Useful links: Full background, Accessible Themes, Student Guide

How Full Page Background Images Affect the User Experience give some interesting points about full page backgrounds that I’d never considered. Plus a link to a how to at CSS Tricks if you want to try out a full page background.

Accessible Joe announced a project to create accessible WordPress themes called Cities. He’s working on one for Los Angeles. Karen Mardahl @kmdk is working on a Copenhagen theme. For Syndey, Australia, there’s Lisa Herrod @scenariogirl. Char James-Tanny @CharJTF is working on one for Boston. Jennison Asuncion @Jennison has one going for Toronto. All these new accessible themes will be available free through wordpress.org. @AccessibleJoe asks that you DM him on Twitter if you’d like to participate in this project. You can join one of the existing teams mentioned above, or organize for a new city.

A Student’s Guide to Web Design contacted me on Twitter, so I checked them out. Their purpose is, “equipping students after graduation for the design industry.” Recent grads might find a useful community there.

Some Personal News about Web Standards Sherpa

web standards sherpa I’m joining the Web Standards Sherpa team as Community Manager. I’ll be doing some behind the scenes work with their various activities, and will be in a more public role working with social media.

I might be the author of some of the tweets coming from @StandardsSherpa or I might be posting or commenting on the Sherpa Facebook page. Not much is happening on the Google+ page, but I’m planning to make it an active resource, too.

I’m happy to be a contributing member to this group of web standards evangelists and hope you’ll keep track of the groups’ activities on Facebook and Twitter.

Web Standards Sherpa defines itself:

We provide seasoned & aspiring web professionals the opportunity to receive feedback, glean advice, and learn best practices from industry experts.

That means you can go to Twitter or Facebook and ask a question. On the web site, you can request a site review. If your question or request is accepted by the Web Standards Sherpas, one of their experts will provide an answer or review your site.

In addition, expert articles about general web standards topics are published on the web site.

Web Standards Rock!

Useful links: 2 Readlists, WCAG=ISO, responsive menus

Two Readlists. 1. Adaptive Web Design was created by Aaron Gustafson. 2. Responsive Enhancement was created by Jeremy Keith.

WCAG 2 is now also ISO/IEC 40500 at the W3C.

10 Tips for How to Handle Responsive Menus Successfully is at usabilla. NIce blog, I’ve never seen it before but will keep going back.

Useful Links: Meritocracy, Primers, Binder fun

you keep using that word is a passionate rant about the word “meritocracy” in response to the post I linked to yesterday called A primer on sexism in the tech industry.

With even more response to that primer post, Laura Sanders wrote A primer on sexism in the tech industry – by an actual girl. Then Kathy Sierra send an email to Faruk Ateş, who wrote the original post, and later gave him permission to publish her email.

On a lighter note, were you on Twitter last night during the debate? I was, and was surprised by how inane some of the tweets were. But you know what, perhaps humor is the only response to politics in our time. Here’s a TechCrunch report about some of the fun people had at the expense of the Romney: ‘Binders Full Of Women’, Romney Gaffe, Gets Tumblr And 200k Likes On Facebook. It’s just amazing what the Internet and social media allow in this day and age – sometimes we forget that.

 

Useful links: Sexism, Job Hunting, Color Contrast, Blog Takedown

A Primer on Sexism in the Tech Industry at .net magazine is by Faruk Ateş. For quite some time, I’ve been impressed with the quality of content appearing at .net magazine. I’ve linked to quite a few articles here. So here’s a belated +1 to .net magazine for being such a great resource.

How do you look for a job in an industry known for biases against women? is an informative post for women looking for work.

Here’s a wonderful addition to color contrast testing tools. Lea Verou created a contrast checker that she describes in Easy Color Contrast Ratios. Here is what this innovative tool can do:

  • Accepts any CSS color the browser does, not just hex colors. To do this, it defers parsing of the color to the browser, and queries the computed style, which is always rgb() or rgba() with 0-255 ranges which be parsed much more easily than the multitude of different formats than modern browsers accept (and the even more that are coming in the future).
  • Updates as you type, when what you’ve typed can be parsed as a valid CSS color.
  • Accepts semi transparent colors. For semi-transparent backgrounds, the contrast ratio is presented with an error margin, since it can vary depending on the backdrop. In that case, the result circle will not have a solid background, but a visualization of the different possible results and their likelihood (see screenshot).
  • You can share your results by sharing the URL. The URL hashes have a reasonable structure of the form #foreground-on-background, e.g. #black-on-yellow so you can even adjust the URL as a form of input.
  • You can adjust the color by incrementing or decrementing its components with the keyboard arrow keys until you get the contrast right. This is achieved by including my Incrementable library.

You’ll find a link to the new contrast checker on Lea’s site (it’s currently on github). I think it deserves a URL of its own, don’t you?

This is one of those “I can’t believe they did that” stories. Textbook Publisher Pearson Takes Down 1.5 Million Teacher And Student Blogs With A Single DMCA Notice. That’s Pearson as in Visual Quickstart Guides and a bunch more books you probably own. Pearson that I’ve worked for several times as a writer or tech editor. I hope something in this situation changes soon.

Useful links: Flexbox, background-size, models of disability, smart objects, HTML5 headings

Opera Dev has a post by Chris Mills called Flexbox: fast track to layout nirvana?

Take advantage of the CSS background-size property is at .net magazine.

Models of disability and their relation to accessibility is a fascinating post by Martyn Cooper. The post conclusion will give you an idea of the different models of disability the article discusses:

Our models of disability are important, they shape our attitudes and impact on how effectively the needs and preferences  of disabled people are met in design. The medical model is now widely seen as outmoded and a perpetuator of  discriminatory attitudes. The social model has had widespread influence. It is important in accessibility considerations because it recognises the importance of the context of the users and supports the view of accessibility as a relationship property; in the case of web accessibility the relationship being between the diversity of users and the web resource or application. Functional models have been asserted as the most useful in design and development and the potential of these for personalisation and analytics highlighted.

Working with Smart Objects in Dreamweaver and Photoshop is by Tom Negrino.

HTML5 Ranked Headings for Screen Readers. Yep, your hierarchy on HTML5. How’s it working in screen readers?