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RE: Help on approach for annotating images

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Dec 3, 2005 1:00PM

On Sat, 3 Dec 2005, Malcolm Wotton wrote:

> Thanks for the comments:

You are apparently replying to my message. It is customary to express such
things with attributions - not for courtesy, but for understandability.

> http://www.bpscgi.co.uk/cgi-bin/pumphouse/site.pl?nl=1

It wastes screen real estate and contains no obvious link to any other
version.

> 1) the black and white version works for me, I actually use it - so _I_
> think it's useful :)

Which black and white version?

There's a link - among a longish list of links in tiny font - named
"Disabled Access". I don't know which access you have disabled and why,
but it really does not suggest "black and white" to me.

I don't see anything else there suggesting "black and white". I don't
really need anything like that, but you seem to discuss the features
of a version that cannot be reached in any normal way.

You have _fixed_ font size, or made all you can to do that. Moreover,
the links have insufficient contrast with the background, and they don't
change color when visited.

That's surely hostile to accessibility, since most users don't know how
to work around that. It's a real problem, and it has real solutions:
just stop creating it. Problems with black and white versions seem to be
more or less imaginary.

> 3) QUOTE 'Access keys (at least as currently defined and implemented)
> mostly _reduce_ accessibility'
>
> Can you point to a reference or survey for this? or is it a point of view?

It is expert consensus. See e.g. http://www.clagnut.com/blog/204/

> 4) The disability access page is always accessible - it's on the main menu,
> the question is how much prominence does it need?

Make the site accessible, instead of creating a disability access page.
There's nothing there that anyone needs to know to visit the pages, so it
should not be there. If you wish to advertize services to disabled people
when they physically visit the theatre, that's fine, very fine, but
such information should be labelled appropriately.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/