Comment on WCAG 2.0: Scaling and stylizing text

I would still like to see a checkpoint that states:

Under Guideline 1:

Checkpoint 1.x: Ensure that the font size and styling of text content is 
easy to change.

Basically pushing (requiring?) people to use CSS for styling of text, 
rather than images.

COMMENT:
Authors using images to style text is one of the fundamental problems of 
accessibility on the web.  The current guidelines seem to perpetuate this 
problem, by allowing authors to continue this technique.  Text equivalents 
for images used to style text is a poor substitute.  In some cases these 
text equivalents are not even available to the user in the most common 
browser technologies.  For example the ALT content for the AREA element is 
not rendered by any of the major browsers (i.e when images are configured 
to be not rendered).  Even when text equivalents are rendered, the user 
often has little control over styling.  These are big problems for people 
with visual impairments (low vision, non-screen reader users).

I think there are limited exceptions to this requirement.  For example text 
that is used as part of a logo to "brand" a web site.

Jon


Jon Gunderson, Ph.D., ATP
Coordinator of Assistive Communication and Information Technology
Division of Rehabilitation - Education Services
MC-574
College of Applied Life Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
1207 S. Oak Street, Champaign, IL  61820

Voice: (217) 244-5870
Fax: (217) 333-0248

E-mail: jongund@uiuc.edu

WWW: http://www.staff.uiuc.edu/~jongund
WWW: http://www.w3.org/wai/ua

Received on Monday, 23 September 2002 10:11:15 UTC