Re: Are Small Text buttons level 2 compliant

UA added to post list.

If these are provided by an image, and the equivalent can be formatted
according to user preferences, then I think that it satisfies the user
requirement but not WCAG.

I am not sure that alternatives can be formmatted in existing user agents.

Charles McCN

On Tue, 26 Sep 2000, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:

  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/

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
September - November 2000: 
W3C INRIA, 2004 Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Received on Tuesday, 26 September 2000 10:45:23 UTC