Two comments about Before-After Demo (BAD)

Hi,
two brief comments about Before-After Demo (BAD) pages (I know that these pages are still in development, and maybe my comments are untimely...):

1 - Alt text

See screenshot n. 1 (images with highlighted alt text taken from "Home" BAD page): http://www.semplicemente.org/_test/EOWG/BAD/shot_1.jpg 

Alt text should be used when the image is important to understanding the content, in all other cases images are decorative. This is an important issue because every non essential text read by the screen reader is nothing more than noise for the blind.

If you are publishing, for example, a research about psychology and somewhere in the text there's a graph showing important data, this image is meaningful and must have a descriptive alt text. On the contrary, if at the beginning of your paper you put the image of a brain, as a metaphor of cognition, this is only decorative and must have null alt.

IMHO, the three images that you can see on screenshot n. 1 are decorative.

.... anyhow I suggest to put somewhere in the BAD pages also an example of null alt text (as you have done in one of the links we have seen during the teleconference), better if we have at least one CSS decorative image and one null alt text image.


2 - Adequate space between form buttons

See screenshot n. 2 (two form buttons taken from "Citylights Survey" BAD page): http://www.semplicemente.org/_test/EOWG/BAD/shot_2.jpg 

A person with physical disabilities that affect manual dexterity may use an alternative pointing device, or other assistive technology, to select interactive elements such as links or form buttons. Since the user's accuracy can be quite poor, placing links, buttons or form fields too close together can make their selection difficult.

I suggest to make sure there is adequate space between form buttons, and between form fields, in the BAD pages.

For your reference, this is an article I wrote some time ago: http://xhtml.com/en/css/css-and-accessibility/. 

That's all for now :)

Regards,

-- 
Marco Bertoni
International Webmasters Association / The HTML Writers Guild
http://www.iwanet.org

Received on Friday, 23 January 2009 16:57:52 UTC