- From: Joel Sanda <joelsanda@hotmail.com>
- Date: Fri, 07 Jan 2000 23:16:35 MST
- To: charles@w3.org, 'w3c-wai-ig@w3.org'
- Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Charles; Thanks for your response and critique. I hope my responses can explain why we chose to do some things the way we did. The JavaScript is necessary to maintain the page layout in Netscape browsers when the window is resized. As we all know, you resize a window in Netscape and the CSS-P is thrown out the window. That JavaScript forces a reload, which restores the CSS-P formatting. It's actually a modification of some JavaScript published by O'Reilly in one of their JavaScript books - there version is buggy in a couple of Netscape 4.x versions, particularly on the Mac. Great feedback on the video and audio links. I will make that correction Monday. There is no fixed screen size - except that the site is coded for 800x600 resolution, so the maximum width of all the page elements is 744 pixels. Coding for an 800x600 screen resolution is about as low as anyone can realistically go today - in my opionion. If you're refferring to the JavaScript, that does not create a fixed window size, only addresses what I mentioned earlier. We've had some problems with external style sheets in some versions of Netscape 4.x - which is why this is in the index page. I don't know what the issue is, nor can we faithfully replicate it. Finally, much of the source code is due to Netscape. The page was originally coded for IE4.0 and better, then reworked to work in Netscape. This was what we came up with. I suppose we're all stuck with code that isn't as clean as we'd like until Netscape opts to support more of the W3C's HTML4 and CSS2 Recommendations. The page was at least 1/2 the size before we added functionality in Netscape. Again, thanks for the comments! Regards; Joel Sanda Webmaster eCollege.com ----Original Message Follows---- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org> To: Joel Sanda <joels@ecollege.com> CC: "'w3c-wai-ig@w3.org'" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org> Subject: Re: CSS-P Site Built For Accessibility Date: Sat, 8 Jan 2000 00:15:33 -0500 (EST) 5 minute review impressions... It is unclear to me why javascript is necesary - I used a text and a graphic browser to check it out without a lot of problem except where the links were javascript references for a new window. This is not helpful for accessiblity in general, and doing it through Javascript is a bad idea in particular. Where there are audio/video versions of information it would be helpful to provide more details about what they are - for example instead of the current code something like <p><a href="videofile"><img src="realvideo_icon" alt="welcome message (video)"></a> <A href="videofile">Welcome message (video)</a></p> something like <p><a href="videofile" title="Welcome message, real Video version"><img src="realvideo_icon" alt="Real Video" title="Real Video Icon"><span class="nounderline"> </span>Welcome message (video)</a></p> would be nice - provides the fact that it is realvideo (you should also use a type attribute in the a element to do this in a machine-readable way) to the user, and means tere is one link not two - having to skip through multiple redundant links is something worth avoiding if possible - especially with a head-switch or similarly slow input system. Requiring a fixed screen size is not very helpful and should be avoided - people who are using magnified screens (or even just getting the crucial bits by using a 30 or 40 pt font) are then unable to avoid having the problem of scrolling horizontally as well as verticaly, which is a serious hassle. For the rollover functions it would be nice to make them work for non-mouse users - add an onFocus/onBlur set of triggers. In general the text alternatives seem to be done intelligently. It would probably have made more sense to use a single external stylesheet. And given a regular image-naming schema you could write a short function to find the names, and reduce the size of the page source by a substantial amount. Cheers, Charles McCN -- Charles McCathieNevile mailto:charles@w3.org phone: +61 409 134 136 W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI 21 Mitchell Street, Footscray, VIC 3011, Australia On Thu, 6 Jan 2000, Joel Sanda wrote: Hi; I'm a webmaster for eCollege.com - a company that puts schools on the Internet with a variety of solutions for online and distance education. We have been researching and implementing W3C WAI standards, and have a site we would like some feedback on. Our most recent attempt employs CSS Positioning for nearly all layout. There are minor exceptions where we had to insert simple (no embedded) tables to ensure consistent formatting for both Netscape and Microsoft browsers. The site is at http://online.luc.edu/, and should comply with all WAI Priority 1 Recommendations, with a few minor exceptions. Some of the content areas do not yet have text-based versions available, although we do have a video and audio version. I have used JAWS 3.31 on the site, and it seems to do fairly well with site navigation and content. The site also passed Bobby and the W3C's CSS Validator. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! Joel Sanda Webmaster eCollege.com 10200 A East Girard Avenue Denver, CO 80231 phone 303.873.7400 ext.3021 fax 303.873.7449 "Educators Working for Educators" www.eCollege.com -- Charles McCathieNevile mailto:charles@w3.org phone: +61 409 134 136 W3C Web Accessibility Initiative http://www.w3.org/WAI 21 Mitchell Street, Footscray, VIC 3011, Australia (I've moved!) ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com
Received on Saturday, 8 January 2000 01:17:08 UTC