RE: 48-Hour Consensus Call: InstateLongdesc CP Update

Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> 
> I've seen it and I've bought into this argument before, but Web
> developers don't want their browsers to put visual aids on their
> images (they can do that themselves)

Actually, that is not 100% correct. Authors don't want to have to place
those visual aids on the web-content themselves. We learned this in the late
90's, when the current Best Practice was to include a "d link" on screen.
Authors ran from that screaming in pain.

However, most professional web developers both understand and embrace the
idea that if the end user needs or wants to make changes to their visual
design to better improve their individual interaction, then they accept
that. They accept scalable fonts, they accept elastic design for various
view-ports and screen resolutions (and in fact are now developing with that
concept in mind), they accept user style sheets, and high-contrast mode.

There are already a number of tools that add visible markers to the screen
on user-demand, including at least one Firefox Plugin (Mouseless browsing),
and Dragon Naturally Speaking (both which allow users to enumerate links, so
that if they have 5 "Read More" links, they can more precisely speak the
go-to command as "click link #4").  

If this were a user-agent setting that users could set in their preferences
(just like they can today specify to always use Helvetica at 22 pts, if they
so choose) then this would be, I suspect, non-controversial to most content
authors.

JF

Received on Tuesday, 25 September 2012 05:04:25 UTC