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

>Cynthia's suggestion on wording:

>Minimize the use of text in images, opting instead for HTML text styled with
>CSS. Choose fonts which are available on most users' machines and which can
>be rendered using CSS. You may use text in images for logos and limited
>accent elements where specialized fonts and text treatments are required,
>and cannot be achieved with CSS.
></checkpoint>
>
>"Minimize" doesn't seem much different than "avoid", but it does accurately
>express the task at hand.  I think we may have moved crossed the line from
>"simple enough" to "too simple" in our attempt to remove qualifiers.


Yes, I like "minimize".

I'd like to add  words like "as much as is feasible, consistent with the 
basic purpose of the site..."

That needs some wordsmithing.  What  I'm trying to get at is that there are 
some pages are truly works of art; in fact that's their fundamental 
purpose, and I wouldn't want to interfere with the artists vision in those 
cases.  For  example,
http://www.rivertrout.com/main.html , which is a "library of letters": the 
image map is a fish with hand drawn lables "fin", "tail", "heart" etc. When 
you mouseover the label "head" it changes to "letters of reason", when you 
mouseover "heart" you see "letters of passion". There's no way I can see to 
change that hand drawn text to CSS without ruining the artistic effect of 
the image.  (The letters themselves are HTML text by the way).

On the other hand, If the site is offering legally mandated information, 
e.g. a government site, like a bus schedule, or a public service site, 
especially sites that deal with disabilities,  much less graphic text is 
permissable IMHO.

As for commercial sites.  Some have elababorate graphics and the designer 
might say "the fundamental purpose is to sell product X" for which 
graphical text is needed.  Well, there are sites where personally I'd agree 
that the graphical text might help sell a product... for example, pop 
music...but there are other commercial pages where I'd say elaborate 
graphics are irrelevant at least to me... for example, the  warrantee 
description.  At some point there just has to be a judgment call.  That 
makes it tough to write guidelines, but how else to we allow graphical text 
in a site like rivertrout.com while minimizing it on the county bus schedule?

Anyway, that's what I'm trying to compress into the words "as much as is 
feasible, consistent with the basic purpose of the site".  Maybe we can't 
compress it this much.  I'm sure there are better words...  but I hope this 
moves us along.

Note that none of this is an objection to graphics in general: just to 
bitmap or compressed bitmap images of text.

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 Wednesday, 25 October 2000 12:39:27 UTC