RE: User Stylesheets are Assistive Technology

Correct me if I am in error. But I have tried booklets on some pages and received alerts blocking them.

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From: J. Albert Bowden <jalbertbowden@gmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, 19 July 2018 10:22 AM
To: Chaals Nevile <chaals@yandex.ru>
Cc: W3C WAI ig <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Re: User Stylesheets are Assistive Technology

"I think a major issue with user stylesheets is that there are no stable
CSS-APIs that you could work against."

selectors are about as stable as they come and incredibly effective.
a generic stylesheet may not beat specificity 100% of the time, but that shouldn't discount it, by any means.
moreover, any style sheet added to the document is going to have to be scripted in, and even more likely in javascript.
so since we are already using javascript, lets just find the styles that are not winning the specificity wars and then rewrite the style at a higher specificity.

we can also use javascript to address frailty/brittleness in selectivity; offer a nav/modal that appears on activation. read the dom, present page elements in nav/modal with toggles/options, etc.
there are already a ton of bookmarklets that do most of this, pieces of this, etc.

i actually think bookmarklets are more ideal here for cross-browse/rplatforms, most particularly in terms of maintenance; however, then i think it becomes an issue of user adoption. not many people know about bookmarklets.

maybe i'm missing something entirely? i am certainly not an a11y expert.



On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 7:01 PM, Chaals Nevile <chaals@yandex.ru<mailto:chaals@yandex.ru>> wrote:
On Wed, 18 Jul 2018 21:40:11 +0200, Tobias Bengfort <tobias.bengfort@posteo.de<mailto:tobias.bengfort@posteo.de>> wrote:
I think a major issue with user stylesheets is that there are no stable
CSS-APIs that you could work against. A user-stylesheet is basically a
monkey-patch that will break on a regular basis.

In order to get this working reliably we would have to convince authors
to trat their CSS as a public interface and announce breaking changes
early on. I am not sure this reasonable.

We would. But in a world of CSS preprocessors and so on, it is possibly easier than it might seem.

cheers
tobias


On 18/07/18 01:50, Wayne Dick 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.

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 use Safari because the browser will host user stylesheets. It is too bad
that other browsers decided to stop supporting this important assistive
technology.

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.

For those who want to tell me how wonderful screen magnifiers are if I just
used them correctly, don't bother. I probably know how to use them better
than you. For my needs, screen magnification scores zero.

Wayne Dick



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