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From: Tony Trott
Date: Tue, Jan 21 2003 9:38AM
Subject: graphic slices
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Hi, all.

I'm curious about the idea of designing a homepage with graphics. It seems to me that this would not be a good idea as it would be quite inaccessible to screenreaders and if the graphics are raster graphics they will be distorted when enlarged. Also, having a lot of text in a graphic also can easily lead to abuse of the alt-text requirement.

I'm asking this because I have seen and heard a lot of people talking about designing with sliced graphics. As I said, it seems like a bad idea to me but I admit I could be wrong. What do you think of this idea of des

From: Mark Rew
Date: Tue, Jan 21 2003 10:52AM
Subject: Re: graphic slices
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The concern I have with an all graphics site is that any text information that is displayed with graphics have an alt tag with the corresponding information. I'm also concern with the effect on slower connections such as users connecting to an Internet provider via modem.

Another thought is that the separation between structure, content, and presentation is lost. It improves navigation to use standard structure elements as heading tags, paragraph, list, etc. Many screen readers can jump to the beginning and end of such structures as lists, tables, and paragraphs. Or provide a list of headings that the user can jump to. All of these features make navigating a web page with a screen reader easier.

Mark Rew
----- Original Message -----
From: Tony Trott
To: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Sent: Tuesday, January 21, 2003 11:18 AM
Subject: graphic slices


Hi, all.

I'm curious about the idea of designing a homepage with graphics. It seems to me that this would not be a good idea as it would be quite inaccessible to screenreaders and if the graphics are raster graphics they will be distorted when enlarged. Also, having a lot of text in a graphic also can easily lead to abuse of the alt-text requirement.

I'm asking this because I have seen and heard a lot of people talking about designing with sliced graphics. As I said, it seems like a bad idea to me but I admit I could be wrong. What do you think of this idea of designing a homep

From: Big John
Date: Tue, Jan 21 2003 11:26AM
Subject: Re: graphic slices
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Mark Rew wrote:
> The concern I have with an all graphics site is that any text information
> that is displayed with graphics have an alt tag with the corresponding
> information. I'm also concern with the effect on slower connections such as
> users connecting to an Internet provider via modem.

Hear hear! My connection is quite slow, and sliced graphics sites
tend to be excruciatingly slow loads. Add in alot of JS, and steam
starts coming out my ears.

> Another thought is that the separation between structure, content, and
> presentation is lost. It improves navigation to use standard structure
> elements as heading tags, paragraph, list, etc. Many screen readers can
> jump to the beginning and end of such structures as lists, tables, and
> paragraphs. Or provide a list of headings that the user can jump to.
> All of these features make navigating a web page with a screen
> reader easier.

Besides all that, slices make it danged hard to alter the layout
once it's set in cells. CSS positioning allows one to break out
of the 'cell block', and create most visual structures efficiently
via the rendering engine, rather than thru images. Images can still
be strategically placed to enhance the design, without balloning
the load time too much. Check out this 'simple' layout, using only
one structural image:

http://users.rraz.net/mc_on_the_rocks/wheeling.html

It's got some very advanced css in the nav. I know, it should
be a list, but that causes some buggyness in one or two very
popular browsers. However, there's NO JS in the page, and
design flexes very well from 640x480 on up, and allows text
resize too.
Big John



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