Aging Eye Reader's Gripe of the Day

Am sending this because I think that the technical part of the 
communications community lacks input of examples from the vulgar plebs 
and needs to be reminded that obeying guidelines may not be enough to 
produce accessibility.

The AFB has a unit that provides technical advice and product 
evaluations for the vision impaired.  Its AccessWorld 80+ character line 
is too long for easy reading.  When enlarged it runs off the screen and 
to read it every line must be chased to the end, back and forth for 
every line of their long newsletter.   For long documents that passes 
usability and becomes accessibility.

When I suggested word wrap as the fix for it I was told that  AFB's Web 
Department says that word wrap is not a feature it will be 
implementing.   They need educating.

Word wrap helps those with poor acuity who enlarge (keeping the copy on 
the screen) and those with limited field width (allowing them to pull in 
the margins and read a narrow column).   These two groups of the vision 
impaired deserve accommodation by AFB as long as it claims to support 
the low visioned.

Here is an example of a page that uses word wrap well.

http://blindness.growingstrong.org/eyes/lvres.htm

It allows me to pull in the margins (for a narrow field) and enlarge 
(for poor acuity) and it keeps the copy on the screen as the adjustments 
are changed.
---------
gfmueden@verizon.net    ===gm===

Received on Friday, 13 July 2012 20:29:41 UTC