-proclaimed freelance web designers and developers, and many staff people with those (and related) titles, but there are also hundreds of thousands of “hidden” web designers and developers, and this partly accounts for the business world’s indifference to us.

But the hidden workers are coming out of the shadows. Over 12,000 people filled out The Web Design Survey during its first 24 hours online. Average completion time was 8 minutes, 45 seconds. Not a bad start. Keep spreading the word.

[tags]webdesign, survey, web design survey, ala, alistapart, design, development[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart An Event Apart business Design industry Women's Studies work

The Web Design Survey

A few days back, we remarked on the strange absence of real data about web design and the designers, developers, IAs, writers, project managers, and other specialists and hybrids who do this work. In all the years people have been creating websites, nobody bothered to gather statistics about who does this work, using what skills, under what conditions, and for what kinds of compensation.

In the absence of statistics specific to our field, commissioning research got us only so far. It was time to take the next step.

I took it! And so should you. The Web Design Survey, 2007.

Presenting A List Apart’s first annual web design survey. The information it collects will help us form a long overdue picture of the ways web design is really practiced around the globe. The more people who complete the survey, the richer and more detailed the picture will become.

Depending on how you answer it, the survey has up to 37 questions, nearly all of them multiple choice. A fluent English speaker should be able to complete the survey in ten minutes or less.

In structuring the sections on employment, we patterned certain questions along the lines established by previous surveys undertaken by AIGA and The Information Architecture Institute. The similarity will afford easier comparisons across the three surveys. This comparability will be useful because some “web designers” are also (or primarily) designers, and thus also fall under AIGA’s umbrella, while other “web designers” are primarily information architects.

Hosted by An Event Apart, the survey will remain open until 22 May, 2007. After we close it, we’ll slice and dice the data and present our findings in a future issue of A List Apart.

Help us increase accurate knowledge about—and deepen respect for—the profession of web design. Take the survey and spread the word. (You might even win a free ticket to An Event Apart, a 30GB video iPod, an Event Apart jump drive, or a funky A List Apart T-shirt.)

Also in this issue of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

The Long Hallway

by Jonathan Follett

In the virtual conference room, no one can hear you scream. Social networking enables knowledge workers like us to build virtual companies with no office space and little overhead. But can we make them succeed? Follett dissects the skills required to create, manage, and grow the virtual firm.

Contrast and Meaning

by Andy Rutledge

Yes, Virginia, design does matter. Better web page layouts aren’t only about aesthetics. A layout with clear hierarchies can turn scanners to readers, and readers to members. Learn how visual contrast can turn lifeless web pages into sizzling calls to action.

[tags]webdesign, survey, design, development, compensation, business, alistapart, AndyRutledge, JonathanFollett, longhallway, thelonghallway[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Accessibility Design

ALA 235: vertical grids, accessible web apps

In Issue No. 235 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

Setting Type on the Web to a Baseline Grid

by Wilson Miner

Grids, grids, all God’s children got grids. Even a one-column layout with no artwork uses a grid (just not a very interesting one). Web designers have spent the last year or so discussing the application of sophisticated grid systems to multi-column layouts. Wilson Miner shows how to apply the same principles of proportion and balance to the type within those columns by borrowing another technique from our print brethren: the baseline grid.

Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA

by Martin Kliehm

“Web 2.0 applications often have accessibility and usability problems because of the limitations of (X)HTML. The W3C’s standards draft for Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) addresses those limitations. It provides new ways of communicating meaning, importance, and relationships, and it fills gaps in the (X)HTML specifications and increases usability for all users by enabling navigation models familiar from desktop applications. Best of all, you can start using ARIA right away to enhance the accessibility of your websites.”

[tags]alistapart, accessible, webapps, accessibility, design, webdesign, layout, grids, baselinegrid[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Design development Publishing Standards

ALA 234 triple-header

In a triple issue of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

Ruining the User Experience
Anticipating your users’ needs is the key to making a good impression; it’s the little things that matter most. ALA’s technical editor Aaron Gustafson explains why progressive enhancement means good service.
Inside Your Users’ Minds: The Cultural Probe
Drawing on the field of ethnography, Ruth Stalker-Firth introduces a method for studying user behavior and motivations outside the lab.
Cross-Browser Scripting with importNode()
Anthony Holdener explores the world of XML DOM support for web browsers and presents a new technique for cross-browser scripting.

