Re: Specifying foreground and background colors

At 03:19 PM 2000-06-14 +0100, Alan J. Flavell wrote:
>On Tue, 13 Jun 2000, Al Gilman wrote:
>
>> Designers would mostly cringe at the thought of colors they picked being
>> randomly displayed in contrast against some other color picked artistically
>> but totally independently by somebody _else_.  So you wouldn't have trouble
>> selling this rule as a good design rule. 
>
>That seems to me a very effective way of expressing it!
>

And then I went on to articulate what the special interest is that people
with disabilities have in this rule, which admittely has no good reason for
anyone to violate.  [Which Alan tacetly suggested we could ignore.  -- and
I overtly suggested likewise.  On the other hand...]

The point is how to approach this age-old argument about the scope of the
WCA message to content preparers.

The small interpretation is that only issues you wouldn't care about except
you undertand the impact on people with disabilities.  This interpretation
holds that general good practice is out of scope and shouldn't be mentioned.

The large interpretation is that the WCA message should tell content
preparers about everything they should be mindful of to broaden the
usability of their content and minimize the people who can't access the
information in it.  This includes not only issues which are unique to the
disability access scenario, but also issues where what the disability
access performance depends on is a general good practice, but disability
access is more critically dependent on compliance with this principle than
is general usability or desirability.  

The difference is a body of "general good design principles that you should
be sure not to forget."

From the designer side, I think they would want to hear about these things
from us.

Somewhere in the bowels of the knowledge base I do think we should
distinguish which is which of these.

In this area lies some ambiguity as to what best to do.

Al

Received on Wednesday, 14 June 2000 14:42:07 UTC