The Protocols and Formats Working Group today published a First Public Working Draft of Accessible Rich Internet Applications WAI-ARIA 1.1. WAI-ARIA provides an ontology of roles, states, and properties that define accessible user interface elements and it can be used to improve the accessibility and interoperability of web content, particularly web applications. It is introduced in the WAI-ARIA Overview. WAI-ARIA 1.1 is expected to include only a few changes from 1.0. The primary change in this Draft is the addition of aria-describedat. Learn about the current status of WAI-ARIA 1.0 and 1.1, and the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Update (27.09.2013): If you’re using CC, make sure that you’ve installed the latest version of PS and Extension Manager first, before installing BlendMe.in. If you should still happen to run into any issues, please kindly send an email to contact@blendme.in. Thank you for your understanding and support. – Ed.

Here at Smashing Magazine, we’re very fond of the creativity and mutual support of the Web design community. Today, we’re proud to feature a free Photoshop extension that will help everyone access those font icons they need without even leaving Photoshop. – Ed.

There is no doubt that the Web is full of websites that are packed with free icon packs, and that doesn’t necessarily make it easier for designers to find their way around when they’re looking for a particular icon for a particular project. When you’re in your creative zone and have an idea about something that would perfectly fit in your design, you don’t have time to waste and struggle with finding the right asset.

BlendMe.in is a Photoshop extension that allows you to quickly find a high-quality icon that you can simply drag and drop and then easily continue your ideation. All of the icons are vectorial and have been inserted as smart Photoshop objects, meaning that you get all the icon components as layers (vector objects, adjustment layers, etc.) so that you can easily tweak them to match your creation.

A preview of a “dog” icon in Photoshop with the help of the BlendMe.in extension.

BlendMe.in automatically suggests a number of icons that are related to the keyword you’ve typed in.

Search results when you type in “twitt” in the extension.

The Photoshop extension provides you with suggestions of icons that contain the same keywords.

Download BlendMe.in For Free!

BlendMe.in is freely available for private and commercial projects. All the assets are provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

• Preview of the BlendMe.in Photoshop extension
• Download the free extension (ZIP, 1.80 MB)

Instructions:

• Close Photoshop before installing the extension.
• If you don’t have it, download and install Adobe Extension Manager.
• Unpack the ZIP file, and double click one of the .zxp files. This will launch Adobe Extension Manager.
• Please make sure the Extension Manager version matches your Photoshop version.
• Go through the installation steps.
• Open Photoshop and choose Window → Extensions → Blendmein.
• Browse or search icons, then drag and drop into your PSD.

Behind The Design

As always, here are some insights from the designers:

“This extension started out as a solution to a problem that we as UX designers often have: we tend to use small parts of older UIs (especially in the mock-up phase) and the process can be quite frustrating. We kept asking ourselves, ‘How difficult can it be to build an extension in which one can search layers from existing PSDs?’ After several tries, we came up with something that we kept using repeatedly, not only because it was our own tool, but because it made our lives easier.

This extension only contains icons at the moment. We do, however, plan to grow the collection and include more asset types, including filters, effects and adjustment layers.

The content inside BlendMe.in is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License — with attribution. We’re thinking of ways to make the attribution even more prominent by default, e.g. by automatically generating a text layer with thanks to all the asset authors that have/are being used. Designers pour hours of work into these high-quality collections which they release for free, and attribution is really the least we could do to give them the credit they deserve.

Speaking about thanks, we’d like to thank Daniel Bruce (Entypo) and Visual Idiot for their early support, and to all the creatives who’re making part of their work available to others for re-use. Thank you!”

A big Thank You to the team at BlendMe.in for the fantastic Photoshop extension — we all sincerely appreciate your hard work!

(il, ea)

© The Smashing Editorial for Smashing Magazine, 2013.

Sustainability Outreach and Communications Intern:

Intern will report to Sustainability Coordinator. The position will be 8 hours per week.  Hours may vary to accommodate meetings, events, and interviews. Additional tasks may be assigned.

Intern must demonstrate evidence of interest and background in sustainability and must feel comfortable reaching out to professionals, peers, and faculty. Intern must be a current UMBC student.

