Re: Are accessibility guidelines defined for the blind?

Hi Len,

Thank you very much for your quick reply and summary.
What I and most low vision do is define their onw font size and style. I
always use font size 12 and font style arial and at my work place I have
always my computer on a 640x480 pixels. If you go to www.postbank.nl
(sorry it is Dutch) you see that all the problems come together and it
is realy impossible to read information. Another problem is, that
sometimes loading a page in frames constuction in a new seperate window
is disable by use of ASP. If I try to load the page in a new window
without frames I get the same frame constuction back.
I think a lot of these problems can be solved by including more option
in the browser. I'm not interesting in nice web design or creative
graphical designs. I'm interesting in information on web pages. So if a
word is too long for the specified table cell. Don't make the cell and
the table width longer, but brake the owrd in two pieces (if I want
that).
A lot of people define a table with a width of 640. Than have a column
of 200 and 400 and place a banner of width 480 pixels in the column of
440? 
I think in such a situation the web designer makes a mistake and he or
she must be punished for such a mistake. So make the image smaller. but
why browser also make the width of table longer?

Text on images indedd is also often an big problem. Also if there ia an
ALT tag. Alt tags doesn't help users with screen magnifiers with high
magnification level and no speech not a lot, because the popup window is
mostly much large than the magnified view so impossible to read. 

Regards Peter Verhoeven
Internet : http://www.magnifiers.org (the Screen Magnifiers Homepage)


"Leonard R. Kasday" wrote:
> 
> Peter,
> 
> Thank you for bringing up those extra points.  You're right, we need to pay
> more attention to partial sight (a.k.a. low vision).  By the way, even
> though I don't have low vision, I run into these sorts of problems
> sometimes with popup boxes.
> 
> So lets summarize your points for low vision:
> 
> 1. Optimally, users should be able to have scrollbars even if the web page
> turns them off.
> 2. Until browsers do (1), pages should never turn off scrollbars.
> 3. Table dimensions should be expressed as percentages, not absolute units.
> 4. Avoid using images wider than  N pixels  (what's a good value for N?)
> 
> to which I'd add
> 5. If you use style sheets for layout, avoid specifications which cause
> objects to overlap each other when font size is increased.
> 6. Whenever feasible, display text in such a way that it wraps sensibly
> when font size is increased.
> 7. Use real text, not images of text, so  that user preferences in color,
> font, and size may be used.
> 
> Len
> 
> p.s.
> I'm actually more familiar with the term "low vision" than "partial
> sight".  Is the term "partial sight" more used in Europe?
> 
> 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 10:00:56 UTC