RE: [Fwd: WAI and seizure disorders]

I guess we have two groups of users: 1) those that do not tolerate any
blinking/animation and 2) those that need to be able to control them, for
instance so that the animation is shown only once (n times) if not
explicitly activated by the user. The last group is basically everybody,
because all too often the pages are difficult to read because the eyes
continuously wander to the animation and lost the reading place on the text
line.

We can count on the designers/programmers to educate themselves and avoid
these problems. However, it has at least two problems: there are always
designers who don't know about these problems and the user interface for
turning things off will be confusing as everybody is doing it in their own
way.

So, I think the user agent should provide a common interface for turning
things totally off with alternative info for first group and showing
animations only once (n times) for the second group and providing a
animation control panel. In addition, the designers/programmers need to
have at least an easy library routine to communicate the info with the user
agent and provide some the control panel for starting and stopping the page
animations.

In IE, it seems that I can turn videos, sounds and animations off in
multimedia options. So what is the difference in this case? Are these
referring only to certain technology?

Furthermore, if we would have guidelines that ask designers to provide info
(in RDF?) of their Java Appletts, gif-animations etc. so that we know if
they are animations or blinking text etc., shouldn't we in that case be
able to turn the harmful ones off?

Marja

Received on Monday, 6 July 1998 17:06:49 UTC