Web Dev Digest Episode 15 Intro ...INTRO MUSIC... Welcome to the Web Dev Digest, your daily web development news roundup. This is episode number fifteen, for Tuesday, July seventeenth, 2007. I'm your host, Ara Pehlivanian. ...MUSIC INTERLUDE... Hello and welcome the show. Intro to Screen Readers and Magnifiers If you’ve heard about building accessible websites but have never met anyone with a disability who uses assistive technologies to surf the web, then Roger Johansson’s latest post on 456 Berea Street dot com is a must read. Johansson posts links to three key videos that will introduce you to both screen reader, and screen magnifier technologies. In particular he points to Victor Tsaran’s Introduction to Screen Readers, Karo Caran’s Introduction to Screen Magnifiers and Doug Geoffray’s From the Mouth of a Screen Reader where Geoffray “talks about the history of screen reading software and how they analyse what is displayed on the screen in order to speak it to the user.” Sphinn Randfish of SEOmoz dot com reports the launch of a new search engine industry news & networking site called Sphinn by Danny Sullivan. According to the article, Sphinn (that’s spelled S P H I N N) isn’t going to “fizzle out and become unpopular in a few weeks”. To illustrate this, randfish provides a top ten reasons list for why you, “as a professional in the search world, should be registered at and contributing to Sphinn on a daily basis.” Among his reasons are the fact that early adopters have a chance to stand out, referral traffic is already high, great material is rising to the top, and submissions are judged on merit. How to lose your readers in under 2 minutes Michael Stelzner has written an article on Coppyblogger dot com called “IKEA content: How to Lose Your Readers in Two Minutes or Less” where he draws parallels between the way the Swedish furniture store herds customers through a long winding one way in, one way out path to the way many different documents tend to be written. The big difference or course being that a bored reader can much more easily abandon your document (or web page) than a bored IKEA customer can leave the store. Stelzner’s article discusses how to keep readers interested and reading to the very end. Usability is a path to failure Todd Wilkens of Adaptive Path makes the bold claim that a focus on usability is actually a path to failure. In a post to the Adaptive Path blog today, Wilkens says that “Praising usability is like giving me a gold star for remembering that I have to put each leg in a *different* place in my pants to put them on.” He qualifies this by explaining that usability is a fundamental requirement of any successful product and that in and of itself, it won’t distinguish you or any product in the marketplace.   A List Apart 241 A List Apart number 241 is out today with an article by Aza Raskin called Never Use a Warning When you Mean Undo where he discusses how to build more foolproof web apps that don’t cause users to lose their work. Raskin takes a look at the practice of using warning dialog boxes and how users who are used to clicking OK without even reading the message can potentially authorize the loss of their work. Also on A List Apart today, an article by Rob Swan called Conflicting Absolute Positions that discusses how to create a liquid layout that contains a fixed-width, scrolling side panel and a flexible, scrolling main panel, all without using any JavaScript.   Corporate Web Standards Scott Gledhill shines a bright light on the many different facets of building large, complex corporate websites in equally large and complex teams. In his article on Digital Web Magazine dot com, Gledhill takes a highly detailed look at the many challenges and opportunities that emerge throughout the life of such projects. A must read for any member of a web development team be it large or small. Google Hosted Site Search for Small Businesses And finally, Google has announced that it will be offering a new hosted site search service for small businesses. According to a press release issued today, “In three simple steps, businesses can sign up online for the hosted service, and in less than 10 minutes customers and visitors are able to search their site using the power of Google's search technology, for more relevant results. … Custom Search Business Edition starts at $100 a year for searching up to 5,000 pages, and extends to $500/year for up to 50,000 pages.”