Email tanvig1@umbc.edu with a resume and cover letter detailing:

1. Why this position interests you
2. Related skills and experiences you possess
3. Any groups, activities, jobs or time commitments you are currently engaged in

The sustainability outreach and communications intern will assist in developing communication and outreach efforts on the following topics in coordination with staff, groups, and committees on campus under the direction of the Sustainability Coordinator:

1. Sustainability Related Accomplishments and Champions
2. Energy Conservation Efforts
3. Transportation
4. Research and Education
5. Recycling, Waste, and Compost

Desired skills and qualifications:

•  Strong writing and communication skills
• Strong organizational and time management skills
• Familiarity with or willingness to learn HMTL, wordpress, and understanding of basic web design
• Ability to work independently
• Creativity and design skills
• Related coursework in related area such as Environmental Studies, Communications and Design
• Awareness of environmental issues
• Involvement in campus sustainability

Examples of Tasks and Responsibilities:

Website:

- Increase number of hits to UMBC Website and track analytics

- Develop, format, update and edit web content

Events:

- Event planning and logistics

- Assisting with activities including tabling, coordinating sign-up sheets, pledges, and photo booths

Writing:

- Assist with writing press releases, articles and event summaries

- Assist with conduct interviews and drafting articles

Design:

- Assist with posters, designs and fliers

Social Media:

- Assist with drafting updates to myUMBC and Facebook Events Calendar

- Assist with creating and posting spotlights

- Assist with posting photos and updates following events

- Expanding followers on myUMBC and social media

Photography:

- Assist with taking photographs and editing, organizing and uploading content

Webpage forms are quite commonplace for a number of different purposes. Some examples include user registration, e-commerce checkouts, profile settings, or even contact forms. Input fields are much easier to style with modern CSS3 techniques – but what about improving the overall user experience?

In this post I want to showcase a number of free open source jQuery plugins to help developers create easier web forms. Visitors want to fill out forms quickly and without much hesitation. You don’t want too many flashy page elements distracting from the task at hand. Think of these additional features more like guidelines to help users fill out forms concerning unique or unfamiliar content.

jQuery Autotab

Auto-tabbing is a nifty feature which could be developed from scratch. If you would rather save time then check out this great plugin to streamline that functionality. jQuery Autotab will detect when a field has hit its maximum length and automatically move onto the next defined element in the form list.

All of the inputs are built using a long selector string in jQuery where you separate each field by commas. I would love to see this plugin work dynamically based on each field’s tabindex attribute, instead of manually defining each element. There are also cool filters you can utilize for different inputs such as numeric telephone numbers or alphanumeric street addresses. Grab a copy from the official Github repo to see how this plugin works in action.

Pickadate.js

A little while ago I wrote an article detailing various date picker plugins for jQuery. The list includes a number of great choices but I miss one great solution named pickadate.js. This is a free open source plugin to use in any website project which just so happens to support mobile responsive web browsers. Pickadate allows users to pick not just a date, but also a specific time or range of times which need to be passed into the form.

Try skimming my other article if you have the time just to see what else is out there. I really love toying with pickadate.js because of the support for almost every mobile device. This doesn’t completely sell the plugin on its own, but also consider the beautiful interface which is very intuitive for first-time users. If you need a quick jQuery plugin for date selection I would suggest starting from here and branching out as you have the opportunity.

Progression.js

Have you ever seen guided forms which follow the user along to each input field? These can be created manually through hidden text elements or tooltips. But you may also choose to include a plugin such as Progression which can work in a similar manner.

This open source project allows developers to easily incorporate guided form fields without much setup. There are a number of parameter options which you can pass to adjust the width, animation style, and interface colors. Check out the online documentation to understand a bit more about how this works. I feel Progression.js is a simple way to get users engrossed with the process of filling out each field, and hopefully completing your form in its entirety.

Selectize.js

Anyone who has built web forms will recognize the ever-familiar select menu. This is a dropdown box which contains a number of options with different values, where some values are put together into option groups. Selectize.js is a free plugin which customizes your select menus to work with a more native user interface.

