RE: Kynn's Reply: Textual Images vs. Styled Text

A ruling on  Americans with Disabilities law (thanks for the link, William)
stated is not enough to merely provided access, but the issue is rather the
extent to which the communication is actually as effective as that provided
to others.

Now there may be a problem as to what is a reasonable accommodation.
Wheelchair ramps are not easy or cheap and may bother the ascetics of the
design of a staircase. Yet non-the less, they are doable, and are considered
reasonable accommodations, by law.

When people wish to keep the law with regard accessible web sites they look
to WAI, and if something is at all reasonable, then we have a responsibility
to tell them.

Re: text in images. - important content that is not grafical in it
functionality should not be in an image. Using CSS is no harder then
installing a wheel chair ramp. with other images there is often no
reasonable accommodation to be made. When there is (like when SVG becomes a
reality) then we will recommend that too.

Were there is a better known way to do something, then we must recommend it.


Sorry.

L
-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Kynn Bartlett
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2000 2:38 AM
To: William Loughborough; 'WAI-GL'
Subject: Re: Kynn's Reply: Textual Images vs. Styled Text


At 12:11 PM -0800 11/28/00, William Loughborough wrote:
>At 02:29 PM 11/28/00 -0500, Leonard R. Kasday wrote:
>>3.1 When an appropriate markup language exists
>
>In addition to "for example" and "avoid" you have to consider what
>"exists" means.

This is against

>The use of image text is against the rules WCAG 1.0, the laws of the
>State of Pennsylvania, and probably Oz and Canada and possibly
>Portugal.

It's an absurd "rule", as it favors one technique (outright banning
of specific types of images) and ignores a bunch of realities, including:

* The problem with magnifying text images also applies to magnifying
   any other images that contain content; you may not be able to
   adequately increase the size of an image of ANY kind.  If the
   answer is to "ban it!" then the answer is clearly to ban all
   images on the web entirely -- because there will likely be some
   audience for whom they are too small.

--Kynn
--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@idyllmtn.com>
http://www.kynn.com/

Received on Wednesday, 29 November 2000 10:18:19 UTC