RE: Best accessible practice for adding textual images

This article by Joe Clark in A List Apart has some useful information
and techniques about designing for users who have low vision:

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/lowvision/

John

"Good design is accessible design."

Dr. John M. Slatin, Director 
Accessibility Institute
University of Texas at Austin 
FAC 248C 
1 University Station G9600 
Austin, TX 78712 
ph 512-495-4288, fax 512-495-4524 
email jslatin@mail.utexas.edu 
Web http://www.utexas.edu/research/accessibility 



-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Paul Collins
Sent: Friday, May 20, 2005 3:27 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Best accessible practice for adding textual images



Hello,

I am a front end developer and using CSS with XHTML  to position my
content. I am curios to know what is the best way to display images
containing text.

Lately I have been using the CSS background property to display all my
images and hiding the text in a span. For example the following site:
http://www.caweek.org. Obviously, you can't resize the images on your
screen, but If you turn off styles you will have a pure text document in
your browser, apart from the occasional photograph.

I have just discovered another method by where you add the image as
HTML, but specify the height and width using css and making it an EM
instead of PX. This enables the user to enlarge the image as they would
enlarge text. This of course pixelates the image as you enlarge it,
leaving an unsatisfactory but readable result. Also, if you turn styles
off you still have the image displaying on the screen and you can't
enlarge it.

My question is what would the W3C say is best practice and the common
method for people with sight difficulties to read a web page? Would they
turn the styles off when they can't enlarge the image? Or would they
prefer to see a blurred version when they enlarge the text?

Any advice would be fantastic.
Thanks in advance.
Paul Collins

-- 
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Paul Collins
Ph: +44 (0) 793 9038 249 (UK)
pauldcollins@gmail.com

Received on Friday, 20 May 2005 12:06:00 UTC