Style Sheets for Access

We encountered a CSS issue related to override which may be best addressed
in the browser or authoring tool rather than CSS2, but just in case someone
can think of a creative way of dealing with it in the CSS specs I thought I
would bring it up here.

In using CSS in Internet Explorer, through the view/accessibility menu we
discovered that the CSS chosen (e.g., a large print, high contrast style
sheet we created) would in fact over ride other embedded, linked or
imported style sheets as long as we had a style declaration for all the
specific selectors. However, when we encountered style sheets with
declarations for selectors for which we had no declarations (i.e.
contextual selectors or classes we hadn't thought of) the other style
sheets over rode ours. This is exactly how cascading should work, however
it makes it difficult to create an accessible stylesheet. How can you
anticipate every possible permutation of element, class and context in one
style sheet?

The easiest way to solve this is probably in the browser, by disregarding
all but the user selected style declarations made through the accessibility
menu. Alternatively an authoring tool which generates an omnibus style
sheet to over ride all other style sheets could be created (this would be
huge and would  defeat the CSS purpose of limiting the transfer of
redundant information), or a Java applet which adjusts the style sheet on
the fly in response to other declarations....any thoughts?

Jutta Treviranus

Received on Wednesday, 29 October 1997 12:40:00 UTC