RE: Commercial Realities and Accessibility (was: Are Small Text buttons level 2 compliant)

> From:	Paul Davis [SMTP:paul@ten-20.com]
> 
> i.e. dirty orange, off pink, yellow with a touch of black. Also delicate 
> variations of pastel shades are cropping up all over the place. A low 
> 
[DJW:]  My favourite example of this is the FAQ tab
on http://www.bt.com/surftime/ (you don't need to
accept the Javascript or Flash for this, and the Flash
has no information content).  I think my colour vision
is reasonable, and still had to turn off colours in the
Accessibility options.  (Each tab has a lower and lower
contrast.)

An interesting observation, though, is that whilst BT use
colours in their printed material, they manage to keep it
quite readable.  I think the difference is that the printed
material is done by experienced designers, who know that
you need to be subtle in designs and use a minimum of 
constructs, but the web stuff looks like it is done by
twenty-somethings, with no prior experience, who like to
try every gimmick.

I think also, that with established companies, the senior 
management understands print technology, but not web 
technology, so leaves it to the people who claim to know.

This last point will be a problem for the person who suggested
marketing accessibility to the decision makers.  Those decision
makers amy know lots of disabled people, but they may not 
have any idea about web technology, and can only compare their
site with all the others.

(Start ups in this area are often all twenty somethings, and
probably haver limited experience of disability.)

One final point is that the same companies who do this
often have people who really know about users interfaces;
for example, BT Research have a good set of pages on designing web
sites for colour blindness. 

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Received on Wednesday, 27 September 2000 15:05:04 UTC