Re: Len's CSS solution for the text in image problem - will designers adopt?

Kynn asserts that any web designer offering the CSS solution I suggested, 
for folder tabs with real text, would "get fired".

First of all, Alta Vista uses tabs with real text, and presumably the 
designers were not fired.  Of course, that method does hold up in NN 3.

Now, as for the CSS example http://astro.temple.edu/~kasday/wai/tabs/, that 
Kynn feels is a more significant danger to continued employment, since the 
appearance doesn't hold up in NN 3.

I constructed that example for a (very large, international) web design 
house working on a government web site here in Pennsylvania.  As you saw on 
the page, I pointed out explicitly that  appearance, but not function, 
would degrade in Netscape 3.  Nevertheless, the technical lead informed me 
that management there is on board and he's incorporating it into their 
standards.  I'm checking to see if it's just for this project or type of 
project or more broadly.

So there are at least some design houses who will use this approach... for 
at least some sites... not only because of the advantages for 
accessibility, but also because of all the other familiar advantages: lower 
server load,  faster download time, and simplified scripting, especially in 
an international environment.

As for Kynn's suggestion that some design houses will not bother with 
double A if they can't use images of text...

This does get at an important issue, but not the narrow issue of images of 
text.  The issue I think is what how we define priorities and 
compliance.  Right now, it's based solely on the difficulty experienced by 
a user with disabilities.  I think our rating needs to balance the 
difficulties some design feature causes against the value of or need for 
that feature.

Other people are already discussing compliance on this list, explicitly or 
implicitly.  So it's something more appropriate for another thread.  As far 
as this thread is concerned, my point is that it's unreasonable to insist 
that images of text always be allowed just because it should sometimes be 
allowed.

Len






At 02:53 PM 10/23/00 -0700, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
>At 03:06 PM 10/23/2000 , Wendy A Chisholm wrote:
> >Kynn, Cynthia, Marshall, and others who represent designers, do you 
> think it will it be accepted by designers?  It's using CSS which won't be 
> supported on older browsers which causes me to anticipate designers 
> balking at this.
>
>In short, no, but I don't think I could convince anyone, especially
>Len, because the argument "designers won't accept it and won't do
>it" doesn't seem to hold much weight 'round here. :)
>
>Any web designer who does this would get fired the minute that Marshall's
>boss looked at the page in Netscape 3 and saw "it's broken", and would
>get replaced by a web designer who understands the need for backwards
>compatibility and thus uses a graphic to convey branding content.
>(See Marshall's comments from a few weeks ago on this topic.)
>
>By the way, I am not lightly using the word "content" after branding.
>Branding is not "presentation", it is "content."  If you follow the
>idea of using CSS entirely to effect branding, then you run the risk
>of _losing content_ when CSS is not supported or available.
>
>That loss of content is something web designers are concerned with,
>and something we need to be concerned with.
>
>I don't think it's as easy as limiting it just to trademarks, either.
>There are legitimate reasons to not use CSS and to use graphical
>images (such as font choices, effects, even kerning), and to say that
>those are not good reason and accessibility MUST come first is pretty
>restrictive to a web designer.
>
>If I saw that as a priority 2 requirement, I wouldn't bother with
>double-A accessibility at all.  (However, that is also a result of
>the extreme brokenness of the compliance system for WCAG 1.0, too.
>The two problems -- unreasonable demands on web designers and a poor
>compliance scheme -- compound each other in unacceptable ways, making
>WCAG 1.0 very flawed.)
>
>--Kynn
>
>
>--
>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/
>What's on my bookshelf?                         http://kynn.com/books/

--
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, 24 October 2000 10:44:02 UTC