RE: [Issue 317] Color

Joe, I still find forms where required fields are shown in red without
additional indication.  Even more often, error alerts may return people
to forms where the fields that have something wrong with them are shown
in red but not otherwise identified.

And no, I don't have a URL in front of me that I canpoint to.





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-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Joe Clark
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 2004 9:56 AM
To: WAI-GL
Subject: Re: [Issue 317] Color



> If the text is colored... then it by definition can be read by the 
> User Agent or it wouldn't be able to render it red.

You mean there's HTML under that rendering? An amazing revelation.

> If the colored information is a line or something in a graphic - then 
> it would need to be described.

A poor choice of words.

> But for a person who is colorblind -- they would generally only have
> standard visual browsers.    And figuring out which item is what color
based
> on color codes in the source would be beyond them.

and that task *almost never comes up*. I am at the extreme high end of 
Web-surfing habits among Working Group members, as adduced elsewhere,
and 
I have found precious few sites that, in essence, say "Click the red box

to cancel. Click the green box to buy." It borders on nonexistence.

WCAG WG has this annoying tic of pretending it knows the first thing
about colour deficiency. Nobody seems to want to do the reading. Not
only is it readily available, much of it for free, but I brought
photocopies to the Toronto f2f.

All we have to do is require authors not to use confusable colours in
confusable ways. You can put red and green right next to each other and
it won't necessarily mean anything special for colour-deficient viewers.
And no, this has *nothing* to do with greyscale display and precious
little to do with another shibboleth, "contrast."

> Now
> 1- we COULD require all color blind people to have a plug in that 
> would expose colors to them.

Isn't this like denoting a language change by writing "The following
text 
is in Spanish"?

> OR
> 2-  we COULD require authors to have something that would provide a 
> redundant non-color cue for any color encoded information.

Every site that uses colour-- and few do not-- has "colour-encoded
information." Besides, our other proposed guidelines would require
authors to use something apart from just colour to communicate meaning.
HTML is not incredibly well-suited to this task, but it can be done. I
provided examples for the Toronto f2f.

> Anyone see holes in the above

It's all hole and no donut.


> - or additional things to keep in mind?
> - or anything else on this?

How about "do your research"? If that seems too onerous, you could
simply 
trust the contributor who *has* done it.

Oh, hi, Kynn. I'm sure you'll have something to say about this, or
rather, 
about me.

-- 

    Joe Clark | joeclark@joeclark.org
    Accessibility <http://joeclark.org/access/>
    Expect criticism if you top-post

Received on Wednesday, 21 April 2004 11:03:11 UTC