RE: When reviewing a site with CSS disabled, "sea of white" appears: is this a real accessibility issue?

Hi Andy,

 

I think disabling  CSS for testing purposes and actually using a page with
no CSS are quite different things. 

 

I often see 'page is not accessible with CSS turned off' listed as an issue
on audit reports. 

 

I think this can be very misleading and counterproductive.

 

The question is who chooses to disable or which user agents don't support
CSS? 

 

I'd be very interested to see some dependable statistics on this.

 

My inkling is that these numbers would be very small, and, while 'pages not
being accessible without CSS' might be a barrier for these users, there are
plenty of other accessibility issues out there.

 

I'd also be interested to see how big these 'seas of white' caused by social
media widgets can be!

 

Cheers,

Adam 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From: Andy Keyworth [mailto:akeyworth@tbase.com] 
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2014 4:07 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: When reviewing a site with CSS disabled, "sea of white" appears: is
this a real accessibility issue?

 

Hi all,

 

When I was trained to do web accessibility testing, one thing I was directed
to do was to disable CSS and review the page to observe how it linearizes.
But I was also informed that if large white spaces  ("seas of white")
appeared in this view, that was an accessibility failure because it impacted
users who needed this view to compensate for low vision. I have more or less
accepted this on faith, but wanted to solicit your advice on whether this
assumption is correct. I find quite often that seas of white appear because
social media features, which in an CSS-enabled display are quite small, in
fact import a page from the social media, and the effect is to render what
would otherwise be "invisible" content" into white space in CSS-disabled
view. 

 

Andy Keyworth