Re: EOWG: reaction on training pages

Eric,

Thanks for all your comments! Replies below.

At 02:08 PM 6/9/00 +0200, Eric Velleman wrote:
>Hello,
>
>In the Netherlands we are currently enjoying our vacation so I only found
your mail this morning. Hopefully this E-mail arrives before the call.
>First of all, I think the pages are very handsome, offer a good overview
and good navigating. 
>
>-------
>Legibility/visibility
>- The pages are very legible although the style sheet does not seem to
cover all the tags (see technical remark below).

JB: The issue you mentioned is a Netscape bug; it is not an inheritance
error within the style sheet itself. we _may_ be able to insert a bug fix
for that. I will try. I have a similar version, with a similar bug, so I
should know if our fix is successful.

>- The yellow background is very sophisticated. It might have a bit more
contrast, or is this a W3 standard.

JB: Not a standard (yet). I would like to get a consistent style sheet for
WAI resources though.

>- I saw a remark on italics to focus attention. Please do not!. Discovered
pages by the W3 that do use italics (www.w3.org/tr/). Extensive research
has shown that it reduces reading speed enormously and when used in
combination with small fontsize is mostly not legible at all. Using italics
on a CRT is even worse than in print. We have that same experience here at
our institute with partially sighted students. But also good sighted people
experience difficulties with italics. In combination with serif fonts the
damage is even larger. Some designers use the Photoshop alternative of
crisp italics that have a very low inclination but still, also that reduces
reading speed and legibility. Example of research I found on the net about
this can be found at: http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/AHNCUR.html

JB: Are you talking about the training pages here, or other pages?
Regarding use of italics in general while we can try to avoid those in WAI
materials, those are not a checkpoint under WCAG 1.0 and can be overridden
in style sheets where needed. I'll check this when we get into other
resources, but let's keep focused on the training pages for now.

>-------
>User control:
>- All the fonts can be scaled very good except when passing on to the slides.
>http://www.w3.org/WAI/training/ra#why: On this page is a link to the
slides. The slides are not part of the discussion now but could be. The
fonts are preinstalled scalable. I miss the user control in this. And the
slides have a scrollbar making it necessary to scroll inside a slide
content. Sometimes you have to scroll double: the page and the slide content. 

JB: Separate topic. The format for the slidemaker tool was changed recently
and not everything in it was from EOWG discussions. I will follow up on
that when possible; apparently we need to ensure that all styling for WAI
resources will be stable and controlled by EOWG.

>-------
>Technical: 
>- My Browser, Netscape 4.7 (sorry for not switching to IE :-) has
difficuties with the style sheet used on the training page. Therefore I get
different fonts on the same page. In the Style Sheet I noticed that there
was not a reference to the <dt> and <dd> tags? And the tags do not have end
tags like </dt></dd>? this sometimes causes difficulties with Netscape.

JB: As above, this is a Netscape bug, and we will try to compensate.

>- Also the yellow background is missing in my Netscape version. Because of
that, the overview over the page is a bit less although the indenting does
the same job.

JB: I'll see if there's a way we can correct for this bug as well.

>-------
>Reactions:
>-------
>>Alan wrote:I think there are advantages to one-word navitems wherever
possible. 
>
>I agree to that. I think that these items are clear as to the content I
would expect behind them and easily readable.

JB: OK.

>------
>>Alan wrote about a description of keyboard-only access to the Web: using
internet software without a mouse. Keyboard-only access is used by people
who are blind, laptop users, and sometimes by people with upper-body
mobility impairments or learning disabilities. This is less of an assistive
technology than an alternative access strategy, and it is something that I
could write for this purpose (if I haven't done so already!)
>>Judy replied: Where? in the "How People with Disabilities Use the Web?"
(that's where we should be addressing it, and that page has edits pending)
or somewhere in the training pages?
>
>I think that keyboard-only access is very important. Just pull out the
mouse :-) and see if it works well. More people should do so more often to
undergo the ultimate blind-user experience. When we recently presented our
book Site Seeing (about the development of an accessible website or
webbased multimedia product) to the His Royal Highness prince Bernard of
the Dutch Royal House, we asked him to pull out the mouse plug and tab his
way to the page we wanted him to open. It was quite an eyeopener :-) to him
and to many others in the room. Sorry, but although the book is in English,
the page about the presentation is in Dutch.
>So maybe we should suggest people to do the mouse-off test. And visit
their pages without a mouse, or just listening to a speech synthesizer like
we do here when we give courses and information about making the web
accessible.

JB: I'll add a mouse-off test.

>--------
>>Sheela wrote: I think the 'planning' page is coming together. In my
opinion, the planning page should contain enough information so that a
trainer can quickly get a sense of all the elements he/she needs to cover
by looking at that single page. It should act like a list of check points
and if he/she wants more information, the hyperlinks should be be used. 
>
>I agree that sort of a checklist could be a good idea, on the other hand
the pages are very flexible and offer many different approaches to
trainings. When studying I had to visit schools and teach. We then got sort
of a form that we had to fill in to be sure that we had well prepared
everything for the lesson. the form asked for a timetable, definition of
the group and their wishes, pre-goals, goals i wanted to achieve in the
lesson, How I wanted to see if the goals where met, etc. Maybe we could
combine something like that with a checklist.

JB: Can you send that checklist?

>-------
>>the section on this page called 'Arrange Resources in Advance' is
probably the most well constructed. The four points under this section
-'Consider online or off-line presentation modes', 'Arrange equipment',
'Order W3C/WAI materials in advance' and 'Check need for accessible
formats' all provide concrete informtion. I like the way each of these are
hyperlinked to the same page. I don't think 'Determine Needs and
Expectations' and 'Choose Resources and Approaches' are constructed as
well. In the second particularly, the title of the section is repeated
again as a point below it. I think we can definitely come up with 3 points
(each not more than 8-10 words) that can serve as checkpoints for 'choosing
resources and approaches'.
>
>- I agree to that. Maybe we could add the points that are on the linked
pages to form the three of four points. so the Determine Needs and
Expectations would feature the following links:
>a. What does the audience need
>b. What are the audience learning objectives
>c. Confirming objectives and building program

JB: Let's try something like that.

>- I like naming the first page "Overview" like Judy proposed
>
>- And yes I agree, Judy wrote: one kind of feels lost when one lands in
the middle of a page. If you link back to top to often the pages become to
long? What is wrong with the back option?
>
>- CSS positioning is still iffy in terms of browser implementations, no?
>Anyone have new updates on that?
>
>I understand that Netscape and IE can read CSS1 now but that they still
look very different. We had great difficulties because we wanted our site
www.bartimeus.nl to use style sheets that can be changed by the user and to
look about the same on Netscape and IE.
>
>For now!
>Kindest regards and hear you at the call,
>
>Eric Velleman
>Henk Snetselaar
>
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Eric Velleman
>Bartimeus Institute for the Blind and Partially Sighted
>Utrechtseweg 84, 3702 AD Zeist
>The Netherlands
>Tel: +31 (0)30 - 6982401 or +31 (0)30 - 6982346
>Fax: +31 (0)30 - 6982347
>Email: E.Velleman@bartimeus.nl
>Website: www.bartimeus.nl & www.accessibility.nl
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
-- 
Judy Brewer    jbrewer@w3.org    +1.617.258.9741    http://www.w3.org/WAI
Director, Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) International Program Office
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
MIT/LCS Room NE43-355, 545 Technology Square, Cambridge, MA,  02139,  USA

Received on Friday, 9 June 2000 10:13:19 UTC