Re: Animated Gifs and Screen readers

Michael R. Burks wrote:
> Does anyone know of any issues with animated gifs or other animated images
> and screen readers?

I can state a non-screen reader problem that I have encountered recently:

I have Mozilla set not to play animations as I can't stand having movement on 
the screen when trying to read text.  What is actually rendered is the first 
frame only.

A site I encountered recently had a flashing message.  The first frame of this 
animation was just plain black.  Having no alt attribute, I couldn't even see 
what it was by giving it focus and reading the tooltip.  It took me quite some 
time to work out why these black splodges were appearing on the screen until I 
fired the same page up in Konqueror [the KDE user agent, same codebase as the 
Mac Safari].

As screen reading software/talking user agents would render the value of the alt 
attribute if present (as would Lynx), users of graphical user agents are the 
ones likely to find this inaccessible if they have switched animations off.

Cheers

M

-- 
Matthew Smith
Kadina Business Consultancy
South Australia

Received on Monday, 30 August 2004 22:23:16 UTC