Category Archives: Layout

Need Help Deciding which Web Application to Build

Posted on by

Now that the house issues have been mostly settled I can get started on building one of the many small web applications that I have been tossing around. Some of these ideas I have been thinking about for what seems like years and others just a few months.  I have a good 7 or 8 different web applications that I want to build and I’m looking for some help in determining which one(s) I should build first.

Reasons Why

I need to get other peoples opinions on which will be useful them and more importantly the general public and might in the long run I would be able to charge enough to cover my hosting costs with ads or annual fees. I know that probably all of these have been done many times over, but there are a few reasons why I want to build them and they are:

  • Learn PHP and MySQL
  • Use the newest accessibility implementations of WAI-ARIA and possibly HTML 5
  • Use microformats were applicable
  • Test newest features in screen readers – JAWS, NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA), etc. and web based browsers (Firefox 3.5, IE8, etc.)
  • Use Web Standards
  • Test abilities for user interface design (UI or UX)
  • Create 508 compliant and usable examples for others to learn from for accessibility presentations.

But most importantly to create web applications that I would like to use personally.

Important Part

Now comes the important part, which from the following list of web applications should I build? I added a short description of what they do along with different ways I could help pay the hosting cost. I even created one page prototypes just so you could see what types of information is stored in each one. The style (CSS) and layout (UI/UX) will be changing. I just took some old CSS and put these together.

  1. Online URL/bookmark storage which allow user to have X URLs/bookmarks stored online for free, charge per X items stored, set up annual fee, or show ads of some type. I started this one a while ago and stopped for some odd reason. I’m tired of having bookmarks on two home computers (MAC and PC), along with on work one. Yes, I have heard of delicious.com and ma.gnolia.com.
  2. Store individuals personal contact information and either have X individuals for free, charge per X customers, annual fee, or show ads of some type. Always looking for an address or phone number when at someone else’s house or office and would like to have it be web based.
  3. Online wine inventory – personal use hosted by me with ads for up to X entries or small annual fee for limited number, bigger ones for people with 1000s of bottles of wine. Yes, I know corkd.com is around. I started mine about the same time they (Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin) did, just did not have enough get up and go to get past midway with it. Once Cork’d came out I stopped for the most part. So this one is a good way completed using ASP and Microsoft Access, which only needs to be converted to PHP and MySQL.
  4. Online wine inventory – for wine stores to allow their customers to store their wine collection information and then place their (wine store) ads on website (charge monthly fee to store per customer or flat rate by amount of storage and bandwidth used).
  5. Mini adhoc conference information service (no prototype just yet), which would help groups like BarCamp create main information page about event and later at event add an online schedule of talks (allow addition of rooms, topics, speakers, etc.). Place AdSense and/or links of event sponsors on pages. I created similar conference room scheduling web application for old job so have the general idea for it already in my head of what it would need. Not sure if this one exists, but I assume it does somewhere and have not really looked if it does.
  6. RSS/XML Feed reader, which either would have X feeds free, charge per X feeds over free amount, annual fee, or show ads of some type. Created one to pull in a feeds and either display all records contained in RSS/XML, first X amount, or only display records that contained certain words or phrases. There are way to many of them around.
  7. Store multiple weather location information, which would allow you to save multiple zip codes or city/state/country combinations to keep track of home, vacation location, other friends, or families weather. Same idea for covering hosting costs as previous ideas.
  8. Technology Skills or Skill Swap repository, which would allow members to put in there different skills and then have the rights to search for others for help with questions or for projects.  Would have ability to make personal information private so as not to get spammed. Could charge fee for those just looking to find people for work or projects, charge for recruiting type ads, or just place AdSense on pages.

Conclusion

So please do me a great favor and list the top three applications in order you think I should build them so I can get an idea of what others are thinking.

Thanks, greatly in advance for your time and effort for helping me learn new things and decide which web application to build first. I will post findings in a few weeks along with the order in which I will build them in, since a few could be bundled together to make an over arching suite of applications.

How to Hide “Required” from Visual Users, but Make it Available for All Others

Posted on by

How do most people usually designate that a field is “Required” in a web FORM? I would think that it is with an asterisk (*) after the actual INPUT field and it is sometimes made “bold” and “RED”. There are other ways to do this that are simple, use web standards, good design principles, and are 508 compliant.

When creating a FORM you should not make all fields required. By doing that nothing stands out to the person filling in your very important FORM. If most fields are required you should state at the top of the FORM or in the directions the fields that are NOT required.

Instead of just placing an asterisks after either the LABEL or the INPUT field in a FORM for a required field as most people do. You can actually place the word “Required” within the LABEL. Of course your using LABELs for your FORMS, along with FIELDSETs and LEGENDs.

