Re: Animated GIFs and accessibility guidelines

> Guideline 7 at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/ says
> "Ensure that moving, blinking, scrolling, or auto-updating objects or
pages
> may be paused or stopped." and
> "Until user agents allow users to freeze moving content, avoid movement
in
> pages."
>
> How does this apply to animated GIFs?

[IMHO:] Animated GIFs can feature moving, blinking, or scrolling, so if you
use them and do not have an adequate form of control, you are in violation
of the guideline. I suppose you might be able to have a link with some
scripting hack to turn off the animation, but that wouldn't work in some
browsers, so you still couldn't cionsider that you have passed the
guideline.

I bleieve the rationale is that some people can't focus on moving images,
or blinking lights cause them discomfort, or even seizures (flickering is a
P1, everything else P2). Animated images are a nuiscance to many, and you
have to ask yourself if there is anything to be gained in having them in
your Web page. Is there information in there that can *only* be displayed
using an animation? Can't you link to it?

--
Kindest Regards,
Sean B. Palmer
@prefix : <http://webns.net/roughterms/> .
[ :name "Sean B. Palmer" ] :hasHomepage <http://infomesh.net/sbp/> .

Received on Thursday, 15 February 2001 10:19:26 UTC