RE: Colour blindness and accessibility

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Christophe Strobbe wrote:

> >.mandatory      { color: red ; }
> >
> >and the colour-blind user has an instant override,
> 
> This also demonstrates that using HTML and CSS can result in mixing up 
> structure and presentation (cf. Jukka Korpela's article on 
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/styles/harmful.html). Because form elements 
> in HTML do not have an attribute called "mandatory" or "required", you 
> create a new type of field with class="mandatory" or class="required" or 
> whatever comes to mind. This means that the user has to check your HTML 
> code to find out which class selector they should at to their stylesheet. 
> So they would have to write
> .mandatory, .required, .req { color: red;}

You're postulating a user agent with very limited capabilities.

The one I was postulating doesn't require anything so clumsy.  It
will present you with an accessibility option that presents the
classes defined in whatever stylesheet you happen to be viewing,
and lets you apply presentational attributes on-the-fly.  So
it'll list ".mandatory" as "color: red", and allow you to adjust
it to "font-weight: bold", or whatever you want.  It could even
directly highlight in a predefined way all elements having
a given property.

The basic point is that markup+style supports this kind of
accessibility.  The limiting factor is user agents.

-- 
Nick Kew

In need of paying work - http://www.webthing.com/~nick/cv.html

Received on Wednesday, 30 April 2003 14:15:27 UTC