Barbara announced that Patricia could not attend the meeting today, and that she was asked to chair. We all introduced ourselves to the new members of the group. Peter McDonald authored the CALS Web Design manual, which we looked at. Professor Charles Wivell is a volunteer who has Web experience.
Next meeting time--tentatively set for Tuesday 1-23 at 10:30-12, Olin 106, but we should all watch email for final time and date, since we were unsure what Patricia decided and couldn't remember exactly what the emails said.
Color Blindness - Barbara looked into this and reported that the condition affects 8% of men and 1% of women. The most common type confuses red and orange with green and yellow. Next is the inability to see green; then the inability to see blue. After discussion we decided it was best to recommend that the use of color is OK as long as it alone is not meant to indicate something important. That is, color is not a substitute for meaningful text or an underlined hyperlink.
When designing Web pages, designers should check how they look in Lynx and Mosaic, and b/w. Barbara reported finding comments showing in Mosaic that didn't show in Netscape.
Foreign Languages--where appropriate, buttons for reading the Web pages in different languages should be on the main page.
Nancy Skipper will keep a copy of "jargon" that we need to have defined in the glossary.
CALS Web Style Guide- Peter McDonald worked on the group that wrote the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences Web style guide. We looked at it and liked the presentation of icons, buttons, and templates that authors could downloaded and incorporate into their own Web pages. Peter gave us permission to use it and he will work with Michael on hashing out which parts we should keep/cut, etc. They will present it to us in a week or so.
The group accepted Peter's recommendation that we adopt the shorter, more succinct CALS Web guide and modify it as our own and point only to the Yale guide, which is much longer at appropriate points within the document. The shorter CALS guide will give us more Cornell Library specific icons and buttons to provide and be more useful.
Arshad's buttons and logos--Jill presented Arshad's buttons and logos, which can be found at http://www2.englib. cornell.edu/~at11/logos. This site has been added to the Web Implementation group home page. Arshad's link to CUL buttons will fewer pixels in the border and without shadows can also be found here. The group seemed to like the top buttons without shadows, linked from this site and called "NEW" buttons for CUL. Arshad will have more buttons for us to look at in the next week or so.
Design Subcommittee Report in Progress - Michael has started this already, and a link to it is on the Web Implementation Group home page. He will add the revised CALS guide and comments from our minutes to the report.
Forms -- Michael showed us Susan Currie's and Math's recall forms. We liked Susan's table, and would like Math's statement about confidentiality incorporated into it. We also suggested a button at the top that would allow the user to skip to the form, especially good once they'd read it several times already.
Articles Michael brought will need to be discussed at the next meeting, since we adjourned at 10:30 am.
--Jill
Posted 19 January 1996