- From: Matt May <mcmay@yahoo.com>
- Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 14:02:35 -0400
- To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
AP As for those who are so distracted by animation that they cannot remember to hit the stop button should not be traveling the Internet without binders on .... (i.e. turn off graphics or animation in the browser). After all, you don't tell someone to stand in the middle of the street to see if the bus is coming, so when you surf the net, you need to maintain your personal safety. MM If I have this right, you want to mandate creating alternative-media versions of existing content to illustrate concepts, but users who are distracted by those alternatives are to turn them off. If you do this with animated GIFs or Flash, you will violate checkpoint 4.4: Ensure that content remains usable when technologies that modify default user agent processing or behavior are turned off or not supported. Flash and animated GIFs cannot be started or controlled from the user interface. They're either on and uncontrollable (except for stopping animated GIFs, which subsequently can't be restarted), or they're off and inaccessible. "Turning off animation" in the browser means nothing to Flash (it'll happily keep Flashing away), and with animated GIFs merely prevents users from discovering whether the image is an animation at all. These are _all_ accessibility problems. Now, either these additions are media equivalents, in which case they should be communicating little more than the same information as the textual content; or they're new content, and need to be treated as such. I think it's clear that the media called for in the current 3.4 is new content, and telling users who could benefit from that content to turn it off is a large accessibility problem of its own. AP Minimum is one image per page, preferably a topical illustration or logo. Every image more enhances the graphical usefulness of a page. Too many doesn't exist. MM I find this absurd as a statement of fact. I can't state this often enough, apparently: quantity does not indicate quality. Quality of alternate media is the factor that will make sites more accessible to all, and that isn't going to be helped by simply demanding more images. I'll go so far as to say the presence of a logo is beneficial to establish context, though it will generally communicate little about a document's actual content, and as such is an incidental benefit. But just as we can't formulate generalized technical criteria for satisfying 3.3, we can't do it for 3.4. And when we can't do that, we have to work with the authors, not construct artificial barriers for them when they can use their own knowledge of their subject matter to make better decisions. - m _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Received on Friday, 10 August 2001 13:50:05 UTC