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

Just following on from my original post; in case what I'm describing is unclear, I've prepared a sanitized screen capture. The screenshot is of a site with CSS disabled; the large red rectangle highlights one of several (the image became too long to meaningfully show them all) empty white spaces.

The spaces don't appear to affect either NVDA or JAWS, and the content otherwise seems to linearize well. There is no white text filling these spaces; my best deduction is these areas are defined by linked social media features. The only situation I can imagine this impacting is low-vision users who (by force of long habit, perhaps?) use a CSS-disabled view to read websites, and for whom these seas of white space would be challenging. But I don't know if there is any estimate on the number of real users this description fits.

Again, your opinions are greatly appreciated. 

Andy Keyworth
Senior Web Accessibility Specialist 
T-Base Communications
Phone: 613-236-0866 | Toll free: 1-800-563-0668 x 1256
www.tbase.com | Ogdensburg, NY | Ottawa, ON
ALL TOUCH POINTS. ALL ACCESS METHODS. ALL FORMATS.TM

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-----Original Message-----
From: Patrick H. Lauke [mailto:redux@splintered.co.uk] 
Sent: December-01-14 10:39 AM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: When reviewing a site with CSS disabled, "sea of white" appears: is this a real accessibility issue?

On 30/11/2014 15:27, Userite wrote:
> 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

Unless they use a text-only browser, or have explicitly set their browser to ignore stylesheets, those users will get the same experience (provided a site shows/hides things appropriately, e.g. using display:none - which removes something visually, as well as from the DOM representation seen by AT) as sighted users. So no, the above statement is not accurate.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

www.splintered.co.uk | https://github.com/patrickhlauke http://flickr.com/photos/redux/ | http://redux.deviantart.com
twitter: @patrick_h_lauke | skype: patrick_h_lauke


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