RE: Web Forms: Usability and Accessibility Question.

-----Original Message-----
From: David Woolley

* to understand.  I'm basically referring to the styling of form elements
that
> take away the users ability to immediately identify them.  I'm talking
about

Web 'designers' have been doing this with links for years[1].  If you read
the styles list, you will find quite a few complaints that browsers still
don't allow enough freedom to redesign standard user interface elements.

In my view, this is the primary obstacle to anyone over 40 learning to
use the web; you cannot write a simple set of rules for interpreting
pages; you need a vast amount of accumulated knowledge about design
conventions, continually updated to track fashions.

[1] I coined the phrase "hunt the link" to describe this sort of design
(although one frequent champion of graphic designers' rights, here, has
said that is perfectly OK to have pages where you have to wave the mouse,
looking for feedback, to find the links).


The blatant examples to me are text that is in the same default blue color
as anchors and underlined that are not links at all.  And plain black text
without any underline or any discerning feature to separate them from other
standard text when they are in fact anchored.

Geoff

Received on Wednesday, 4 February 2004 03:29:10 UTC