RE: Are Small Text buttons level 2 compliant

> From:	Ben Morris [SMTP:bmorris@activematter.com]
> 
> I think that the spirit of these guidelines is to make sites accessible
> to,
> but not necessarily designed strictly for, those with disabilities.  All
> of
	[DJW:]  
	As I see it, level 1 gives a lot of tolerance to
	typical commercial use of HTML as a page description
	language, but levels 2 and 3 require more and more 
	rigid adherence to the orginal philosophy of HTML as
	an information markup language.

	As such, the fact that this requirement is at level 
	two makes me think it is meant to be taken fairly
	literally.

	Modern HTML plus style sheets allows a lot of input
	to the visual styling without having to use GIFs of
	the text (although there are problems, like intellectual
	property restrictions on scaleable fonts, and the lack
	of a clean fallback mechanism for BUTTON elements, and
	broken implementation of, at least, the latter).

	Actually, even from the point of view of someone with
	adequate vision and 128K+ access to the net, text as
	graphics is almost always a barrier to access to the site
	because of the time it takes to load on the first access
	to the page.


> I think that scrolling to the bottom of the page is not a 'significant
> barrier.'
> 
	[DJW:]  It's definitely a barrier, and I would say
	it was even a significant one - in any case, HTML 
	requires that the image have alternate text, which
	should avoid that scrolling in text only mode.

	I think you are taking a line that is halfway between
	that which was intended by the guidelines, and that taken
	by a couple of my colleagues when told about the Olympics
	and AOL cases, namely that forcing commercial organisations
	to support the last 20% of the market was an unwarranted
	intrusion on their ability to operate their businesses.

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Received on Tuesday, 26 September 2000 12:36:33 UTC