[tags]alistapart, webdesign, ethnography, userexperience, UX, DOM, XML[/tags]

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A List Apart Design events Happy Cog™ people Publishing SXSW

A List Apart dinner at SXSW

A List Apart dinner. Pic by Jeffrey.

25 A List Apart staffers, Happy Cogs, and friends broke bread (well, more accurately, we broke spring rolls) at Mekong River Restaurant in Austin, Texas. Here Peter is seen making sweet love to his noodles. Missing, and missed: Dan Benjamin, Krista Stevens, Erin Lynch, Andrew Fernandez, Tanya Rabourn, and Andrew Kirkpatrick.

[tags]sxsw, sxswsi, sxsw2007, alistapart, happycog[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart events Happy Cog™ SXSW

Austin Power

As snow falls prettily on the island of Manhattan, Mrs Zeldman and I prepare for our annual junket to sun-baked, star-studded Austin, Texas, accompanied by the keynote speaker of 2025 and cradling the blessed StarTAC. Most of Happy Cog and the A List Apart staff will be there as well, many with speaking roles. Here are a few panels I found (with more to come):

Writing, Better

Ballroom F
Saturday, March 10th
10:00 am – 11:00 am (same time as “A Decade of Style,” below)

If content is king, why don’t designers talk about it? Panelists will discuss what makes for good writing, what each person does to keep fit with verbs and vowels, and what the future might hold for the written word in a world that is being inundated with podcasts and video.

Moderator: Greg Storey

Greg Storey Principal/Creative Dir, Airbag Industries LLC
Bronwyn Jones Mktg Comms, Apple Computer
Erin Kissane Editor, Happy Cog
Ethan Marcotte Vertua Studios

A Decade of Style

Room 19AB
Saturday, March 10th
10:00 am – 11:00 am (same time as “Writing, Better,” above)

A small group of grizzled veterans reflects on a decade of successes, triumphs, failures, disappointments, reversals of fortune, and just plain fun in the world of CSS and web design.

Moderator: Eric Meyer

Molly Holzschlag Pres, Molly.com Inc
Eric Meyer Principal, Complex Spiral Consulting
Chris Wilson IE Platform Architect, Microsoft
Douglas Bowman Visual Design Lead, Google

After the Brief: A Field Guide to Design Inspiration

Room 18ABCD
Saturday, March 10th
11:30 am – 12:30 pm

You’ve received the creative brief; now what? Learn how to draw creative inspiration for your web design projects from a number of likely and unlikely sources.

Moderator: Jason Santa Maria

Jason Santa Maria Creative Dir, Happy Cog Studios
Cameron Moll cameronmoll.com
Rob Weychert Art Dir, Happy Cog Studios

Ruining the User Experience: When JavaScript and Ajax Go Bad

Room 18ABCD
Saturday, March 10th
4:05 pm – 4:30 pm

With the exploding popularity of DOM Scripting, Ajax and JavaScript in general, it’s important to know what to do—and what not to do—when dealing with these technologies.This session will walk you through several real-world examples, pointing out common mistakes that hinder usability, accessibility, and searchwhile teaching you ways to avoid them altogether, either programmatically or simply by altering the way you think about JavaScript-based interactivity.

Aaron Gustafson Sr Web designer/Developer, Easy! Designs LLC
Sarah Nelson Design Strategist, Adaptive Path

Book Signing

SUNDAY, MARCH 11
3:00 pm

I’ll be signing Designing With Web Standards, 2nd Edition in the SXSW Bookstore, located in the Trade Show + Exhibition.

Robert Hoekman Jr. Designing the Obvious
Jeffrey Zeldman Designing With Web Standards, 2nd Edition
Brendan Dawes Analog In, Digital Out
Phil Torrone MAKE Magazine
John Jantsch Duct Tape Marketing-The World’s Most Practical Small Business Marketing Guide
Marrit Ingman Inconsolable: How I Threw My Mental Health Out With the Diapers
Gina Trapani Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tips
Elliot McGucken Own the Risk: The 45Surf.com Guide to Hero’s Journey Entrepreneurship

Get Unstuck: Moving From 1.0 to 2.0

Room 18ABCD
Monday, March 12th
10:00 am – 11:00 am

Is your team mired in the goo and muck of old-school thinking? Are your designers and developers divided on their approach and about to throw in the towel? This panel features formerly stuck experts as well as those who have helped clients get out of the muck.

