RE: Are Small Text buttons level 2 compliant

It's not merely a question of people choosing to not emply assistive 
technology out of whim or stubborness.

Assistive technology may not produce as good a solution as accessibility 
built into the web page, as I noted when I talked about problems with 
magnifiers.  Don't get me wrong: magnfiers can be invaluable tools, and 
some people will need them no matter what is done with the web page.  And 
people need them when the web page hasn't built in the accessibility.  But 
they aren't as effective as being able to simply magnify the text.  That's 
why real text should be used everywhere, unless there's a really good 
reason, e.g. company logos.

Len



At 10:35 AM 9/26/00 -0700, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>At 1:28 PM -0400 9/26/00, Poehlman, David wrote:
>>I explained this in the message.  what I disagree with is that the text can
>>be small.  some people have low enough vision that they need larger text but
>>not use assistives to achieve it.
>
>Aha, okay.  So you are arguing that web designers have to account for
>people who need assistive technology, could benefit from assistive
>technology, may even have access to assistive technology (such as
>the screen magnifier in Windows), but who choose not to employ it?
>
>That's a very dangerous argument to propose, you realize...  I argue
>that there are ways for those users who need larger text to get the
>larger text without requiring that web designers _remove_ their
>graphical text images.  The implications of placing the burden on the
>web designer instead of on the user are that unreasonable expectations
>are asked of the designer, and she is unable to reasonably comply with
>those requirements.  Thus, she ignores them.
>
>--Kynn
>--
>--
>Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
>http://www.kynn.com/

--
Leonard R. Kasday, Ph.D.
Institute on Disabilities/UAP and Dept. of Electrical Engineering at Temple 
University
(215) 204-2247 (voice)                 (800) 750-7428 (TTY)
http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday         mailto:kasday@acm.org

Chair, W3C Web Accessibility Initiative Evaluation and Repair Tools Group
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/

The WAVE web page accessibility evaluation assistant: 
http://www.temple.edu/inst_disabilities/piat/wave/

Received on Tuesday, 26 September 2000 15:36:55 UTC