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Issue related to WCAG checkpoint 6.1

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From: Dey Alexander
Date: Feb 26, 2003 3:50PM

I have a question about an issue related to WCAG 1.0 checkpoint 6.1
"Organize documents so that they may be read without stylesheets...",
and seek your collective wisdom.

From my reading of the CSS techniques docco (at
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CSS-TECHS/#Generated) and the WAI curriculum
(at http://www.w3.org/WAI/wcag-curric/sam52-0.htm), I have been of the
impression that this checkpoint was intended to cover two main types of
situation:

1. Where CSS-generated content might be lost, and
2. Where read order might be skewed

I'm currently doing some research on the accessibility of university web
sites (in Australia) and have found a different type of issue that is
related to readability without stylesheets, but for which I doubt 6.1
was written to cover. I'd be interested in hearing your views.

Here's an example: a page has a dark blue background, hardcoded into a
table cell element, e.g. <td bgcolor="...">. It uses white text for
links and content, but these are handled by CSS. Remove the CSS and you
get black text and dark blue links on a blue background - clearly
unreadable. While this would certainly cause a problem for users with
version 3.x browsers (Netscape/IE), I'm not at all sure that this is the
situation that 6.1 was trying to capture.

So, what's your view?

Cheers,
Dey


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