- From: Alan J. Flavell <flavell@a5.ph.gla.ac.uk>
- Date: Wed, 13 Sep 2000 00:00:11 +0100 (BST)
- To: Anne Pemberton <apembert@crosslink.net>
- cc: WAI Guidelines List <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
On Tue, 12 Sep 2000, Anne Pemberton wrote: > Myself, I liked very much William's site that included graphics. I would like to take up this point too, if I may. I had already, in an email, expressed general pleasure with William's article (while raising a few technical details which he has now addressed). One recurring theme of my interactions with other web authors is their apparent deeply-held belief that by asking for accessibility, we want to forbid them to include colour, movement or any other kind of media, and boil everything down to black text-only on a mid-grey background. I really have no idea where this silly belief comes from, but my observation is that it is amazingly widespread, and deeply ingrained. What I feel is desperately needed, alongside the entirely competent and necessary - but somewhat "academic" guidelines from the group, are some really convincing demonstrations[1] of pages which have widespread appeal to the mass audience - while at the same time being very accessible to all kinds of unusual browsing situations. Otherwise we are continually "up against" this argument that accessible design is absolutely unusuable in a mass/commercial environment, and can only be considered when pages are authored for a specialised audience or community. The exact opposite of what I'm hoping to see. [Anne writes...] > The result > is a much more inviting presentation. The criticism of the animated > graphics as a "bad idea" is misplaced. The first time I viewed the page, I > didn't even notice there was animation until I had gone through the whole > page and returned to the top to look it over a second time noting the > details including the animation. Not all people, and not even all "visual" > people, are "distracted" by animation. Motion is a part of life. Compared > to the original, all text, no color, no graphics presentation, this version > is very inviting and gives the impression that accessibility is do-able > without throwing away the baby with the bath water. Exactly! Those in our audience who are, for example, distressed by unexpected motion on a web page have every right to get client software that blocks it, or otherwise processes it to meet their requirements. The key feature of the WWW, to my way of thinking, is that it enables us to offer content in a form that can gracefully adapt itself to each reader's needs and requirements. But this is not done solely by the author creating content to fit every possible circumstance: the web is a co-production, based on the concept of many different client/browser situations "rendering" the content in a form that's suitable for each reader. It's little short of maddening that, looking around the web, we see such tremendous effort currently being put into factoring-out this flexibility, in a stubborn belief that the sole purpose of design is to ensure that everyone will literally _see_ exactly the same view - or else (it seems these authors believe) it would be better that they get nothing at all. After all that effort having been put in to defeat the inherent flexibility of the web, those authors then have the gall to inform us that they "cannot afford" the effort to write a few ALT attributes for their images, and so on. The whole message of the web to me was that we are freed from the inflexibility of such paper-based thinking, and can use any available additional effort not for factoring-out the flexibility, but for factoring-in additional options. [1] I only wish I could produce some convincing examples myself; but although I feel I can recognize what I'm looking for when I see it, I have to admit that - coming from an academic and verbal background myself, and having no particular graphical design skills - I'm not the person to do this, and some of my ham-fisted attempts may have done more harm than good. Some readers might be familiar with the "Top 3 HTML Straw Man Arguments" at http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/www/html-smac.html which looks at some of the same issues, but again with a predominatly verbal approach. Best regards
Received on Tuesday, 12 September 2000 19:00:15 UTC