Re: GIFs

Yes, it is very true that there are numerous possible features (java, 
flash, javascript, movies, SVG, etc) that can be used to create 
flicker. And as Alan pointed out earlier, just picking up on gif images 
that change isn't enough. On the other hand for a site with several 
thousand pages where all kinds of content has been added to a template 
(think of a university) it is helpful to be able to check for things 
that are suspicious and will require manual investigation.

A couple of examples: In the mid 90s I was briefly Webmaster for an 
Australian University. We knew we had thousands of pages on tens or 
hundreds of servers, but we didn't even know how many. Because 
University policy was to let people publish, and not get in their way 
too much (we could just afford to teach people who wanted to publish - 
we didn't have a review staff for every course page let alone every 
piece of information on a distributed multi-campus University) we had 
no way of finding out which pages might cause problems such as 
accessibility, or lynx capability (which was what students were using a 
lot).

To be able to search a large Website automatically and flag the issues 
for further investigation is important. This is the same reasoning as 
picking suspicious-looking alt text and getting a person to review it - 
a large task becomes more easily manageable, and distributable.

And finally it doesn't have to be a large organisation. With 20 authors 
most sites are essentially managed on trust rather than knowledge 
(unless the publishing systems are extremely inflexible), so QA tools 
that can check over the whole site for things that are more or less 
likely to be problems are very valuable.

cheers

Chaals

(PS My apologies to deque: I had read that RAMP did some kind of 
checking for flicker).

On Saturday, Mar 29, 2003, at 08:01 Australia/Melbourne, Josh Hughes 
wrote:

> I think there's a lot of programming necessary to catch all the
> potential things that could cause a page to flicker. It's better as a
> user check; I think most people could tell whether or not their page
> could cause someone to have an epileptic seizure.
>
>
--
Charles McCathieNevile           charles@sidar.org
Fundación SIDAR                       http://www.sidar.org

Received on Friday, 28 March 2003 18:39:08 UTC