Moderator: Liz Danzico

Liz Danzico Director, experience strategy, Daylife
Kristian Bengtsson Creative Dir, FutureLab
Chris Messina Co-founder, Citizen Agency
Luke Wroblewski Principal Designer, Yahoo!
Jeffrey Zeldman Founder and Executive Creative Director, Happy Cog

Preserving our Digital Legacy and the Individual Collector

Room 8ABC
Tuesday, March 13th
11:30 am – 12:30 pm

Many great art, book and manuscript collections survive because an individual had the foresight or good luck to save the good stuff. Libraries and museums owe a debt to individual dealers, collectors and packrats for saving illustrated Czarist plate books from the Soviets, and WWII letters from the trash-heap. Who are today’s collectors? What are they preserving? How will they manage fragile born-digital collections long enough share with future generations?

Moderator: Carrie Bickner (aka Mrs Zeldman)

Carrie Bickner, Director of Education Outreach, The New York Public Library
Josh Greenberg Assoc Dir Research Projects, Center for History & New Media
William Stingone Curator of Manuscripts, The New York Public Library
Megan Winget Professor, UT at Austin

[tags]sxsw, sxswi, austin, texas, mrszeldman, alistapart, happycog[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Design Flash Standards Tools

ALA 233: Semantic Flash, Valid Arguments

In Issue 233 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

Semantic Flash: Slippery When Wet
The love that dare not speak its name gets its due as Happy Cog’s Dan Mall explores some of the ways Flash can enhance semantic, standards-based site designs. Part One of a series. Includes do-it-yourself, “shiny floor” project built with web standards and, yes, Flash (there, we said it).
Where Our Standards Went Wrong
No, they didn’t go wrong by using Flash. A List Apart’s Ethan Marcotte weighs the pros and cons of rigorous validation. Re-examine your assumptions. Discover the silent weight of invalid markup. Consider how to better educate clients on the benefits of web standards.

This issue goes out to our friends at SXSW Interactive.

Edited by Erin Kissane. Produced by Erin Lynch. Tech-edited by Aaron Gustafson and Ethan Marcotte (is that fair?). Illustrated by Kevin Cornell. Art directed by Jason Santa Maria. Published by Happy Cog. It’s shake and bake and I helped.

[tags]webstandards, flash, design, webdesign, alistapart, validation, ethanmarcotte, danmall, danielmall[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Design Flash

ALA 232: Flash cage match, multi-column CSS

In Issue No. 232 of A List Apart, for people who make websites:

Flash Embedding Cage Match
“How can you best embed Flash content?” In search of an answer, Bobby van der Sluis of UFO fame defines the criteria that matter most to modern web developers: standards compliance, cross browser support, support for alternative content, avoidance of content/player mismatches, auto-activation of active content, and (why not?) ease of implementation.
He then surveys current best-practice alternatives, explains how each works and evaluates pros and cons. And he wraps it up with a surprise ending. Oops. Spoiler.
Multi-Column Layouts Climb Out of the Box
An environmentally responsible energy policy. The perfect snack. Multi-column layouts with equal height columns. Three worthy goals that always seem to elude our grasp. Alan Pearce can help with the layout problem. Building on prior solutions, Pearce shows how to create elastic and liquid three-column layouts with fixed-width sidebars and equal height columns.

[tags]alistapart, webdesign, flash, embed, css, layout, 3column[/tags]

Categories
A List Apart Design Standards Tools

Praise the Lord and Pass the Pliers

A List Apart 231 is strictly for tools. Unusual tools. Tools so wrong, they’re right.

So you need to prototype a sophisticated web application, all whizzing pathways and flipping form fields. So you need complex software, right? Not necessarily. In Paper Prototyping, Shawn Medero shows how to do sophisticated interface development thinking with our old friends, Mr Paper and Dr Scissors.

From child’s tools to what the pros use, our “so wrong, they’re right” tool theme continues in Casper Voogt’s unexpected Quick CSS Mockups With Photoshop. Yes, you read that right, and no, we’re not advocating a return to table-based layouts or absolute positioning.

The greatest web magazine team in the world produced this issue of A List Apart. Special hat tip to editor Erin Kissane (aka Girl Erin), acquisitions editor Krista Stevens, production manager Erin Lynch (aka Boy Erin), and technical editors extraordinaire Aaron Gustafson, Ethan Marcotte (studio, bio), and Andrew Kirkpatrick. ALA illustrator Kevin Cornell brought this week’s articles to life with a visual language that straddles brilliance and madness, and art director Jason Santa Maria supervised all visual details and contributed the issue’s color scheme.

[tags]alistapart, design, webdesign, prototyping, layout, photoshop[/tags]