self-selection, transparency, and priorities was Re: Personalisation - your thoughts please

Re: more accessible to somewhile less accessible to others *

at http://www.peepo.com we have to confront this issue,
our site is for people with a severe learning difficulty
some users would prefer, and benefit from visible text labels(early
readers),
others (non-readers) either find it a distraction or a waste of screen
estate.

so we are considering offering a text button,

however there is a problem, how does the user know about your aid?
at our site you can type a letter of the alphabet to visit sites related to
it, 'f' for football.
how does one disseminate this? a 'text' button is relatively easy to
understand, but takes up valuable screen space.
an approach we are beginning to look into is self-selection
from the homepage, click on the cartoon link, now if you can read you might
select the cartoons with a speech bubble,
presumably you would not if you cannot read, other things being equal.

More immediately:
Today  the site changed from one where the user could change the font size
to one where they cannot.
We use a fairly large font, and have the constraint of insisting that all
the content fit in the window,
 this means that if the user has selected extra large font or extra small,
our design is lost.




*Personalisation of this kind can
be used to enable a feature that makes the site more accessible to some
while less accessible to others (can't think of an example here, but I can
dimly remember a few ideas people had on this list for aiding one group that
fell down because they damaged accessibility elsewhere).

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Hanna" <jon@spin.ie>
To: "WAI List (E-mail)" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2002 1:30 PM
Subject: RE: Personalisation - your thoughts please


> Personalisation only works when users have some sort of attachment to the
> site. For instance a bulletin board site where by its nature many of its
> users would spend a lot of time on the site and frequently come back.
>
> For any other site it's simply not worth the effort of setting up
> personalised features.
>
> Most sites that have personalisation are kidding themselves in thinking
that
> users are "attached" to the site, and guilty of portal-era hubris.
>
> If your site is of a kind where personalisation is worth the effort to
your
> users then I would be wary of making accessibility options part of that.
> However I can see a point in using personalisation to do something that
> would make the site less accessible when the user explicitly asks you to
do
> so through the personalisation mechanism. Personalisation of this kind can
> be used to enable a feature that makes the site more accessible to some
> while less accessible to others (can't think of an example here, but I can
> dimly remember a few ideas people had on this list for aiding one group
that
> fell down because they damaged accessibility elsewhere).
>
> Also some personalisation techniques work with someone's accessibility
needs
> without being accessibility features per se - for example your site should
> always work without graphics being displayed, but specifying "I don't want
> graphics" would allow you to reduce download time to those users.
>
>

Received on Friday, 19 April 2002 11:44:50 UTC