Re: Combine 79, 78, and 74 SCs? (was Re: Mechanism Disclaimer)

Authors can both enable and disable accessibility features on browsers by how they write their content.

For example,   setting a Fixed page width in pixels defeats the natural reflow of text when you narrow the window. 

So having and SC that says - that “nothing is done “  to defeat a capability in the browser is a very reasonable thing to  do.   

You can try to do it specifically by predicting what the author might do and writing a specific SC for that — but a better way is to say don’t do any thing that will overide access features… and then user failures to help identify specific things that would fail that SC so it is easier for authors to identify them. 

In-line formatting for example I think will defeat some of these things — but that may depend on browser design. 


> RE: "Adaptable presentation: Overriding the font-family, colors or spacing used on a web page does not cause loss of content or functionality."


I dont think the author has any control of this.  You are asking the author to be responsible for what someone else does — without saying what that person might do.   For example — what if a person makes fonts very small (1 pt) or  the background is changed so that it is the same as the color of some of the text on the page.   Both will result in loss of functionality but that author can’t help that.     If they are to be sure to have the page work with different alternations - there has to be some definition and ranges on the alternations.    In WCAG 2.0 for example we made the authors responsible for maintaining functionality with ZOOM but we defined what that meant and told them they only had to handle zoom up to 200%. 

> Secondarily, do we really have to have all SCs including PDF (and Flash/Silverlight?) techniques? I don't think that's a good thing for 2017 (compared to 2008).


IF you want technology agnostic SC — then you do.    Also there is a massive amount of web content in PDFs.   Especially in the government.   If you are going to write Level A or AA techniques that cannot be met by any technology except HTML - then it may limit that adoption of the new guidelines. 


>  I outlined 4 levels of user-adaptation on a task force email, it is worth others thinking about it to, especially for COGA. These are different ways the SCs can impact layout and author effort:

These are very interesting.    I hope they get lots of attention and discussion.  This type of thinking is very valuable in exploring what can and can’t work — and ways to make things work that look like they wouldnt. 




Gregg C Vanderheiden
greggvan@umd.edu



> On Jan 22, 2017, at 8:39 PM, Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi David,
> 
> Lots of progress whilst I didn't check email this weekend!
> 
>> For those web technologies that allow user agents to change *any or all* of the following: 
>> - foreground and background colors, 
>> - font family​, 
>> - spacing between characters, words, lines, or paragraphs, 
>> nothing is done in the content to prevent these modifications. 
> 
> The "nothing is done" doesn't sound like something from WCAG, and surely a web technology doesn't allow a user-agent to change something: that's up to the user-agent? 
> 
> If an author doesn't "prevent" a modification (which they can't anyway), but some content disappears or functionality doesn't work, does that fail? It is assuming intent, which doesn't lead to a true/false conclusion.
> 
> I'm still thinking it's best to orient the SC text around the content and what the content needs to enable. 
> 
> Taking my previous font-family example and updating it:
> "Adaptable presentation: Overriding the font-family, colors or spacing used on a web page does not cause loss of content or functionality."
> 
> Secondarily, do we really have to have all SCs including PDF (and Flash/Silverlight?) techniques? I don't think that's a good thing for 2017 (compared to 2008).
> 
> However, if that is the case, it might help to separate out Spacing, as common PDF UAs can do font & colours.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -Alastair
> 
> PS. I outlined 4 levels of user-adaptation on a task force email, it is worth others thinking about it to, especially for COGA. These are different ways the SCs can impact layout and author effort:
> 
> 1. Adaptation that works under the author-controlled styling/scripting in a default browser, such as Resize text or the new Resize content.
> 
> 2. Adaptation that over-rides author styles but doesn’t impact layout, such as changing colors or font-family.
> 
> 3. Adaptation that will likely break or override layouts, such as Linearisation or Spacing. Also several from COGA that I’ve seen, such as adding icons to the text.
> 
> 4. Personalisation where the website would have to provide options for the user, or in some way work with the user’s settings in a pre-agreed fashion.
> 
> Levels 2 & 3 have some overlap, where a really odd font might break a layout, or a minor change of spacing might not.

Received on Monday, 23 January 2017 03:33:53 UTC