Re: Revising 2.4 to deal with timeout barriers

----- Original Message -----
From: "Anne Pemberton" <apembert45@lycos.com>
>    Do flickering web pages cause seizures? Has it ever happened, even
once?

The most publicized evidence of CRTs causing photic seizures was the Pokemon
incident in 1997. Almost 700 kids were taken to the hospital after having
had a seizure when a 12Hz red-blue strobe appeared on the screen. Further
research showed that .75% of a sample of over 4000 had seizures when they
saw this scene, half of those being their first seizure. And another 10.4%
reported eye pain, dizziness, headaches, nausea, etc., as a result, with
over 3/4 of those reporting those problems for the first time[1]. Similar
problems were found back in '87 with a Wang Chung video, which was pulled
off the air.

Has there been a similar reported widespread case on the web? No, but that's
not to say the capability of inducing seizures isn't there, or that it
hasn't already occurred. The display mechanism is similar enough between TVs
and computers that the possibility is much more than theoretical.

[1] http://optics.org/article/news/05/2/1
-
m

Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2001 12:48:08 UTC