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RE: WAI needs to rethink and revisit (was Printable character between adjacent links)

for

From: John Foliot - bytown internet
Date: May 17, 2002 6:05AM

Hear, hear!!

I am currently embroiled in a debate with an associate over the use (or
non-use) of fixed font sizes. His argument is that if he does not use fixed
font sizes in his stlyesheets that the "display" becomes unpredictable in
different browers/OS implementations. He points to the WAI Guidelines
wording as justification: (This statement is found in the Guidelines
(http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/)) "3.4 Use relative rather than absolute
units in mark-up language attribute values and style sheet property values.
[Priority 2] For example, in CSS, use 'em' or percentage lengths rather
than 'pt' or 'cm', which are absolute units. If absolute units are used,
validate that the rendered content is usable"

While I feel comfortable in debating the folly of this mind set it does open
the debate up, as the WAI wording is counterproductive and, IMHO against the
spirit of Universal Accessibility.

How can we, as committed developers and advocates, influence the W3C to
revisit their wording? Thoughts?

JF




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael R. Burks [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
> Sent: May 16, 2002 9:35 AM
> To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> Subject: RE: Printable character between adjacent links
>
>
> Just one more reason that the WAI needs to rethink and revisit
> much of what
> they recommend.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Mike Burks
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Prof Norm Coombs [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
> Sent: Thursday, May 16, 2002 8:57 AM
> To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> Subject: RE: Printable character between adjacent links
>
>
> As a blind user of the Internet,
> I hate hate hate those characters between links that WAI thinks
> is so nice.
>
> At 11:31 AM 5/15/02 +0300, you wrote:
> >philip steven lanier wrote:
> >
> > > Adjacent image-based links can unambiguously be made visually distinct
> > > from each other. Consider a row of circular "button"
> > > graphics with text or icons in them.
> >
> >Yes, that's one possibility I had in my mind. Sorry for not
> making it clear
> >that borders and margins were just _examples_ of the visual presentation
> >features that could be used. Yet another possibility - for images that
> >essentially contain text - would be to use alternating background colors
> >that are sufficiently different.
> >
> >The basic problem to avoid is having a row of links like
> > foo bar zap blurp more foo more bar and so on
> >in image format, with no obvious (and I mean _obvious_ to
> virtually anyone
> >who sees it) indication of where each link ends or even how many links
> there
> >are. A useful rule of thumb: the user should be able to recognize them as
> >separate links without knowing the topic or even the language used. It
> >happens too often that people rely on orthography like capital letters or
> >even recognizing _phrases_, or other "higher level protocol" issues.
> >
> >--
> >Jukka Korpela
> >TIEKE Tietoyhteiskunnan kehitt