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News, views, professional development

Please note: the Web Standards Team don't necessarily endorse the views expressed or products and organisations mentioned in these links.

Something else to check out: the Web Standards Team have an ever-growing de.lico.us link collection covering all manner of standards-related news, reports and resources.

Contents

Training and events

  • Free accessibility and web standards training sessions. As you'll be aware, from 1 January 2008, your websites must comply with the New Zealand Web Standards and Recommendations. To help you get ready for this deadline, we're running free hands-on training sessions. Come along and learn about: testing your site with the OpenWolf validator, how common accessibility tools work, practicing simple user testing, the web standards exemptions process and what other benefits web standards have for your site. If you'd like one for your agency, please contact us at web.standards@ssc.govt.nz

Web standards lending library

We've got a growing collection of web-standards related books we'd like to share. Send us an email, and we'll dispatch post-haste. First in, first served, with a 4 week lending period. More books on the way, so check back here.

  • Web Word Wizardry - a guide to writing for the Web and intranet, Rachel McAlpine [content]
  • Designing With Web Standards, Zeldman (another copy of the one below)
  • Killer Web Content, Gerry McGovern [content, usability]
  • Web design for ROI - turning browsers into buyers and prospects into leads Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus [Usability, communications]
  • The User is Always Right: A practical guide to creating and using personas for the web, Steve Mulder [Usability]
  • Designing With Web Standards, 2nd edition, Jeff Zeldman. [Mark up - HTML and CSS]
  • Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook, Dan Cederholm. [Mark up - HTML and CSS]
  • Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner's Guide to User Research (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies) [Usability]
  • Web Analytics: An Hour a Day, Avinash Kaushik [Analytics]
  • Ambient Findability by Peter Morville [Usability]
  • A Step-by-Step Guide to Usability Testing, Peter Mitchell [Usability]
  • Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works, Ginny Redish [Writing and Content]
  • Handbook of Usability Testing: How to Plan, Design, and Conduct Effective Testing, Peter Mitchell [Usability]

Contact Pamela at pamela.flinkenberg@ssc.govt.nz or phone 04 495 6692, or Jackie at jackie.wright@ssc.govt.nz or phone 495 6712