Here is how to accomplish this for a web FORM and it can be easily accomplished by using a little CSS to hide the text that a field is “Required” to be filled in. The way to do this, that I use is to make it part your input fields LABEL. Here is an example of a few lines of code on how the code might look.

<label for=“username”><em>Required<em>User Name</label>

To hide the word“Required” you will be able to use the same CSS used for hiding “SKIP NAVIGATION” by adding a new class or stating that LABELs with an “EM“ in them will be displayed.hidden off the page.

Reminder please do not use “DISPLAY: NONE” in your CSS, since screen readers will not see it. Below is the CSS to visually hide the word “Required” from browsers.

.skip a, .skip a:hover, .skip a:visited, label em {
position: absolute;
left: -10000px;
top: auto;
width: 1px;
height: 1px;
overflow: hidden;
}

As you can see the CSS positions the link absolutely with a position of “LEFT” minus 10,000 pixels and a “TOP” position of auto. This will allow screen readers, Blackberries, Treos, etc. to see it but not browsers. That is as long as their CSS in turned on.

You can also place extra notes or instructions for a field inside the INPUT field with lighter text that is that will not go away once you start typing in the field. This can be done by using more CSS. Below is the XHTML code to accomplish this.

<label for=“username”><em>Required<em>User Name<strong>must not contain spaces<strong></label>

<input type=“text” name=“username” id=“username” size=“25” maxlength=“50” value=“”/>

The CSS to do this is fairly simple and follows below.

label strong {
color: #aaa;
font-size: .85em;
font-style: normal;
position: absolute;
top: 0;
right: -275px;}

Here is what the CSS is doing for the extra notes and instructions. It is first taking any STRONG elements within the LABEL and making it light gray color, the FONT-SIZE smaller and normal weight. After that it is absolutely positioned at the top left of the INPUT FORM field, as long as the LABEL is left or right justified to it and finally placing the information negative 275 pixels from the right of the beginning of the INPUT field.

Don’t forget to listen to your FORMs by using the Firefox extension Fire Vox. Here is an example how placing extra notes or instructions would look in a FORM, along with some “Required” field examples.

I hope this post is useful and further explains how to hide visual the word “Required” from my Accessibility presentation “Is your Website Accessible?”, please look for the most current presentation closer to the top of the list.

Use of UL or OL in HTML Forms

Posted on by

I just finished re-reading Roger Johansson’s wonderful article entitled “Use the label element to make your HTML forms accessible“.

I agree with everything he said, except I think by putting the label and the input elements as part of an un-ordered list (UL) or an ordered list (OL) the screen reader will announce how many items are in the list. By doing so you can then place an UL or OL inside a FIELDSET, which will inform you of how many fields you need to be filled in. This number might be greater than the actual number of items if you have lines of text in the middle of the form field list.

I found this great piece of information about using UL or OL in forms from Justin Stockton when he was looking over a form I was building. He either asked “Why I was using the <BR> tag?” or “Why I had form elements inside of a <P> tag”. I told him that was how I learned to create my forms from articles I had read. He suggested using the UL or the OL for form items. After that, by like only a day or so I was listening to either one of Derek Featherstone, Aaron Gustafson, or boths podcasts about accessibile forms and they mentioned the same thing.

Here is a short  code example for filling out personal information on a form:

<fieldset>
<legend>Personal Information</legend>
<ul>
<li>
<label for=”first_name”>First Name</label>
<input type=”text” name=”first_name” id=”first_name” />
</li>
<li>
<label for=”last_name”>Last Name</label>
<input type=”text” name=”last_name” id=”last_name” />
</li>
<li>
<label for=”company”>Company</label>
<input type=”text” name=”company” id=”company” />
</li>
<li>
<label for=”title”>Title</label>
<input type=”text” name=”title” id=”title” />
</li>
</ul>
</fieldset>

Now here is what the code looks like as a form:

Personal Information




Of course you will need to use a bit of CSS to make this look better. You can remove such things as the fieldset border and do a bunch of other things to it. Here is the same example with CSS added, nothing fancy. When you use UL or OL in the fieldset you will be improving the accessibility of the form in my opinion.Please give me your thoughts on this matter of using UL or OL inside a fieldset.

Finally My Notes from An Event Apart Chicago 2007

Posted on by

Finally got around to finishing up my post about the actual two days at the An Event Apart conference in Chicago on August 27 – 28, 2007. I had  a great time both at the conference and at the different gatherings each evening. I learned as much if not more at the evening events as I did during the day at the conference.

Please download all my notes, below is just an overview of some of the things I learned. The following is a summary of what happened by day ad speaker.

DAY – 1

The first speaker of the conference was Eric Meyer and his topic of discussion was “Secrets of a CSS Jedi“. He showed that you could use tables and CSS to create pages that end up displaying graphs. I had seen his earlier article about this and had worked on creating forms to allow you to enter the amounts and then put out the graphs. It is now time to work on this again, since Eric has changed the graphs from being pixel based to now be EMs based.