You have the choice of using a standard select menu with more customized design features – even where users can enter their own values into the select menu. Additionally Selectize.js allows you to turn select fields into tag-based input boxes. You’ll find these in many social networking sites like Tumblr where the already-existing tags appear in the list, and users are allowed to enter in new tags as well.

Selectize isn’t perfect for every form but it does provide a lot of circumstantial value. Tag-based inputs are tough to come around. This open source jQuery plugin offers all that functionality and even more for customizing the design of your select menus.

iCheck

This is one of my favorite plugins because of the many different templates you can choose from right out of the box. iCheck allows developers to style radio buttons and checkboxes within forms. There are different skins like Flat, Square, or Polaris which you can initiate along with the plugin. It is also possible to change the color scheme on each of these skins.

iCheck offers a tremendous amount of control to developers who want easily customized checkboxes & radios. There are different color-based stylesheets which you also need to include depending on which skin you are using. In regards to simplicity and ease-of-use, iCheck wins my approval every time.

Colpick

Color pickers are another fairly obscure user interface feature which are vitally important to certain web applications. There are a number of great solutions built with jQuery and I certainly couldn’t include all of them. Colpick is open source which you can download right from Github. The color picker UI is designed almost identical to Photoshop which is great for a majority of your technical users.

But even for people who have never used Adobe software before, this color picker plugin is fairly straightforward. I don’t think anyone would struggle for too long before figuring out how it works. The design is created entirely in JS/CSS and it is even supported in legacy browsers such as IE7/IE8. The latest edits are about a month old as of writing this article, so I’m sure we can expect future updates and bug fixes as time goes on.

jQuery Switchbutton

Apple iOS users must be familiar with the ON/OFF switch inputs you find on application settings pages. Many jQuery plugins(among other libraries) have been written to duplicate this effect on the web. For a natural jQuery effect Switchbutton is a really great choice. It offers plenty of custom options for changing the label text, trigger button, and how the input checkbox should pass values into the form.

You can also change up the design to look more like classic iOS, the newer iOS 5/6/7 rounded switch, or a minified version with no text. Check out the live plugin demo page to get an idea of how these switches work in a browser. This plugin is most beneficial when trying to improve user experience without re-designing large segments of the page.

Passy

Rating user password strength has been a popular choice for almost any website registration form. Sometimes you may feel that users are turned off by this functionality and find it annoying. But it can really help people determine if their password choice is complex enough to fend off brute-force hackers.

I really like Passy for jQuery because it has this dynamic strength rating system built-in alongside the functionality to generate random password strings. When initializing the plugin you can choose how many characters should be used for any new password, which characters are allowed(or disallowed) and where the new dynamic password should appear on the page. It’s an easygoing plugin without much hassle to help users rate their chosen password or generate a new one if they prefer more security.

Nod

This final example is a plugin built for validating input fields. Each form typically has a number of fields with minimum requirements such as the length of a username or e-mail address. Nod is a jQuery plugin for validating any type of input you can possibly think about. Check out the live demo example to get an idea of how this validation can work in the real world.

The large metrics table on the plugin’s website will outline some of the choices you have when validating input content. There is also another table filled with options which let you choose between how the errors are handled and when the plugin should check for validation. Nod is simply one of the most conclusive jQuery plugins for basic frontend validation and it works perfectly in any type of common web form. Also check out the official Github repo if you want to learn more about the plugin’s development.

Closing

My goal here is to offer a wide variety of plugins for web designers & developers to play with and see what can work best. Each web project will be different so you may try using an assortment of these plugins over time. I do hope this collection will provide a nice starting point to increase the usability of your website forms. If you know about any similar plugins I may have forgotten feel free to share in the post discussion area below.

The post Best Free jQuery Form Plugins to Improve User Experience appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Philip Walton looks at common CSS layout issues that were a pain in the butt before Flexbox.

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Solved by Flexbox is a post from CSS-Tricks

Revisiting the first universally accessible web browser

Direct Link to Article — Permalink

Line Mode Browser is a post from CSS-Tricks