No provision for link highlighting

Name: grant broome
Email: grant.broome@cdsm.co.uk
Affiliation: GAWDS
Document: W2
Item Number: (none selected)
Part of Item: 
Comment Type: technical
Summary of Issue: No provision for link highlighting
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
currently there is no provision in the guidelines to ensure that those who are partially sighted, or have mobility impairments can be provided with a high-visibility highlighting mechanism for links and controls. Currently browsers only provide a thin dotted line which a significant number of disabled web users find difficult to see. This could be regarded an issue for the User Agent, but I\'m not sure that there is even a user agent guideline for this. 

Proposed Change:
A new guideline could be included that guides developers towards providing greater visibility for links using CSS techniques. This of course may seem like a radical, not to mention very late change, but the benefits to so many groups of disabled people are great. Consider:



*partially sighted visitors who cannot use a mouse.

*websites which present colour schemes and images that do not present the default highlight very well.

*those with athetosis, who often find it difficult to focus on small areas of the screen.

*older arthritic web users



I\'ve also written about this here:

http://grantbroome.blogspot.com/2007/06/whats-missing-from-wcag-20.html



I\'ll leave it in your capable hands.

Received on Thursday, 7 June 2007 13:05:05 UTC