A new Success Criterion regarding use of color.

Name: Mary Frances Laughton
Email: Laughton.MaryFrances@ic.gc.ca
Affiliation: Government of Canada
Document: W2
Item Number: Guideline 1.3: Create content that can be presented in different ...
Part of Item: 
Comment Type: technical
Summary of Issue: A new Success Criterion regarding use of color.
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
Some sites become essentially unusable (e.g. parts of Facebook.com) when viewed under (Windows OS) high-contrast display rendering schemes and certain user agent settings (accessibility color options) that are used by some people with low vision.  We are in the process of doing further research on this topic to determine if this warrants a new success criterion or whether an advisory technique would be sufficient.  One advisory might emphasize the need to ALWAYS explicitly set appropriate foreground/background colors (since the cascade doesn’t always seem to work as expected). Another might be to recommend designers test their designs against the range of OS Accessibility display renderings.

Proposed Change:
Please consider a new Success Criterion, “A site should be (operable, perceivable...etc) without relying on color.  Moreover, the site should not depend on a specified foreground or background color.”

Received on Friday, 29 June 2007 21:09:54 UTC