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RE: Linear Access and Text Only

for

From: Karl Groves
Date: Dec 5, 2003 8:56AM


>> A user of the Opera browser using the user views with this home page
>> would be able to have a low vision experience that was much richer and
>> informative than the LIFT text-only version, and could get all the
>> information in the page simply by toggling images on and off, and would
>> get more visual cues as to the structure of the page. The LIFT text
>> transcoder allowed increase (or decrease) of text size, but the controls
>> were near the bottom of the page where a low vision or blind user, would
>> not notice for a while, and when I went to another page on the site, the
>> font-size change was reversed. In this case it seems the transcoder
>> would largely be redundant for anyone that has decent assistive
>> technology. The transcoded page and the original page looked identical
>> in the Lynx text browser. Clearly the transcoding process works best
>> with a page that is already essentially accessible. I don't know how
>> well it will work with a page that is essentially inaccessible.

>All true but how many users know how to use 100% of the features
>offered by their browsers? Having some of those features available on
>the webpage itself makes it much easier to use them.

I found this comment to be particularly ridiculous.
Users who need those features will likely be quite familiar with them - this
is particularly true of the browser's accessibility settings.

In addition, I should remind you that your company's name is "UsableNet".
As such, one can only assume that you'd be familiar with the concept of
learnability.
A good website is created in order to a)minimize the overall amount of
things the user needs to learn to interact with the site and b) minimize the
time/ effort needed to learn to interact with the site. If anything, your
tool is introducing new things the user has to learn on the particular site,
while they are far more likely to have already learned their browser's
features. By having the controls near the bottom of the page, you've also
increased the time necessary to learn the new way of interacting.

Karl Groves, Master Certified CIW Designer
http://www.karlcore.com






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