- From: Dave J Woolley <david.woolley@bts.co.uk>
- Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2000 19:27:43 +0100
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> From: Anne Pemberton [SMTP:apembert@crosslink.net] > > accommodate all those with disabilities before we worry about those who > choose not to buy what they need. Again, the answer to slow download is a > [DJW:] I have strong views on that response but limited time and want to concentrate on the other point. [DJW:] [10 lines of context follow] > Using graphics for links is but one use of graphics on a page. If graphics > do not help you, does that tell you they don't help others? It shouldn't. > You shouldn't stop your thinking at the end of your own nose. Broaden your > perspective. Statistically, "retarded" folks are about 3 percent of the > total population. What percentage of the disabled population would that > be? > Statistically, "learning disabled" folks, many of whom have significant to > severe problems with text, are some 20-25% of the total population in the > US. Again, what percentage of the US disabled is that? If you have access > to numbers on the total disabled population, you can easily figure out how > many are likely to NEED graphics. > [DJW:] - the specific issue was text as graphics, not graphics in general; - commercial use of graphics doesn't help people with learning problems; - standard icons are better treated as characters and many are already available as such; - icon characters could be added to text only browsers very quickly. A typical heavily graphical commercial site tries to establish a theme and then designs all the graphics and icons based on that theme. In order to use the site you are faced with a puzzle formed from the site metaphor in order to work out which graphical elements are significant and what they mean. Even sites with a fair amount of textual content can have up to half a dozen conventions that one needs to know before one can decipher the site. It's quite common for sites (particular mass market ones), and Windows interfaces in general, to take well known icons and serverly distort them to achieve a style. This doesn't happen on physical products. E.g. a physical DVD player will likely use fairly clean forms of the common forward backward, play, pause, etc., icons, but the web/windows interface is likely to show them as images of inscribed shapes on a mottled background. The proliferation of different icons on Windows application tool bars only helps the very frequent users; everyone else has to check the tooltips on each. Except for a few ones which have become standard, every product tries to invent its own. Particularly back to web sites, someone who is not a frequent user is faced with a problem a little like solving a cryptic crossword puzzle. In the same way that there are rules for finding anagrams, there are rules that have to be learnt for finding the significant elements in the site. An 80 year old that I know (who can still solve crossword puzzles) has had difficulty learning the most basic operation of new everyday technology for several years. I try to imagine him with many web sites. I think I could eventually teach him how to operate sites using clean markup, or to operate one specific web site (assume that it didn't change, which is not usually a safe assumption), but I doubt that I could teach him the meta rules needed to handle a new graphical site. Taking a bit of a risk, as you are clearly out of sympathy with Jakob Nielsen (although he is far from anti-graphics), you should have a look at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000806.html which describes how the difficulty of learning a new set of site conventions lost an author many sales when he changed fulfillment companies (away from Amazon). If one is going to use graphics to help people who cannot handle words, one needs a standard set of graphics across web sites (ideally across browsers as well). This happens to a large extent with physical products. The brightness and contrast icons on my monitor are very similar to those on my home TV. However, web designers don't want to look the same as everyone else, so distort them to the limit of recognizability. Once you have a standard set of symbols, you have an iconic alphabet, which can be represented as a font. Many such symbols already exist in Unicode, and, if there were the commercial demand, I'm sure that e-commerce shopping baskets and other relevant symbols could be added. The existing ones have been available to Windows interfaces and, with some abuse of the font mechanism, in HTML for a long time, but they are not used (even though, unlike GIFs, they are scalable), because designers don't want their symbol to look like everyone else's. In theory, with the top end system you assume everyone will buy before accessing commercial sites, the following HTML will show a black telephone symbol that could be interpreted as a phone number marker (it would be better to define a new character with that specific meaning): <html> <title> Phone </title> ☎ </html> (Unfortunately, the reality is that this is not in Lucida Sans Unicode and Windows doesn't have correct Unicode mappings for Wingdings, so, at the moment, you can call on the "when technology exists" clause, as the alternative hack of selecting the Wingdings font and typing "(" fails on browsers that do interpet character codes properly. I believe that Word 2000 comes with a more complete Unicode font, and it may work with that, or some of the shareware ones.) The current Unicode characters don't have many modern symbols (probably because of the failure of designers to use the ones already there)and don't have multi-colour characters (although, I suspect a PostScript type 3 font could create them), but these features can be pressed for. Once you have standard character codes, you can easily build lookup tables into text only browsers; you can tranlate them at WML gateways; you can use custom fonts for particular users, possibly even spelling out the word (I've assumed that content authors don't try to override the fonts, as, although they will want to do that, it will destroy the consistency of form that is desired - even then, an !important user override might solve the problem). I think you should be encouraging a move towards an East Asian type iconic language represented as well defined text characters, rather than calling for a licence for everyone to come up with different bit mapped graphics for the same concept. You should be encouraging the extension of the text character repertoire, not unconstrained imagery. > > -- --------------------------- DISCLAIMER --------------------------------- Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of BTS.
Received on Friday, 6 October 2000 14:27:51 UTC