WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Web accessibility and usability

for

From: Chris Heilmann
Date: Oct 11, 2004 11:11AM


>
>> Badly implemented date pickers, yes. However you _can_
>> develop a date picker that only gets applied when and if
>> DHTML is possible. I explained the ideas how to do that...
>
> Unfortunatly, only applying an effect when it is _possible_ is barely
> related
> at all to when it is wanted. By defenition, most DHTML only gets deployed
> on
> clients that can handle it. The problem is the extra layer of a
> screen-reader
> on top of IE (or whatever).

AFAIR all screen readers (except for the linux ones of course) need IE as
their engine, but they don't apply scripts that add additional HTML via
DOM. If someone has other information, that'll be great to know.

>> You do
>> not need to cut down on usability enhancements, as long as
>> you check if they can be used and, in some cases, you allow
>> the user to enable or disable them.
>
> I love the 'in some cases bit'! When do you not allow the user to disable
> something?

The idea was that even users with perfectly able browsers might not want a
special effect or help. Then you can offer an extra mean of turning those
off (An example would be a page that adds skip links but allows users to
get rid of them, or a page that allows the user to set a fixed size on the
font).


--
Chris Heilmann
http://icant.co.uk/ | http://www.onlinetools.org/