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Re: WCAG 2.0 'accessibility supported'

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Feb 6, 2009 2:45PM

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Rimantas
Liubertas
Sent: 06 February 2009 17:54
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] WCAG 2.0 'accessibility supported'

> However, 75% or so of Internet
> users do not have such user agents. Furthermore, they have no way of
> knowing that using a different user agent would allow the text to be
resized.

How many of these 75% percent do need text resizing, and how many do know
that this feature exists?

Where did you get this number anyway? Only IE<7 cannot increase text size,
does it have 75% of market share? If one believes net stats all versions of
IE have market share ~67% and IE6 has less than 30%.

Frankly, it is sad to see how this "px is non resizable in IE"
nonsense became the bike-shed of the web accessibility and way too many
just stuck on this overblown "problem"
and won't move on.

As for the WCAG - I'll stuck with WCAG Samurai for a while, thank you very
much.

Regards,
Rimantas
--
http://rimantas.com/


"How many of these 75% percent do need text resizing?"

My guess would be a percent or two. Doesn't sound much but developers seem
happy to put in the effort to support browsers such as Opera that have
similarly small usage.


"How many do know that this feature exists"

In my experience none. I have never met a single person outside the
development community who knew that text resizing is possible, far less how
to do it. I'm sure there are some, but they are extremely rare.


"Only IE<7 cannot increase text size"

As I stated before, the zoom feature is not a substitute for the ability to
resize text.


"stuck on this overblown "problem" and won't move on"

I base my opinions on the results of user testing, and will be the first to
move on just as soon as users stop having problems with resizing text.


"I'll stick with WCAG Samurai for a while"

I'm totally in agreement. The W3C should simply have adopted it instead of
persisting with WCAG 2.

Steve