Re: yelp

[Janina Sajka <janina rednote net>]

Nothing wrong with graphix. It's not the graphic, but how the page is
coded that determines accessibility in html. The authoratative source on
HTML accessibility is still the Web Accessibility Initiative in the W3C:

	http://www.w3.org/wai/

	Essentially you want your meaningful graphics to have <alt> text
	tags (or longdesc). The purely decorative (or thos transparent 1
	picsel ones used for positioning) should have a null string for
	alt text so that the accessibile browser can just ignore them.

	Please, please, please, don't do this 2 pages thing. It's a
	conclusion people often jump to, but it's the wrong answer.

	Getting accessibility right, on the other hand, is a step toward
	supporting device independent displays. This area, device
	independence, is some of the more interesting work now in
	progress within the WAI and other W3 working groups, namely DI
	(device independence) and VXML.
	
	We're headed toward multimodal interfaces. If we think it
	through well, thinking about accessibility can help develop the
	strategies that will support all users whether or not they're
	using a screen at the moment--and whether the screen they might
	happen to be using at this particular moment is 2 X 2 (cell
	phone) or 20 X 20 (awesome display on the desktop). Putting up
	different views based on consensus based standards is a user
	agent issue, not a content provider issue. The content provider
	just needs to get the markup right.


Jakub Steiner writes:
> From: Jakub Steiner <jimmac ximian com>
> 
> On Wed, 2003-08-20 at 16:52, Calum Benson wrote:
> 
> > It does look cool, but using a large banner image like you have there
> > could be a potential issue, unless it was themable.  The other icons
> > you're using would probably need to be themable too (does icon theming
> > even work within a gtkhtml page?), otherwise the 'arrows' in particular
> > wouldn't show up in the inverse themes.
> 
> If images are a problem, I guess it would make sense to have a special
> plaintext version of the help pages. It's hard to make things pretty
> without images.
> 
> I would think a nice little toggle button at the corner of the
> document/yelp could toggle plaintext (themeable) and fancy full-graphics
> mode for the pretty looks.
> 
> My goal is to make it pretty, I doubt it can be prettier that the
> current incarnation without using some graphics.
> 
> -- 
> Jakub Steiner <jimmac ximian com>



-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina afb net		Phone: (202) 408-8175