RE: Comments on the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 doc (21 August 2002 draft)

> 
> Responses are indicated by JRG:
> At 03:05 PM 9/8/2002 +0000, Brian Kelly wrote:
..
> >Printing
> >
> >The document does not appear to address the printing of 
> resources.  A 
> >page may be rendering correctly on screen, but is corrupted when 
> >printing (as has happened in Netscape).  It would appear that a user 
> >agent could comply with the UAAG, but provide inaccessible hardcopy 
> >output.
> 
> JRG: COuld you provide more information here.  I am not sure 
> what you mean 
> by inaccessible hardcopy.

In some versions of Netscape the use of an indented margin caused
problems in the hard-copy printout, although the screen display was fine
(Netscape used different renders for screeen and hardcopy).
Specifically the content was compressed into the first third of the
page.  After complaints I was forced to abandon stylesheets, as my
readers used Netscape and wanted hardcopy.

I would argue that hardcopy is an accessibility issue and should be
addressed by the guidelines and that there is a need to ensure that the
control over the hardcopy output is covered by the guidelines as the
screen appearance is (control over size, background images, frames,
plugins, etc.)

Thinking about it, paper could be regarded as a (dumb) user agent, which
uses a browser as a proxy.  Not sure if that's a useful model - I was
trying to think about the applicability of the guidelines to other
output devices (braille, offline browsers, transformers such as Avantgo,
etc. 

 Brian

---------------------------------------
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
UKOLN
University of Bath 
BATH
BA2 7AY
Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
Web: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Phone: 01225 38 3943

Received on Monday, 9 September 2002 10:30:18 UTC