Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources Guide

Recommended resources for Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources

Creating Web Pages

This page is designed as an introductory resource for people wanting to design their own web pages. The emphasis of most of the references on this page is on creating sites using universal design principles so they are accessible to all users and meet legislative requirements.

Accessibility guidelines and standards

Caslon Analytics online accessibility guide
This website is published by Caslon Analytics Pty Ltd, an Australian internet research, analysis and strategies consultancy. It is an extensive and comprehesive resource on web accessibility. It examines the issues involved, gives updates of recent events and covers the following areas in detail:

World Wide Web accessibilty
This is the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's website on web accessibilty. It discusses standards and guidelines, tools and techniques, and legal issues.

Olympic failure: a case for making the web accessible
This is the full text of a paper given by Tom Worthington at the 2001 Internet Society Conference in Stockholm. It discusses the implications of the Maguire v SOCOG case for web accessibility.

Maguire v SOCOG
This document gives the reasons for decision of the Hon William Carter QC in the Maguire v SOCOG case heard in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. It is published by the Commission.

Design for Accessibility

Bobby
A site maintained by the Centre for Applied Special Technology. Enter the URL of your page in the form and the tool will automatically check to see that the coding meets the W3C web accessibility guidelines.

Web Accessibility Initiative
Produced by a sub group of the World Wide Web Consortium, this site provides guidelines for making the web accessible for all users.

Disability Rights Home Page
Published by the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, this site contains advisory notes for ensuring web sites are accessible to all users and provides information on Australian legislative requirements for accessibility.

Guidelines for Commonwealth Information Published in Electronic Formats
"The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) uses the AusInfo Guidelines (these guidelines) as its primary reference point for good web design. HREOC's advisory notes on World Wide Web access are issued under section 67(1)(k) of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (the DDA), which provides for the HREOC to issue guidelines for the purpose of avoiding discrimination".

WCAG in Haiku
For designers who would like a more poetic life - this website, maintained by Sean B. Palmer, presents Web Content Accessibility Guidelines in the form of Haiku.

Color blindness check
This tool, showing the effects colour blindness can have on the readability of a website is produced by Q42, an internet agency that focuses on the creation of friendly internet applications and tools. It re-colourises any webpage into a palette that closely resembles the typical palette available to a person having a red/green colour vision deficiency.

Vischeck
This tool, produced by Vischeck, is a colour vision simulator. It shows the user what images and web pages look like to someone who is colour blind. The website also features Daltonize, a tool for making web pages more accessible to colour blind users.

Color vision confusion
This article, by Burcu Karagol-Ayan, Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland looks at some of the issues web designers should consider in making their web pages more accessible to colour blind computer users. This article is part of the Universal Usability in Practice website, a project of the University of Maryland.

Color vision
This tool helps you simulate the appearance of your web site's colors for people with different color visions. You can select text and background colors from a color palette, then choose a color vision mode.

World's Worst Website
This site illustrates some of the worst design mistakes made by new web site designers.

Vincent Flander's Web Pages that Suck
The purpose of this web site is to help people design effective and aesthetically pleasing web pages. It includes examples of bad web design and links to useful sites.

General design resources

useit.com: Jakob Nielsen's Website
Published by Jacob Nielsen a web design consultant, the site includes web design resources and recommendations. Tips on writing for the web and how users read the web are also included. It is possible to subscribe to Alertbox, a bi-weekly newsletter on the site, and archives of the newsletter are also available.

Yale Web Style Guide
Written by Patrick J. Lynch and Sarah Horton, media design specialists, this is an online textbook about creating web pages with an emphasis on editorial and visual aspects of design.

Website tips
Created by SK Designs, this web site is an educational resource to help build or improve web sites. It features tutorials, articles,and tips covering HTML, CSS, graphics, colour and fonts.

HTML Resources

University of Sydney Library Catalogue
Some recommended subject headings on the University of Sydney Library Catalogue are:

Getting Started with HTML
Published by the W3C, and written by Dave Raggett, this is an introductory tutorial about HTML. The site also links to an advanced HTML tutorial and a module on 'adding a touch of style', which introduces the concept of Cascading Style Sheets.

Writing HTML
A project of the Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction (MCLI) in the USA consisting of a collection of modules designed to assist teachers to create learning resources that access information on the Internet. Most of the modules can be downloaded and used offline.

HTML Tidy
This tool, written by Dave Raggett and hosted by W3C, allows the web designer to check for errors in HTML coding and remove proprietry tags created by converting files from word processing and presentation applications, and producing HTML using some wysiwig (What You See Is What You Get) editors. The proprietry tags may cause the file to display in an unpredictable way in different browsers.

VisiBone
This site provides HTML codes for special characters and web-safe colour swatches with matching HTML codes. This page shows all 216 web-safe hexadecimal HTML color codes arranged by hue. The 'color-lab' provides several useful free tools including downloadable reference cards.

Web Publishing Curriculum Resources
This website is part of the IT Curriculum housed at the University of Oregon and incorporates many of the latest standards, including HTML 4.01 and cascading style sheets. The site provides workshops on basic web mechanics, web publishing processes, and web page creation. It also provides notes on the anatomy of an URL, guidelines for good practice, and links to other related sites.