Re: User Stylesheets are Assistive Technology

On Wed, 18 Jul 2018 01:50:08 +0200, Wayne Dick <wayneedick@gmail.com>  
wrote:

> There are lots of people who claim to be accessibility experts who  
> disregard the value of user stylesheets as a significant >technology to  
> mitigate problems of visual interface. Actually they work quite well.

They can indeed work well, but browser implementation of them was never  
great, and I agree with you that it is a great shame it has got worse,  
causing increased problems for many people with disabilities.

> This technology is used primarily be people who are left out of the  
> mainstream ATs. They are a way to change colors, ensure a >personalized  
> contrast ration, control column width and many other things.

I would class them with browser extensions and other ways to customise  
browser interfaces and behaviour, as clearly belonging to the set of  
assistive technologies people rely on.

... Once upon a time Opera had a setup for what it called userJS - a  
technology originally invented to tease a rival for deliberately breaking  
compatibility, by messing with their website, but which proved very  
useful. The later Firefox feature GreaseMonkey did the same thing.

It was unfortunate that during my time at Opera I never managed to get  
traction for a solid sharing system (now someone would call it an app  
store ;) ) for user CSS.

For general use there are key limitations on what a userCSS can do before  
it starts to break things, but having site-specific CSS for particular  
user needs is perfectly feasible, but helping people share relevant stuff  
instead of forcing each user to do it for themselves would be a big step  
forward.

If site developers could see that there were real users downloading  
specific fixes to their sites, from such a sharing system, int could be  
used to explain the problems to them more effectively, and hopefully to  
convince them to help fix some themselves.

I have not looked closely at browser extension technology for a few years,  
but my suspicion is that it would now be feasible to develop extensions  
for browsers to manage userCSS, and that this could be used to support a  
system for sharing more specific CSS for particular sites. Of course, from  
here to there someone needs to do some development and some spreading the  
word.

> I think the AG should at least recognize that this is a form of  
> assistive technology that is available in a technology landscape >that  
> offers almost nothing useful for most people with low vision and  
> cognitive disabilities.

Agreed, but the place to get that idea accepted is in the Working Group  
itself.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Chaals: Charles (McCathie) Nevile find more at https://yandex.com
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