Are accessibility guidelines defined for the blind?

Hi,

This is not the first time that I bring up this point, but because I got
less responce here a new try.

The WAI often mentions numbers of people that having problems accessing
web pages of the Internet. I often read the number 10 million. Are those
10 million people blind? No, they are not blind at all. A lot of them
are sight impaired which is not the same.
In the "quick tips" I read only tips to make web pages accessible to
blind, or maybe to make web pages accessible by using Lynx? If I check
web pages with real accessibility problems for sight impaired with
Bobby, it tells me Congratulations your web page is Bobby Appoved. I
only need to do some manual checking, but all these checkpoints have
nothing to do with things like universal design and color contrast.

A growing number of web pages are designed "system dependent" that
means, that if I don't have a special display resolution or font size
setting a lot of information on the web pages is outside my screen and
the only way to access is to track on bars.
Some web designers don't like trackbars and disable them, so it becomes
realy impossible to get some information on the page. But the page is
Bobby approved (Congratulations!). 

In the statistics from visitors to my web site The Screen Magnifiers
Homepage at http://www.magnifiers.org I see that 25% of my visitors have
a display resolution of 640x480. We as sight impaired use this
resolution often because the the text on hte screen is much lagere than
in a higher resolution and setting a high resolution means that you need
a more powerful system with more memory to let a screen magnifier
performs well.

A lot of these problems occurs in table and frames constructions and
personaly I know it is often difficult to solve these problems also if
you specified a table width of 640. If an image inside the table is
larger than 640 or a word in a cell is larger the width of the table
increases. A lot of web designers don't want to use percentages for
defining table widh, because the lines of text becomes so long if
someone has set a high display resolution. The problem "long line" seems
to have a higher priority than "horizontal scrollbars".

In my opinion a lot of these problems could be solved by the makers of
browsers. 
In my opinion more attention is needed for accessibility problems that
partially sighted have?

Regards Peter Verhoeven

Received on Tuesday, 2 May 2000 03:36:39 UTC