Re: consensus?? RE: Textual Images vs. Styled Text, Round Three *ding*

At 12:46 PM 10/16/2000 , William Loughborough wrote:
>At 03:27 PM 10/16/00 -0400, Wendy A Chisholm wrote:
>>Also, avoid using images to represent text
>
>If I understand all this correctly (which I doubt!), if images are used to "re-present" text those with images off will get presented with the alt= text which could of course be the "represented" text. Where's the problem? So long as the alt= text adequately conveys the same semantics as the "text" that is now an image, I believe the intent of our activities is honored? Be it buttons or logos mattereth not.

William, I think you are not understanding this -- and I mean that
in a nice way, I'm not going to rant at you about pithy slogans
today. :)

The problem is that even with alt text intact, and even with appropriate
semantics, graphical text _does not resize for low vision users_.

That is the accessibility hurdle we are trying to remove here.  The
question is, do you best remove that by forbidding the use of text in
graphics?  (This removes the barriers but _seriously_ restricts the
web design and may affect other accessibility checkpoints!)

I have been arguing that the checkpoint, as worded, says that you
should not use graphical text _if_ there is a good alternative, and
the fact that there is not a good alternative yet for many cases
means that we cannot ban graphical text and should not allow the
checkpoint to be read as doing so.

-- 
Kynn Bartlett  <kynn@idyllmtn.com>                    http://kynn.com/
Director of Accessibility, Edapta               http://www.edapta.com/
Chief Technologist, Idyll Mountain Internet   http://www.idyllmtn.com/
AWARE Center Director                      http://www.awarecenter.org/
Accessibility Roundtable Web Broadcast           http://kynn.com/+on24
What's on my bookshelf?                         http://kynn.com/books/

Received on Monday, 16 October 2000 16:14:43 UTC