Media and blogs

  • Accessibility 2.0: a million flowers bloom 25th of April 2008] Intro interview from the "Accessibility 2.0: a million flowers bloom" conference. Host Robin Christopherson discusses Web 2.0 with Kath Moonan, conference organiser. (Podcast or transcript.)
  • Leveraging Web 2.0 Design patterns for enhanced accessibility Video presentation by Google Research scientist TV Raman, who demonstrates programming techniques for accessible web2.0-style applications.
  • Microsoft warns Web site owners to prep for IE 8 ZDNet. Members of the IE team have remindeded site owners — many of whom had designed their sites to display correctly in less-standards-compliant, prior versions of IE — that they need to “get ready” for IE 8 so that their content will “continue to display seamlessly.”
  • The business case for web standards Wiki. Presentations and structured arguments aimed at convincing managers and others that web standards are crucial to quality site development.
  • Government 2.0: Building an Online Democracy NPR (radio). Business strategist and Wikinomics author Don Tapscott explains how he is working to create government websites intended to get American citizens engaged in democracy.
  • Learning what makes Facebook tick BBC. The Psychology of Facebook is the brainchild of Professor B J Fogg, a pioneering persuasion psychologist who founded the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford.
  • Web Standards Rap Because we are down with the kids, here's Design Prophet, SEO rapper, kicking it doctype declaration style.
  • Design patterns for accessible, crawlable and indexable content Official Google Webmaster Central Blog. Design recommendations for creating web content that remains usable by the widest possible audience while helping ensure that the content gets indexed and crawled.
  • Study critical of UK gov't tax office Web site The Industry Standard. A bad website means taxpayers underpay by £330 million (US$660 million) each year, the Committee of Public Accounts said in its report 'HM Revenue and Customs: Helping individuals understand and complete their tax forms.'
  • 25 Years in Usability Jakob Neilsen celebrates his career. "Since I started in 1983, the usability field has grown by 5,000%. It's a wonderful job — and still a promising career choice for new people."
  • eBay hires Webcredible as accessibility consultants netimperative. eBay UK has selected online usability and accessibility consultants, Webcredible, to provide training and process consultancy for accessibility services, as well as working on specific accessibility projects.
  • Why Accessibility Is Easy Kirk Life75719. Good overview from this accessibility blog.\
  • Government 2.0 Truly Transformative Government: Webcast Oxford Internet Institute. E-Government progress in the UK has been slower than expected. "Is this inevitable? Are there good reasons why government and public services do not engage people in the way music, shopping and social networking do? Or is government not yet going about this in the right way, and does the success of the contemporary Internet have important lessons for the design of public services and public engagement? "
  • Speech on Government 2.0 - Tom Watson MP, Minister for Transformational Government, Cabinet Office One of the world's first blogging politicos reflects: "At the time it was seen as a radical act. People could not believe that I had opened myself up to such scrutiny and occasional daily abuse. I sometimes still wonder about that bit myself." But he concludes it was more than worth it. Overview and vision of e-government.
  • Analysis of WCAG 2.0 Podcast from Web Axe, the web design accessibility tipster. (11 mb.)
  • Better connected, UK annual report on local authority eGovmonitor, 5 Feb. Socitm Insight (the UK's Society of Information Technology Management) is to produce a special supplement on website accessibility as Better Connected, its annual report on local authority websites, due out in on March 3, reaches its 10th year.
  • Web Directions South conference, Sydney, 2007. Presentations include Organisational Wiki Adoption, Is SEO Evil?, Social Networks on Phone Mobile Devices, Usability: More than Skin Deep.
  • WCAG 2.0: Woeful to Wonderful in One Easy Draft? 25 May, 2007 Accessites.org. An older post, but a useful backgrounder to the new Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
  • The war within Web standards: pragmatists versus purists. 26 Jan, Jeff Croft.
  • The BBC's Fifteen Web Principles. 24 Jan, tomski.com. Guidelines developed as part of the BBC2.0 project. Even in the "new" web, the Beeb holds tight to accessibility, saying its "not an optional extra".
  • Wait and See on IE 8 7 Jan, eWeek.dom It's still too early to judge the Microsoft browser's standards compliance.
  • Predictions Buffet for 2008 - Take Your Pick 8 Jan, Viaspire. Viaspire look forward to the coming year, and predict the "stabilization and maturation" of Web 2.0., 2007. A List Apart. A useful first look at the new HTML5 spex, including a
  • Opera files complaint — an open letter to the Web community 12 Dec, Web Standards Project. Opera Chief Technology Officer and co-inventor of CSS, Håkon Wium Lie has written an open letter to the Web community explaining the reasons that Opera has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Union to force Microsoft to support open Web standards.
