21 Re: Zooming the whole website

Doesn’t this contradict the articles’ “don’t do anything to images”? Personally, I can’t understand why making the image zoom with the text is bad (other than it’s pixelated, but it will get that way whether the designer or the assistive technology does the zooming).

Can someone please enlighten me on this?

posted at 09:07 pm on January 12, 2005 by Brian LePore

22 or just make your site single column to begin with

that way you can let the user use the text zooming (or page zooming) built into the browser

posted at 11:43 pm on January 12, 2005 by Block Sheep

23 Screen magnification software

Alot of screen magnifiers are expensive and it seems unfair to penalise people with low vision. So we developed a screen magnification software package called WorksView which is free for the end users. It’s a browser plug-in and is currently being used by various councils and commercial organisations:
www.havant.gov.uk
www.macclesfield.gov.uk
www.kingston.gov.uk
www.casio.co.uk
www.solicitors.co.uk

We have also developed a zooming tool called WorksEye which is on the Casio website. If anyone’s got any feedback it would be much appreciated.

thanks
Huw

posted at 05:17 am on January 13, 2005 by Huw

24 Sigh

Shame it only works in IE!

posted at 06:17 am on January 13, 2005 by Chris Hester

25 Let me choose link color, thank you

Having both modest vision impairment and cognitive impairment, I deeply appreciate Joe’s article and encouraging responses.

As far as “what do we do with the links?” my preference is: distinguish them semantically, let me choose their display.

I turn off link underlines, because they reduce readability, and besides, underlining is a typewriter artifact that clashes with real fonts.

I want all my links to be purple. That way I don’t have to decode each site, “ok, which color is text and which color is link?” My brain is wired so that color-to-function mapping is slow.

I set these colors in my UA. Don’t over ride them for me or I just have to over ride your design, again.

posted at 10:02 am on January 13, 2005 by Jesse the K

26 re: Sigh

Shame what only works in IE?

Chris Hester wrote:
> Shame it only works in IE!

posted at 12:43 pm on January 13, 2005 by apartness

27 the web is not a typewriter

—- I turn off link underlines, because they reduce readability, and besides, underlining is a typewriter artifact that clashes with real fonts. —-
@ http://www.alistapart.com/discuss/lowvision/3/#c9835

This is the web now. Everyone knows that a link outside of context (like a nav menu or some other ordered structure) should have an underline underneath it.

posted at 01:42 pm on January 13, 2005 by Dustin Diaz

28 What percentage...

Is there a good source for statistics as far as low-vision web-surfers?

posted at 03:11 pm on January 13, 2005 by Circus Royale

29 Re: What percentage...

Circus, the Microsoft/Forrester studies (http://www.microsoft.com/enable/research/default.aspx) may be of use, but it’s all a little convoluted. They say (for US working-age adults):

Approximately one in four (27%) have a visual difficulty or impairment.

16% (27.4 million) of working-age adults have a mild visual difficulty or impairment, and 11% (18.5 million) of working-age adults have a severe visual difficulty or impairment.

That’s a fair amount, but be aware that “mild visual difficulty” will include people for whom glasses/contact lenses are their assistive technology. Having said that, a high proportion of people who already wear glasses do still benefit from other technologies, such as the ability to enlarge/shrink text at will and particularly to reduce glare by changing white backgrounds to a pastel/grey colour (this also applies to many people with specific learning difficulties).

I welcome Joe’s ideas and the continued education/discussion of more than just screen reader users, but we have to be careful not to make too many assumptions. A fully featured and customizable stylesheet switcher (where you can set various options rather than just between the author’s favourite blue and green themes) is a great idea for loads of your visitors, and it’s entirely redundant and overcomplex given that users who are in the know are aware they can fire up their own user stylesheet and override styling anyway. One of the big disadvantages of site-based stylesheet switchers is that it doesn’t follow you around once you leave; a user defined stylesheet does.
Web developers and designers determine the content and the presentation that information is published in, but it’s the user and their user agent that determine the environment the information is received in.

In an ideal world, where users were able to self-educate (or were interested in the technicalities of the web), and where everything was coded according to standards and the standards were more exciting than what they are, we wouldn’t need any skip navigation links (because page navigation is the job of the user agent, and site navigation sections would be a distinct and identifiable element), nor we would need any stylesheet switchers and so on. We could just publish freely in the knowledge that the standards folks and the user-agent folks were happy and cheery and helpful and dreamy and knew what they were doing, rather than having to hack accessibility into everything.

Until then, comrades.

posted at 07:15 am on January 14, 2005 by Alistair Knock

30 low-visibility = minimal styling?

I’m experimenting a bit with stylesheets and trying to include the comments made in this discussion. As I gather from what is said: – Just add the minimal CSS to turn vertical list navigational elements to a horizontal list – Add some borders and/or alignment statements for data that is presented in a table – Leave as much possible to the settings of the browser. – Reset to a one column layout whenever feasible.

I wonder though how much visually impaired people actually know how to set their own stylesheets. Changing standard link colours, background colours, foreground colours, fonts and typesizes are elements in the preferences panels of most browsers, but adding your own stylesheet might be a bit too technical.

Are the standard browser interface settings enough to give the right user experience, or do we need some options to be configurable and written to a stylesheet?

posted at 08:05 am on January 14, 2005 by Martijn ten Napel