Comments on Style Sheet Section 15

Some comments on section 15.

Style sheets I beleive are and will be pretty complex.  A user with a
disability will never be able to know all the classes and ids that an
author uses for them to over ride them in their own personal style sheet.
I think the biggest advantage is the use of style sheets to maintain and
easily develop text only versions of documents.  Authors who use a few
rules can maintain one document that can easily be converted to a text only
version.

The following recommendations would help this process:

Author recommendations
1. Do not use inline (in tag) style sheets.
2. Use only one linked and/or one document wide style sheet per document.
3. If #2 is followed and combined with #4 and #5, a text alternative page
can be easily created by just removing the style sheet information.
4. Additional descriptions for the text only version, that is not needed in
the CSS version, can be part of the CSS version and hidden using the
DISPLAY attribute in the CSS version.  
5. Put graphics physically at the end of WWW documents and replace them
with CSS hidden text descriptions in the approapriate points in the linear
document if important.

This provides an easy way for an author to maintain a graghical and text
only version of a document, and maintain only one copy of the document.  

Recommendation to Browser Developers
3. Allow style sheets to be turned off, not just replaced 

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I just did a presentation on the use of style sheets for accessibility and
the outline can be found at:
http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess/97-11-5.html

Jon

Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
1207 S. Oak Street
Champaign, IL 61820

Voice: 217-244-5870
Fax: 217-333-0248
E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu
WWW:	http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund
	http://www.als.uiuc.edu/InfoTechAccess

Received on Friday, 7 November 1997 10:59:49 UTC