Re: Minutes of the UAWG F2F Day 2 28 August 2013

Shawn's Conundrum (Mine Too)

There is a serious issue as to the User Agent's responsibility
regarding element level text customization.  User's need to see
differences in formatting to understand the organization of the
document they are reading, but how much should a user agent intervene
in this function.  I think none.

I am convinced that user agents should only have global text
customization commands.  These should honor user settings unless users
override the setting explicitly. Size is one exception. You have
addressed that already.

Now, how do we get element level accommodation.  The answer is the
same way everyone gets it.  Turn of author styles, linearize, and
apply user styles. Opera already implements user stylesheets this way.
 That is nice but the user should have a choice.

The Answer:

The functionality: The user should have the option to (1) Turn of
author style, (2) Linearize (not data tables) and (3) Apply a user
style to the page obtained after (1) and (2) are applied.

Customized style sheets for users will become a standard form of
assistive technology for users. Most users will not make them
themselves.  They will use something like my T-Rx.  What the user
needs is browser support to apply these style sheets to clean data.

Incidentally, iPad already can apply user stylesheets, they just ruin
the therapeutic value by not allowing change to link colors.  Other
e-readers are less robust, but they still could provide a reasonable
style-sheet access, and they should.  I have found no truly effective
e-reader for low vision, and I have used almost all of them.

Received on Thursday, 29 August 2013 19:48:35 UTC