The next presenter was Jeffrey Zeldman and he talk3d about “Writing the User Interface“. His three big points were:

  1. Content is King.
  2. Design helps people read less.
  3. When people read less every word counts.

Next to speak was Jason Santa Maria on the topic of “Designing Your Way Out of a Paper Bag“. His main topics were:

  1. Branding.
  2. Layout.
  3. Hierarchy and focal Point.

Jason also recommended three different books during his talk.

  1. “Thinking with Type” Ellen Lupton
  2. “Grid Systems (Raster Systeme)”
  3. “Making and Breaking Grids“ – Timothy Samara

After Jason finished talking we had like an hour and a half  lunch break. The food was great and I ate way to much.

This made the first afternoon talk by Lou Rosenfeld (“Search Analytics for Fun and Profit“) a bit uncomfortable because I ate a great deal. Lou talked a lot about making sure you review your website search information to see what people are looking for and where they go once they have searched. You might be able to make a few changes to your website that will greatly improve peoples ability to find certain information. Here are a list of his points:

Querying you Queries and Getting Started

  1. Most frequent unique queries.
  2. Frequent queries retrieving quality results.
  3. Click through rates.
  4. Most frequently clicked results/query.
  5. Frequent queries with zero results.
  6. What are referrer pages for frequent queries.

You should look for what type of meta data people are looking for in their searches.

By typing “site:jfciii.com” into Google’s search box will give you search results from the website you put after the”site:“.

Next, Liz Danzico talked about “The Seven Lies of Information Architecture”

  1. Navigation should be consistent between pages on a website give or take a little bit.
  2. Allow users may need to get to any part of the website at any given time or place.
  3. User experience must be seamless.
  4. Shorter is better.

Dan Cederholm – “Interface Design Juggling”

He suggests starting with colors and use two colors or less. Meaning stay in the same color range just use different tones and hues. He sometimes just goes to Photoshop and starts dumping paint using the paint can.

Two add texture use noise filter.

Make sure you read “Web Design is 95% Typography“.

Get on mailing lists for type foundries.

  1. Hoefler & Frere-Jones
  2. myfonts.com
  3. veer.com

Dan was the final speaker for day 1.

DAY – 2

Jermey Keith – Adactio.com and ClearLeft.com

Presentation slides

Be Pure with how you write your code and do your work.

You need

  1. content
  2. structure
  3. presentation
  4. behavior
  5. HTML
  6. CSS

Be Vigilant and try not to put in extra stuff to your code or content.

To build an AJAX website first build a plain website and once working correctly then add in the AJAX.

Show where things were changed or updated when using AJAX. Look at 37 signals “Yellow Fade“.

Test early and test often.

Luke Wroblewski – “Best Practices for Form Design” – Yahoo

Why Forms Matter?

  1. They make money.
  2. Give access to communities.

Label Alignment depends on what you are doing.

  1. Top alignment is better for familiar data.
  2. Right alignment is better for more difficult data. It makes you think before answering the questions.
  3. Left alignment is better for unfamilar information.

Matteo Pemzo has a great article on “Eye Tracking Data“.

Group data on forms of like kinds together using fieldsets.

Take data user gives you and format it yourself. Only give error if completly incorrect.

Derek Featherstone – “Accessibility Lost in Translation” – Box of Chocolates and FutureAhead

Presentation slides

Create an accessible user experience.

Remember to use keyboard and mouse interaction.

Require fewer page refreshes.

Screen readers need “alt text”if there is none, it reads source attribute which can be very weird.

Size forms and everything in EMs to make it scale for even borders, padding, etc. this makes it better and does not break pages easily.

Submit button should be last in code order.

Eric Meyer – “The State of CSS in an IE7 World”

He talked about IE7 adding the followig items.

  • min-width, max-width, min-height, and max-height
  • Attribute selections
  • Child selector
  • :first child
  • Alpha channelin PNG images
  • they fixed FIXED Â

and  a whole lot of other things.

Jeffrey Zeldman- “Selling Design”

Jeffrey mentioned that you should have a process. Be calm and methodical.

Remind client each time you see them of what you talked about at the last meeting, phone call, or last week.

Learn to translate what they said into something you and they understand.

Sell design not pixels.

Last but not least was

Jim Coudal – “Dealing With the Both of You” – coudal.com

He talked about

  • You need a cool flash of insperation for your projects or websites.
  • Learn quickly and be curious.
  • Value taste over everything else.
  • Work with others and have adult conversations.

He also showed three movies that he and his cmpany made.

  1. Copy Goes Here
  2. Regrets I Have a Few – Hobbies
  3. Subway – Ad Agency video

Please download all my notes, below is just an overview of some of the things I learned. Hopefully they are helpful to you and anyone else yu pass them on to.