- From: Leonard R. Kasday <kasday@acm.org>
- Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2000 10:19:43 -0400
- To: "w3c-wai-gl@w3.org" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
- Cc: w3c-wai-er-ig@w3.org
- Message-Id: <4.3.2.7.2.20000926095651.00cc9420@pop3.concentric.net>
To the people of WCAG, Many sites use small buttons, menus or tabs that have text as images, e.g. FAQs, Our Team, About Us, Consumer Products, Web Sites, Computers, Welcome, News, How-to, Connect, (this is a mixture from several web sites) Do these pass the following priority 2 checkpoint? [1] 3.1 When an appropriate markup language exists, use markup rather than images to convey information. [Priority 2] For example, use MathML to mark up mathematical equations, and style sheets to format text and control layout. Also, avoid using images to represent text -- use text and style sheets instead. I contend no, small image buttons/menus/tabs fail this checkpoint: since an accessible markup exists, viz. ordinary HTML. Plus the last sentence explicitly says to not use images for text. Feasible methods exist. You can get rid of the link underline, and control color and font with a stylesheet. Rectangular buttons are easy. If you want something a bit fancier like rounded corners, it's straightforward to piece together the text parts with slivers of images. That's a bit of a kluge, but in balance I think it's better than making the whole thing text, given the importance of that checkpoint to people with low vision, who can otherwise simply enlarge the fonts and/or change the colors. (Loads faster too). I expect some objections to this position, since a number of well known sites in the disability area use such images, so there are clearly folks who didn't think this was a violation. By the way, the one place I would allow text as images are in logos, where there are substantial reasons for making the look exact. Len p.s. This isn't an academic question for me: e.g. full WCAG is now Pennsylvania State Policy, so we've got to know if image folkder tabs are "legal". [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WAI-WEBCONTENT-19990505/#gl-structure-presentation -- 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 10:17:36 UTC