Add partial sight/low vision to face to face agenda [was Are accessibility guidelines defined for the blind?

I'd  suggest we add a discussion of partial sight/low vision to the face to 
face agenda to follow up on the points made by Peter.

How about planning on an hour's worth after lunch on Thursday?  We would of 
course to either omit things now in that slot or move them and omit others.

Len


At 09:36 AM 5/2/00 +0200, Peter Verhoeven wrote:
>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

--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP, and
Department of Electrical Engineering
Temple University
423 Ritter Annex, Philadelphia, PA 19122

kasday@acm.org
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday

(215) 204-2247 (voice)
(800) 750-7428 (TTY)

Received on Tuesday, 2 May 2000 09:36:10 UTC