RE: guideline 7.1 about screen flickering (fwd)

Netscape 6 (Mozilla 0.9.2) from http://www.mozilla.org has a feature in the
preferences section that lets the user specify how often images repeat
themselves. The preferences range from never to per image design to always.
This worked great on the animation heavy site www.animationfactory.com. 

This does NOT work on flash files, but seems to work very well on animated
.gifs. 

The issue of image cycling is tracked in Bugzilla, and the reasoning behind
the original post was for folks who are distracted by flashing animated
gifs. The bug ID is 64831 and can be tracked at this URL:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=64831.

If Netscape continues to "refresh" their Netscape 6.x browser with builds
from mozilla then we should see animated images preference make its way into
Netscape's version of the 6.0 Netscape browser.

Joel Sanda 
Product Manager
-------------------------------------------------------www.eCollege.com
eCollege
joels@ecollege.com
> p. 303.873.7400 x3021
> f.  303.632.1721 


-----Original Message-----
From: Matt May [mailto:mcmay@bestkungfu.com]
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2001 9:51 AM
To: Adam Victor Reed; Charles McCathieNevile; w3c-wai-gl@w3.org; Anne
Pemberton
Subject: Re: guideline 7.1 about screen flickering (fwd)


----- Original Message -----
From: "Anne Pemberton" <apembert@erols.com>
> If
> animation on the screen is as distracting to mildly ADD folks, then I
would
> expect to see a sizeable number of my students who would be unable to use
> the computers in the lab. [...]
> If the animation in games and on the web were as distracting to ADD/ADHD
> kids as you suggest, the idea wouldn't have come up.

I think your reasoning here is specious. It is an _extremely_ common problem
among people (including a number without substantial ADD symptoms) to be
distracted by animation to the extent that they cannot access content. A
usability test conducted in '96-97 by User Interface Engineering even
documented people physically blocking flashing/moving portions of the screen
with their hands in order to attend to their tasks.

You are using your class of ADD kids (and the content they use) to make a
blanket assessment of all people with ADD which those of us on list who have
it are telling you is fallacious.

>          When I hit the stop button in IE, the animation stopped. The user
> has control.

That's not true in Netscape 6. Or with Flash movies, or the blink or marquee
elements (and I've seen both in the last week in _new_ ad campaigns designed
to draw attention from the user).

My opinion on this image is that it probably doesn't present a risk in terms
of photoepilepsy (though of course I'm no expert), but it would certainly
distract some people from nearby content. My solution to an image like the
one cited would be to loop it for no more than 2 or 3 seconds, since it's
not offering any more content on future iterations of the loop. This is
actually what sites like Yahoo require to keep banner ads from distracting
users unnecessarily.

-
m

Received on Thursday, 26 July 2001 12:22:05 UTC