Re: WCAG Priorities does not help the low vision

Hi Charles,

I should say if those guys of Opera, WebEyes and Webformator merged their 
products and add MSAA to it the world had a perfect browser for people with 
vision loss, including the growing group of elderly people.

Problems are scrollbars, information that hide, bad color contrast, text 
images.
Opera is a "better" browser for low vision people than Internet Explorer, 
but because it does not include support for MSAA it is impossible to read 
aloud pages in Opera.

by disabling tables in Opera it is possible to use a large font without 
scrollbars and also images magnify in Opera.
But on some pages this also results in nasty formatted pages with a lot of 
blanks and loss of information.

Web Eyes never shows scrollbars, but has no color setting support and no 
image magnification.

A filtering tool should be able to:

1. Change fixed in relative measures,
2. Option to disable table columns, or better to load a table column into a 
new page.
3. Option to load framed page in new window (a lot of pages have 
JavaScripts that make this impossible).
4. Quick switch between images on and off. If there are text images the 
alternative description can help.
5. Increase and decrease font size with one keypress (like in Opera + and _ 
keys).

With a Large font size in Internet explorer relative measures solves 
problems for a large group of people. For those who need a much larger font 
reformatting of text is needed.
With a screen magnifier without speech it is realy difficult to read table 
columns.

Regards Peter Verhoeven

At 08:17 23-04-2002 -0400, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>Hi Peter,
>
>first, this is really the wrong list for talking about WCAG priorities - the
>best one is either the interest group - w3c-wai-ig@w3.org archived at
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig - for general discussion, or
>the WCAG working group - w3c-wai-gl@w3.org archived at
>http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl - for proposing how to resolve
>this, which should be primarily focussed on WCAG 2.0 and the conformance
>proposals made so far for WCAG 2.
>
>The issue you raise of how magnification works in browsers and pages today is
>indeed a problem, and I think one that is newer than WCAG version 1 (which
>was effectively completed more than 3 years ago). It is important that the
>working group understand how this arises in current authoring practises - it
>is not, of course, always the case - and what approaches should be used to
>make sure it doesn't happen.
>
>What is appropriate in this group (which is about evaluation tools and repair
>tools) is any ideas you can put forward about how to get around this problem
>- can we make a simple filtering tool that will change something in the page
>to allow it to scale better, for example.
>
>I look forward to your thoughts and further discussion.
>
>Cheers
>
>Charles
>
>On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Peter Verhoeven wrote:
>
>   Hi,
>
>   I see a growing tendency making Web Sites level A Conformance.
>   These Web Sites claim they are accessible. All WCAG guidelines that can
>   improve accessibility for people with some vision loss include a large
>   group of elderly people are priority 2 guidelines (contrast between
>   background and text colors, relative table measures instead of fixed).
>   Why is filling the ALT attribute on images more important than relative
>   measurement?
>   I use a screen magnifier and set font size in Internet Explorer to medium.
>   A lot of people with vision loss set it to Largest and always use their own
>   font.
>   The result is, that on a lot of pages text and links hide under other
>   frames or table columns.
>   The only way this can be solved is by using the author's settings, but that
>   makes it impossible to read.
>
>   In the Netherlands we have a project Drempels Weg, that let Web Sites claim
>   accessible on Level A Conformance.
>   Also the European Union pollicy is Level A Comformance. They speak about 37
>   million people having problems with accessing the Internet. But solving
>   only priority 1 problems does not solve the problems of those 37 million
>   people in the EU.
>   Most priority 1 problems are blind and screen reader related and only helps
>   10% of those 37 million.
>   By defining priorities companies and organizations are no willing to make
>   their web site accessible after they are Level A Conformance.
>
>   BTW: Personaly I believe that most priority 2 problems could be solved by
>   much more flexible web browsers, but there are no such browsers available
>   at this moemnt.
>
>   Regards Peter Verhoeven
>   Internet : http://www.magnifiers.org (The Screen Magnifiers Homepage)
>
>
>
>
>--
>Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 
>134 136
>W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI  fax: +33 4 92 
>38 78 22
>Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
>(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, 
>France)

Received on Tuesday, 23 April 2002 09:42:19 UTC