The Low Vision Core: Reflow (block level), Line Size, Resize with Word Wrap

Hi Everyone,

I have studied LV access very carefully for the past 8-years. Here is
what made me think that the following core SC's are needed. I'll
outline implementation tomorrow. I computed the numbers for scrolling
myself using a simulation. Once the publication status on my research
is settled, I'll make my analysis available to the group.

The Low Vision Core:  Part 1: Reflow (block level), Line Size, Resize
with Word Wrap

The need.

The user's eye is damaged in such a way as to reduce or eliminate
peripheral vision. The user needs so much enlargement so that only a
small area of the document is available to see.

For both reasons Jim Allan just started calling both "field loss". One
is medical the other is environmental, but they are both field loss.
Almost everyone with LV experiences field loss for one reason or
another. Think of it this, we are all using a mobile even if our
screen is 34-inch. This means we need:

1. Linearized block level elements
2. Narrow content
3. Print that fits the screens and columns

Linearized Block Content: This is we currently call Reflow (leading to
lots of confusion). There are three reasons to support this. It makes
error free page search possible. It enables widening or shortening of
content with great flexibility. It makes resize with word wrapping to
any size trivial.

Narrow Content: This is difficult for a person with normal vision to
imagine. For this population (in western languages) 25 characters is
almost too much. Sometimes I will use a magnifying lens (optical or
digital) just frame a region to a manageable width. Think of looking
at a webpage through a cardboard tube. It would wonderful if you could
only move down the page and catch everything in your tube. Almost all
of us see the web through our tube, and we need it to fit.

Resize with Word Wrap: Reading text with horizontal scrolling requires
much more scrolling than reading with word wrapping. This is because
if you scroll text horizontally, then you scroll line by line. If you
have word wrapping, you scroll page by page. The difference in
scrolling is extreme. It takes more scrolls to read 300% with
horizontal scrolling than it does to read 700% without.

Almost all people with low vision need at least two of these three
accommodations to read web content. The problem is that as you move
through the population of LV individuals it is a different two of
three for each person. Hence, we need all three.

Access to these accommodations is moderately easy for implement HTML /
CSS / JavaScript on desktop and laptop browsers. It takes some
authoring cooperation, but no custom code from authors. I I will write
about this tomorrow.

More Soon, Wayne

Received on Wednesday, 11 January 2017 18:36:29 UTC