- From: Leonard R. Kasday <kasday@acm.org>
- Date: Mon, 23 Oct 2000 11:53:41 -0400
- To: "Waddell, Cynthia" <cynthia.waddell@ci.sj.ca.us>
- Cc: "w3c-wai-gl@w3.org" <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Hi Cynthia (Copied to WAI-GL) We need some legal input on an issue being discussed in the WAI guidelines group. In general, the WAI guidelines require that text be presented in the HTML source, instead of part of an image. This lets the user control the size, font, color, and background of the text, which is important for people with low vision. But what if a company has a logo that's a trademark, and that logo has text in it. You can present that logo, with the text, (1) as a single bitmap (or compressed bitmap) image which guarantees it looks exactly--or almost exactly like the original (there can be some small differences due e.g. to different color rendering or the screen's pixel's per centimeter). (2) Or you can implement the logo so that the text is real HTML text, not part of the image. However, the text willnot look exactly like the original if the logo uses a special font and furthermore the user can change the font, size, and color. Is there a legal problem presenting the logo as in (2)? For example, does it endanger the copyright status of the logo (I may not have the exact legal terminaology here BTW)? Is this legal difficulty sufficient that a company could reasonably insist on presenting it as (1), or in some other form that gives almost complete control of the appearance? Len -- 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 Monday, 23 October 2000 11:51:34 UTC