Re: WCAG Priorities does not help the low vision

Hi Peter,

first, this is really the wrong list for talking about WCAG priorities - the
best one is either the interest group - w3c-wai-ig@w3.org archived at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-ig - for general discussion, or
the WCAG working group - w3c-wai-gl@w3.org archived at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl - for proposing how to resolve
this, which should be primarily focussed on WCAG 2.0 and the conformance
proposals made so far for WCAG 2.

The issue you raise of how magnification works in browsers and pages today is
indeed a problem, and I think one that is newer than WCAG version 1 (which
was effectively completed more than 3 years ago). It is important that the
working group understand how this arises in current authoring practises - it
is not, of course, always the case - and what approaches should be used to
make sure it doesn't happen.

What is appropriate in this group (which is about evaluation tools and repair
tools) is any ideas you can put forward about how to get around this problem
- can we make a simple filtering tool that will change something in the page
to allow it to scale better, for example.

I look forward to your thoughts and further discussion.

Cheers

Charles

On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Peter Verhoeven wrote:

  Hi,

  I see a growing tendency making Web Sites level A Conformance.
  These Web Sites claim they are accessible. All WCAG guidelines that can
  improve accessibility for people with some vision loss include a large
  group of elderly people are priority 2 guidelines (contrast between
  background and text colors, relative table measures instead of fixed).
  Why is filling the ALT attribute on images more important than relative
  measurement?
  I use a screen magnifier and set font size in Internet Explorer to medium.
  A lot of people with vision loss set it to Largest and always use their own
  font.
  The result is, that on a lot of pages text and links hide under other
  frames or table columns.
  The only way this can be solved is by using the author's settings, but that
  makes it impossible to read.

  In the Netherlands we have a project Drempels Weg, that let Web Sites claim
  accessible on Level A Conformance.
  Also the European Union pollicy is Level A Comformance. They speak about 37
  million people having problems with accessing the Internet. But solving
  only priority 1 problems does not solve the problems of those 37 million
  people in the EU.
  Most priority 1 problems are blind and screen reader related and only helps
  10% of those 37 million.
  By defining priorities companies and organizations are no willing to make
  their web site accessible after they are Level A Conformance.

  BTW: Personaly I believe that most priority 2 problems could be solved by
  much more flexible web browsers, but there are no such browsers available
  at this moemnt.

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




-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI  fax: +33 4 92 38 78 22
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France)

Received on Tuesday, 23 April 2002 08:17:22 UTC