Re: Inaccessible by color blind? http://www.tryspot.com/tharapita/

> http://www.tryspot.com/tharapita/ is hard to view by color-blind people. This

As well as the colour contrast problems (some or all of which are the
result of inconsistent mixing of deprecated colour attributes and
style sheets - I viewed it in a Linux version of Netscape 4 for which
style sheets fail++ - what I see as black on dark blue appears to be
intended to display as white on dark blue):

- the text is in absolute sizes and, in some cases, those sizes are
  smaller than you will normally find on font size menus.  7pt text
  imaged for 640x480 is lower resolution than the 7x5 pixels of 
  late 1960s first generation VDUs (trying to bold this sort of
  resolution, as you do for 8pt, is likely to be ugly - VDUs 
  used high intensity instead) - the small fonts are unlikely to
  image well unless the browser believes it is using a 1024x768
  display on a 14 inch monitor;

- Verdana is not a generic font and not even universally available -
  it is basically only found on recent Microsoft systems, even though
  Microsoft license it liberally to allow more general use - you need
  to specify a generic font as a fallback;

- effectively unset alt text (image file name and size is not a 
  reasonable fallback), also:  actually unset alt text;

- "Tell a Friend" etc, should be H1, not P (arguably Tharapita.com
  should be H1 and Introduction H2);

- B instead of STRONG;

- Misuse of BR (BR ends a line, it doesn't force vertical movement of
  the writing point unless that is needed for the following content
  and ending a line that hasn't started oughtn't to require such movement
  anyway - the fact that some common browsers incorrectly handle redundant
  BRs is no excuse);

- Misuse of BR to simulate style P {margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0} - note
  that neither this style nor the use of BR are safe as the last line of
  a paragraph may be maximum length - having a small margin is the only
  safe thing until first line or first character style selectors work 
  reliably.

- the document character set is given as windows-1252, a Microsoft
  proprietory character set, even though it appears not to use any
  characters from windows-1252 that aren't at the same code points in
  the default HTML transfer character set of iso-8859-1;

- endemic failure to include mandatory quotes around parameter values;

- various bogus or highly proprietory attributes (I've never seen body=body
  on p before);

- no <!--  ... --> around content of styles to protect early browsers;

- 60 HTML syntax errors, including some structural error (e.g. overlapping
  center and table elements, with the close tag for the center in a 
  context that only allows tr, tbody, tfoot or /table).

++ The heavy use of deprecated markup indicates that the page is intended
to work on browsers which don't support style sheets.

Received on Friday, 13 April 2001 07:13:28 UTC