According to W3.org, the Mobile Web Best Practices (MWBP) Working Group and the Web Access Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working Group yesterday released a final draft of “Relationship Between MWBP and WCAG.”
This document is one of several new writings to come out of W3 regarding the mobile web and content accessibility standards. As more and more mobile devices gain access to the interwebs, more standards arise.
The Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0 Guidelines came out as a recommendation in July 2008, providing the first real list of common problems with mobile-accessed sites, as well as what developers can do to avoid these problems.
Not long after, the WAI published a document called “Web Content Accessibility and Mobile Web: Making a Web Site Accessible Both for People with Disabilities and for Mobile Devices,” in which the hypothesis was stated that web accessibility problems for users with disabilities and web accessibility problems for mobile devices tend to overlap in many areas. By learning about how to develop for one, meeting the standards of the other is suddenly much less daunting.
The draft serves as a last-chance piece of public review material before the draft’s status moves to W3C Working Group Note. Check it and its supporting documents out here:
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 | As Earth Month draws to a close, here are some tools and resources to help web designers work greener. The people at StressDesign, a New York-based brand design company, released the Windpower Logo, a sleek logo representing wind power and green design, meaning that a site using that logo was developed and is maintained with green technology. |
If you’re going green in your site hosting/design and want to utilize the Windpower Logo, you can get the full (Open Source!) deal here, at Windpowerlogo.com. You can also be exceptionally nerdy and become a fan of the Windpower logo on Facebook.
Green web hosting is also becoming an in-demand resource for designers. The key difference between regular web-hosting and green is mainly offset of energy use through carbon offset or wind energy, and housing the servers in a “green” location. Web-Hosting Geeks has a good list of the Best Eco-friendly Web Hosting providers based on review, space, pricing, etc.
Drexel Libraries has some interesting books for website and graphic designers wishing to go green. Everything from what type of ink to request from commercial printers to what source of energy should power your site servers can be found in these and other resources:
And if you’re just looking for a good, thought-provoking to round out Earth Month, check out any of the following:
Supercoder Mike Duncan’s list of 15 coding tools is an invaluable resource, particularly for PC programmers and web designers. Some of my personal favorites from this list include JRuler and Texter. EditPad is also worth the trial, but for a free coding editor that can be configured to upload with each save, and that supports basically any manner of language thrown at it, try Crimson Editor.
One of the most important aspects of any given web site is the color palette used in its design. Studies in color theory have shown that this goes beyond personal preference taps into something psychological. For the web, colors must be readable and easy on the eyes without being incredibly boring or too wild. Most websites go with a white page and a dark blue or black text for the general text because this is the easiest to read. Some sites use black backgrounds or dark gray backgrounds with white text, but these are often gaming sites for young people who can play an RPG for 12 hours on a screen the size of a Saltine, so the eye strain that has been known to come from this is often forgiven.
In choosing colors for your site, there are several things to consider. How many colors in the palette, what the colors will say about your site, etc. Fortunately, there are some very good tools available for help in establishing good color palettes on the web.
| 1. ColorSchemer – A very intuitive piece of software with many variables for tweaking a color palette after creating it. This dual-platform tool costs $49.99 per license. Is it worth it? Download the trial version and decide for yourself. Also note the 100%-free application on this site, ColorSchemer ColorPix, a good little desktop tool for isolating various values of a color anywhere on the screen. If you’re stuck, check out the ColorSchemer Gallery for color palettes made by other users and offered up to designers. |  |
2. The DeGraeve Color Palette Generator – There are other tools like this available, but this one was one of the first. You upload an image to the generator, and based on the colors in that image, a color palette is made.
3. ColorBlender – A lot like ColorSchemer, but with the bonus of being free. Not much can be done outside of direct edit mode, but this is good for some quick color brainstorming.
