Re: Text in buttons - a solution and proposal. (Everybody happy

>The revised proposal is now:
>
>3.1 When an appropriate markup language exists AND WILL WORK, use markup
>rather than images to convey information TO ALLOW TEXT SCALABILITY.
>[Priority 2]   For example, use SVG for line art, MathML to mark up
>mathematical equations, and CSS for text-oriented special effects. You may
>use text in images, when the text has a primarily graphical function, if the
>effect cannot be achieved with markup,
>(as in the case of some for logos and limited accent elements) provided that
>you provide a textual equivalent to the content contained in the image.


LRK:  Unfortunately, I'm still uncomforable.  It's because of a detail and 
also something more fundamental.

The detail is: it's not just text scalability.  It's also font. For 
example, a "chilly font" that has icicles dripping from all the 
letters    I expect scaling wouldn't help e.g. people with a central 
scotoma.   Those individuals rely on peripheral vision which can't handle 
too much visual complexity (even when discriminable) so I expect the 
icicles would make letter recognition difficult even with 
magnification.  So need to change the wording to e.g. "to allow text 
scalability" with "allow control of text properties"

The more fundamental issue is:  I think this is a special case of the 
discussion on going on in the thread "General Exception for Essential 
Purpose" where folks are comparing (a) presenting information in a 
universally accessible form vs. (b) giving several presentations, each 
suited to a particular audience.  Here, presenting information as markup is 
(a), while giving the information as an image with an textual alternative 
is (b).

So we may want to put this discussion on hold till that other thread 
reaches a consensus.  That way we can resolve this issue in a way useful 
for 2.0 WCAG and perhaps anticipate the 2.0 philosophy in these 1.0 
guidelines.


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/