The presentations are scheduled for Monday afternoon. You must be present for all the presentations. Each should last about 20 minutes. There will be time afterwards for your clients to ask questions.

A question came up in class today about the audience. Most of the clients will not know much about Web pages, although one of them is bringing his Web guy. They will be able to understand many of the accessibility and usability issues that you describe. For example, they will understand the notion of color contrast. They can understand that images need alternate text, but they won't know what alternate text is. So explain it. You might have changed the pages to use a linked style sheet instead of an embedded style sheet, so explain why that is desirable. In some ways, you are explaining to your clients some of the things you learned about this semester. You should still address some key technical issues. For example, if tables are used for layout on the site, explain why that is undesirable and then explain how you used CSS to replace the table. I used Word to come up with a diagram in about 5 minutes for the layout design being used by teal.

It is likely the case that you couldn't get everything to work just the way you wanted by Monday. In that case, explain what you wanted to do and what you tried that didn't work. Of course, put this in your 'report' on your group's site.

I asked you this morning to include in your presentation

• Some positive comments about the site before you start talking about the problems you found.
• Some comments about how well a visitor to the site can find the information that he might be looking for—for example, a phone number, an address, the purpose of the organization, or the services it provides.
• Some comments about how well a visitor can track his location within the site. Is there a heading or some other indication, such as a special indication on the navigation menu, as to where the current page is located in the site?

One thing I didn't mention, but that I hope goes unsaid, is that all the group members should take part in the presentation. Only one person at a time should be standing. (There are chairs to sit in along the wall near the instructor's desk.)

It is okay to link to external sites from your group pages, such as to the client's site, W3C pages about accessibility, Nielsen's pages about usability, Bobby, color evaluators, and other Web-based tools that you used. However, all of the files for your own pages and the mirror should be within your group folder and all links to them should be relative.

Please be prompt on Monday. The client scheduled for the 2:00 presentation is on a tight schedule, so we need to start on time.

I have posted the requirements for the final essay. It is due by the end of exams week. I have also distributed the rubric I will use to assess presentations.

Today we took a look at JavaScript. I found my pocket reference and I walked you through that a bit. There's not enough time in a semester to cover HTML, CSS, and a lot of JavaScript, so our focus on the latter will be to incorporate existing scripts into a Web page.

Friday I showed you the left right click gallery. There are some other nice galleries linked from the menu on that page, too. We talked about how you would put such a gallery on one of your own Web pages. Then we looked at some simpler scripts. One is for gatekeeper.

We talked some more about JavaScript. (To learn more than we can cover in class this last week, check out the W3Schools JavaScript Tutorial and the examples.) I showed you an example of using JavaScript to automatically put a latest modification date on a page and to put a clock on a page. We looked briefly at the JavaScript that does it to see if we could turn the time into a 12-hour format.

I handed back old homework and quiz papers that for one reason or another I still had. I also handed out a report of the scores I have recorded for your work all semester.

On Wednesday I will hand out a rubric that I will use to evaluate Part 3—the presentations. I will also give you details about the final report that will be due by the end of exam week.

Check out the Fangs screen reader emulator extension for Firefox.

Each group gave a presentation showing the revised client site home page and what the report site will look like. I have full confidence in the work one group is doing, some confidence in the work two more groups are doing, and some concerns about the fourth.

I found a couple of interesting sites.

1. Left right click gallery
2. CSSPlay.

We'll take a look at the former next week as part of our JavaScript investigation.

This class is dedicated to doing what it takes to get ready for Friday's deadline. As you work on the site to improve it, don't change the layout unless you have a reason based on accessibility or usability. If the colors being used don't offer enough contrast, then try to keep the more dominant color if that seems to be part of the organization's identity.

Have you thought about looking for broken links?

Here are some tips for working with the files.

• When working with your client site's style sheets, format them using a CSS beautifier such as Format CSS Online or Clean CSS. It's hard to work with style rules that are not formatted for human understanding.
• You can format HTML using the Firefox validator plug-in in the lab. I think you can also use NoteTab Lite to format HTML. I found Tabifier online as well.
• When I'm trying to make CSS work, I sometimes build a prototype—a simpler version of the page I'm trying to style. Once I get that working, I can move the style rules to the real page.
• Validate the XHTML often.
• Validate the CSS often, especially if you are trying to style something. It's so easy to miss a semicolon or a unit, or to misspell a property name and not see it no matter how much you look at the code.

I returned the quizzes that you took before the break. The distribution of scores is 20(3), 19, 14, 12(2), 8, 6, 4, 0. Average: 12.3.

So far, I'm planning to be available Thursday evening between 7:00 and 9:00.

Procrastination on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part. Anonymous

We reviewed the requirements for Part 2 of the project. You have two weeks to complete your group's report. These reports are to be published on the CS server at http://cs.wofford.int/groupcolor/. You should be able to SFTP files by logging in using your account and then setting the folder on the server to /var/www/html/groupcolor. There is already an index.html file in that folder as well as a subfolder named mirror that contains all the files in your client site's mirror.

As far as I can tell, I received information by the Tuesday deadline about pages to audit only from the navy group (5 points). The assessment of your work and your group's work was due at the start of class today (10 points). I've been very disappointed, too, by the relative dearth of blog posts about meetings. There were at least two meetings that I alloted class time for. Groups should have gotten together to meet and work at other times, too. On the positive side, the posts I did get to read were quite good.

Last time we built a two-level navigation menu using CSS. I discovered over the break that the pop-up sub-menus don't work in IE6. The fix? Use JavaScript.

At least one blog entry questioned useit.com and usability. Let's consider How Users Read on the Web as a starting point. This article mentions Eyetracking Research, which also contains some significant ideas. Add these ideas to your audit. [Who is Jakob Nielsen anyway?]

We worked today on some dynamic menus. I have a start on a new Web site for me at Wofford. I'm abandoning myblog look for a simpler, more accessible design. I've adopted a two-column, liquid layout [Zip of files we started with]. I want to add a navigation menu similar to what I have now, but with pop-up sub-menus á la son of suckerfish. For spring, I'll need the following menu.

• Home
• About me
• COSC 235
  • Syllabus
  • Schedule
  • Blog
  • Resources
• COSC 330
  • Syllabus
  • Schedule
  • Blog
  • Resources
• COSC 351
  • Syllabus
  • Schedule
  • Blog
  • Resources

At some point, I might want to use an elastic layout. And have you checked out Zen Garden: The Beauty of CSS Design lately?

The resulting Web pages that we put together are [Zip of files] linked below. I'm happy with the menus, although I still want to style them to look better.

• Horizontal menu
• Vertical menu (Hey wait! This pop-up doesn't work in IE6! And the nested selections go off the edge of the window. That's not too good!!)

Think about it: Why did we end up linking the home page to two CSS files?

Have a safe, restful, and yet productive break!