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

Hi Adam,

Blind users do not use style sheets /except if you create a special audio css)

So this really is a serious accessibility issue

Regards
Richard


rom: Adam Cooper 
Sent: Sunday, November 30, 2014 3:23 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org 
Cc: 'Andy Keyworth' 
Subject: 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