- From: Matt May <mcmay@bestkungfu.com>
- Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 10:48:04 -0700
- To: "Charles McCathieNevile" <charles@w3.org>, <DPawson@rnib.org.uk>
- Cc: <w3c-wai-au@w3.org>, <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
----- Original Message ----- From: "Charles McCathieNevile" <charles@w3.org> > CMN Since these are essentially replacing text labels, there is an issue if > they eat too much space. (I think). For people who are reading the text close > packed for reading efficiency, doubling out the spacing can be very > frustrating. So it is important that the icons can be rendered at some fairly > small size, I think - 16x16 seems to be good based on the test we have here. > (I the example page I produced the other icons at that size in some of the > examples, just to see how it worked). But I agree that there will be people > who would like to have the icons large. Me for example. Why the urge to remove the textual labels? Text, properly done, can be at least as helpful as iconography, especially given the learning curve of icons that require a key. Not to mention you can't do a find in your browser for an image, and it won't search alt text. I think I have time in my busy schedule (hahaha. :) to do a textual treatment of your example text, if you're interested. I think, with that said, that set 3 does the job most adequately. Color, which is extremely helpful when scanning a document like this, is used to good effect here, insofar as the image still communicates the message without the color, and going down to 1-bit color displays, the backgrounds will most likely dither to white. Then, if I'm a multimedia tool provider, I can rely on color first, if that's available to me, to scan the page for salient information. And if I can't rely on it, I can fall back on pattern matching, which is slower, but that's what all of the other icons here are relying on. (Though it's worth noting to the author the high incidence of red-green colorblindness among males...) It's worth noting that set 3 isn't trying to do too much, and it's clear where the icons start and end. I agree with Emmanuelle's comment that set 2 is an excellent set of illustrative icons, but since they're used repetitively, I think the goal here is to make the simplest possible icon. To critique set 1, I should point out that the other two sets define the boundaries of their icons, where set 1 does not. Doing so keeps the viewer from having to define where the icon starts and ends, which takes time to process (defined here as fractions of a second, but still) before they can process the image itself. I think set 1 may have tried to communicate too much information in its icons, since these are only needed as indicators of relevance to a tool set, not as descriptive or explanatory images. - m
Received on Wednesday, 2 May 2001 13:51:00 UTC