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Re: Content in background images

for

From: Nancy Johnson
Date: May 24, 2011 1:51PM


Getting back to the background images with text..... It's much faster
for the developer if the design and complicated... not an excuse but
I've seen this first hand....

I received some basic htmls for a government site recently First the
design was far to complicated for any website

There was a heading area where there was a set of 5 rules spanning
out from either side of the text and a complicated background behind
the rules.

When I called her on it, she simply broke the image in half and
brought the section with the text to an inline image and use alt.

I did redo the entire section... and made it work so the headings were
actually text...there were no links..yet it was heading text.

My point is that some developers see this as speed, don't understand
the implications..

Nancy

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Tim Harshbarger
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> It's my understanding and my past experience that if you use high contrast mode on Windows, background images will be disabled in some of the browsers.  In fact, I spent a whole weekend once trying to figure out how in the world sighted people knew a table was sortable before realizing that the visual indicators were CCSS background images.  Until then, i was starting to think all the sighted folk had some sort of user interface mental telepathy--or just went around clicking on things to see what happens.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Dean Hamack
> Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2011 12:15 PM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Content in background images
>
> I can only see one reason why users would disable images, and that's if they
> are on a mobile device with a slow connection. And I think that's a really
> rare edge case. As long as the link contains all of the text that's in the
> images so that screenreader users can get the same information, I think it
> is perfectly fine.
>
>
> On 5/24/11 10:06 AM, "Angela Colter" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
>> Hi Dean,
>>
>> Indeed, the CSS for the link I mentioned specifies both text-indent:
>> -10000px and overflow: hidden
>>
>> And that's the reason for my question.
>>
>> One of the things that accessibility review checklists always tell you to do
>> is turn off images to see if the same information is conveyed. (See
>> http://www.w3.org/WAI/eval/preliminary.html and
>> http://webaim.org/resources/opera/#images ) In this case, the page is marked
>> up so that screenreader users have access to the link text, but people who
>> merely turn off images in a GUI browser will not.
>>
>> It makes sense that marking up the page this way is useful for allowing
>> flexibility in how the page is presented in a variety of devices, but is
>> that happening at the cost of users who are simply turning images off?
>>
>> And is the poor experience of these users--and I'll grant you that I have no
>> idea if such users even exist--a valid argument against using this
>> content-in-background-images method?
>>
>> Angela
>
>
>