  • BBC Backstage Podcast: Accessibility in a web 2.0 world? 2 Dec, BBC. The BBC's backstage panel discussion on video from Blip.tv
  • A Preview of HTML 5 4 Deccomparison with HTML4. "To give authors more flexibility and interoperability, and enable more interactive and exciting websites and applications, HTML 5 introduces and enhances a wide range of features including form controls, APIs, multimedia, structure, and semantics."
  • Web bubble 2.0 for social networks? 27 Nov, CNNMoney. "[W]hile consumers will probably continue to flock to social media site... there is a venture capital bubble in this area. There will have to be more consolidation."
  • PAS 124 - too many standards? 28 Nov, Bruce Lawson. Again on the new UK standards in development, several reponses to Lawson's blog ask for them to be opened up for consultations with wider groups. They need some sort of web standards wiki ...
  • British web compliance expert, Magus, joins forces with BSI to raise online standards 1 Nov, British Standards Institute media release. "British web compliance expert Magus Ltd, has commissioned BSI British Standards to develop a Publicly Available Specification (PAS 124) for web standards. Web standards govern the effectiveness, function and appearance of a website, and include: brand, legal, accessibility, search engine optimisation (SEO), usability and technical standards."
  • Who needs another set of web standards? 28 Nov, ITPro. Blogger Davey Winder is less than impressed by the BSI's new standards project. "Well whoopy-doo."
  • Understanding Web Design 20 Nov, A List Apart. "We get better design when we understand our medium. Yet even at this late cultural hour, many people don’t understand web design. Among them can be found some of our most distinguished business and cultural leaders, including a few who possess a profound grasp of design—except as it relates to the web."
  • Blue Beanie Day - A Day for Web Standards 18 Nov, CMX. "On Facebook today, I was invited to join a group called "Blue Beanie Day." November 26th has been named Blue Beanie Day, in honor of Jeffrey Zeldman's photo, donned in a blue beanie, on the cover of his book, 'Designing with Web Standards'."
  • The Semantic Web Goes Mainstream 20 Nov, TechBizWatch. "Twine is a website where people can dump information that’s important to them, from strings of e-mails to YouTube videos. Or, if a user prefers, Twine can automatically collect all the Web pages she visited, e-mails she sent and received."
  • First look at Firefox 3.0b1: fast, stable, and full of new features 20 Nov, Arstechnia. "Mozilla announced the official release of Firefox 3 beta 1 early this morning. The first Firefox 3 beta, which is available for download from Mozilla's servers, offers some hot new features for users and web developers."
  • WCAG 2.0: The New W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines Evaluated 20 Nov, River Water63522. " Version 1 of the guidelines came under much criticism for being vague, full of jargon and extremely difficult to use. The W3C has been working on version 2.0 of the guidelines for over 5 years now, but has it been worth the wait?"
  • Mozilla releases Firefox 3 beta 20 Nov, ZDNet. "Firefox 3 beta 1 adds to the popular open-source web browser a number of significant features that Mozilla said should improve security, ease of use, rendering of web pages, and the accessibility of previously visited web pages."
  • AxsJAX vs. Hijax 18 Nov 07, Mind Booster Noori. "Now, there's this silly idea that it's too hard to make an AJAX-powered webapp accessible. Developers talk about painful code to allow graceful degradation, and some are even crazy enough to actually prefer mantaining two webapps: one AJAX-powered and other AJAX-less. What's really wrong about this scenario is that it's pretty easy to design accessible websites, even AJAX-powered. Welcome to the world of Hijax."
  • Web guru Berners-Lee warns against 'walled gardens' for the mobile Internet 14 Nov 07, Network World. "The Web is an open platform on which you build other things. That's how you get this innovation. The Web is universal: you can run it on any hardware, on any operating system, it can be used by people of different languages... [i]t's very important to keep the Web universal as we merge the Internet with mobile."
  • Will Success, or All That Money From Google, Spoil Firefox? 12 Nov, New York Times. "The Mozilla Foundation has come to resemble an investor-backed Silicon Valley start-up more than a scrappy collaborative underdog. Siobhan O’Mahony ... calls Mozilla “the first corporate open-source project."
  • Blind man lays human rights complaint against airline 15 Nov, Radio New Zealand. A businessman has laid a complaint with the Human Rights Commission, after discovering he could not make an online booking with Pacific Blue because he is blind.
  • Most UK mobile users now going online- study 2 Nov, netimperative. "More than half (56%) of mobile users are now accessing the internet via their mobiles, according to a poll conducted by online usability and accessibility consultants Webcredible."


New reports and resources

  • WCAG 2.0 Presentation Materials 2 Nov, Web Accessibility Initiative. The WGI have published a set of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 presentation materials, covering benefits, shortcuts, how it differs from WCAG 1.0, and related topics.

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