- From: Chris Maden <crism@ora.com>
- Date: Wed, 25 Mar 1998 10:59:45 -0500
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
[Taylor-Made] > **Smile** I appreciate your suggestions...so I kinda took both > suggestions and maybe you can take a look at what I did to my > educational page to make people aware of accessiblity problems > bragging about what I did. I hope this is somewhat better. :-[) I think you've done a wonderful job of creating a page that looks good in Netscape and Lynx. If it looks good in Lynx, it probably sounds good, too. I have three criticisms, and they are all very minor - take them all with the understanding that I think your site looks great. (1) The description "typing pc" is very unclear. I use Lynx as my primary browser, and this was the only thing I didn't understand. Maybe "cartoon PC typing on its own keyboard" would be better. (2) This is the reason I'm posting this here instead of mailing Joyce directly. <img alt="purple line">. While designing for access, it's important to consider the sighted viewers too! I see three audiences for the alt text: graphic browser users with image loading turned off, text browser users, and visually impaired users. Those with image loading turned off want to know whether to load the image. For them, an indication of whether or not a line is interesting enough to load is worthwhile. But for text browser users, a snippet of text doesn't have the same effect as a rule does - it doesn't break up the page in the same way. Using ASCII-graphic alt text helps them. And I think that most screen readers skip most punctuation. I think a combination alt text would work well for all three audiences: maybe something like <img alt="purple line________________________________"> and <img alt="zig-zag line /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\"> would work well. (3) Change the background graphic. It's distracting to me - I'd go with something non-textual. Toning it down may have prevented screen readers from trying to read it, but now it's nearly unreadable to the sighted, and I spent a little while trying to figure out what it was. When it first loaded, I honestly thought it was Hebrew. -Chris -- <!NOTATION SGML.Geek PUBLIC "-//Anonymous//NOTATION SGML Geek//EN"> <!ENTITY crism PUBLIC "-//O'Reilly//NONSGML Christopher R. Maden//EN" "<URL>http://www.oreilly.com/people/staff/crism/ <TEL>+1.617.499.7487 <USMAIL>90 Sherman Street, Cambridge, MA 02140 USA" NDATA SGML.Geek>
Received on Wednesday, 25 March 1998 10:53:45 UTC