Re: Introducing NetscapeML

I'm going to second Martin's comments and add a few.

I agree with what Martin writes. I have a friend who is legally blind.
He can see but only at a distance of about 6 inches from the screen
and with scaleable fonts that can really be blown up.

I also know more than a few people who have ADD (as adults - not kids).
These people find the movement stuff incredibly distracting. (like they
can't focus to read more than 4 words before the motion really nails
them). Just as we are having a large upsurgence of kids that are being
diagnosed with ADD, we are finding that a lot of adults have ADD that
they have learned to live with (sort of). 

Then there are other groups epileptics, dyslexics, blind, deaf, color
blind, those suffering from migraines, or just general bad day
overloads that could really benefit from really having control of their
environment. After all, the web orignially was supposed to be user
controlled...

I am used to browsers that can have the basic font sizes and colors
changable already, and I can see having a local stylesheet definition
that can be forced to override anything else comming in. Microsoft,
Netscape and Mosaic have always offered that. If they didn't I'd have
had a lot of problems sizing demos to be read. However, the newer stuff
doesn't have the same control as the older stuff. We can't turn off
a server push like we can GIF89a images that move and even getting
the images out of the cache so that they won't play is a real pain
and means that you must flush a bunch of other stuff that may be 
valuable to keep. Java, ActiveX, marquees and other new stuff should
be allowed as well.

If I had my druthers, I'd like to see something under the View button
that says Custom that can be checked (ie enabled/disabled). 
To change it you get a dialog that says 

Background Image  __ Off   __ On (Alt text is default)
Background Sound  __ Off   __ On  ___ Route to alternative player (ie
	speech to text for deaf
Text ____ Standard Screen display ____ Route to alternative player
  (ie text to speech for the blind)
Text/Background Colors/Fonts
   ___ System defintion  (ie defined in options/properties...)
   ___ Local Stylesheet  
   ___ Default Stylesheet/HTML Definition (ie in document)
Blink
  ____ Enable   ___ Disable
Plug-ins 
    (pull down or scrolling menu of plug-ins that can be enabled or disabled)
Server push (or connection keep alive or something)
  ___ Enable  ____ Disable
Java
  ____ Execute  ____ Don't execute
Images _____ Display  _____ Don't Display -or-
If there is some way to identify looping GIF89a images and stop the
looping add an option for that.
Ditto for browser specific things like marquees.

As soon as the Apply button is clicked or the View --> Custom option
is selected, the browser redraws the current
page with the custom View controls in effect (no cache clearing....)

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Mary E. S. Morris co-author Web Page Design: A Different Multimedia
http://www.sun.com/smi/ssoftpress/Morris2/Morris2.html
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Martin Hamilton writes:

> Scott E. Preece writes:
> 
> | Could you try to distill her experience into some requirements for
> | browser features?  It's not clear from your limitied description what a
> | browser could reasonably do to help.
> 
> My perception is that her main problem is to do with the amount of time 
> it takes her to scan a Web page looking for the content.  Her field of 
> vision is limited, so she can't just take in the whole page in one go.  
> Plus... she finds it uncomfortable reading pages rendered with small to 
> medium sized fonts.  To give you an idea of what is OK, she reads her 
> email in an 80x25 Linux console on a 17" monitor.

> i.e. coloured backgrounds, coloured text, font size changes, in-lined 
> images and imagemaps, server push animations, applets and plugins of 
> whatever flavours the browser supports, animation tags a la MARQUEE, 
> and so on.

> PS I realise the obvious response to these comments is "use Lynx, or 
> W3, or ..." - but this isn't the point.  Mainstream browsers like (say) 
> Netscape should support accessibility.

Received on Friday, 5 July 1996 00:27:22 UTC