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Re: Styling for high-contrast mode

for

From: Wayne Dick
Date: Oct 17, 2008 12:40PM

The styling for high contrast brings a more general point. One
cannot assume that a person with a visual impairment listens to
print material or uses a product like Zoom Text, that can enlarge
pictures as well as text.

In a hurry a person with low vision will frequently use ctl+ in
Firefox or a similar text enlargement mode. Imbedded inline
graphics as text stay small and unreadable. One can develop
javascript and stylesheets that work around this problem. A
similar problem arises with any contrast adjustment -higher or
lower. Some people need lower contrast than the author provides.

One can style around this by inserting the accomodation style:

img:before { content: attr(alt) } but the user needs access to
acomodating style sheets -- not a very common item.


So, if you use inline graphic text you will make life difficult
for visually impaired users. If you don't use an alt attribute
with the exact text you will make life impossible. Only the
screen reader user will automatically hear the alt-text and evan
so the sentence will be interrupted with the term "graphic"
before the alt-text.

I cannot think of any scenario where people with visual
impairments would not be at least annoyed by inline graphic text.
I think that is why people say avoiding inline graphic text is
best practice.


Sincerely

Wayne Dick