Currently not addressed: Background images disappear with user-specific colors

Name: Michael Zapp
Email: redaktion@bitvtest.de
Affiliation: BIK (barrierefrei informieren und kommunizieren)
Document: W2
Item Number: Guideline 1.4: Make it easier for users to see and hear content...
Part of Item: 
Comment Type: technical
Summary of Issue: Currently not addressed: Background images disappear with user-specific colors
Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
Users with severe colour vision deficiencies will often need to set their user agents to display specific foreground and background colors. However this also causes all background images to disappear. This is not sufficiently addressed in the current draft.

A related problem apparently also currently not addressed: images with transparent backgrounds may not be visible/legible on a user-specific background color.

Proposed Change:
The guidelines should specify that images that convey important information should not be included as background images.

This is actually already addressed in F3 (Failure of Success Criterion 1.1.1 due to using CSS to include images that convey important information) - however this failure only relates to success criterion 1.1.1 and blind users (as CSS-images can have no alternative text). It should also relate to users with color deficiencies.

The guidelines should also specify that any image containing important information must remain visibible/legible regardless of the background color.

Received on Thursday, 31 January 2008 17:10:10 UTC