“If Browser vendors were required to release a ‘accessibility view’ function with all of their browsers you could switch easily to a text only, properly alligned, etc, interface.”
Your solution is unworkable. Accessible websites are not necessarily text only. This is a common straw man argument. An accessible website is one that doesn’t prevent or obstruct a visitor from accessing the content. Text-only websites can also be inaccessible.
Accessibility is a two stage process: 1.) Remove barriers to accessibility. 2.) Add in accessibility features.
A browser could possibly handle 1.), but it can never satisfactorily accomplish 2.) since it is missing the information you need to have given it. Making websites accessible isn’t a browsers job alone. It isn’t a web designers job alone. It is the job of both groups together to deliver an accessible website.
Offloading an impossible job to the browser is just not on.
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Lori Gillen
I have to start off by saying that I only had time to skim Joe Clark’s article before writing the following comments. So, don’t attribute anything of what I am about to say to him. Thanks.
I have concerns about how accessible WAI material is to people (such as myself) who are interested in accessibility issues but are not technical.
To combat this problem, I have set up a monthly group to study the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (version 1.0). The first meeting is tonight (11/17). I am amazed that I had to start a group like this, that no other ones exist.
As for participating in a working group with the WAI, I’ve been told that I need to participate in a two-hour conference call every week, which is impossible for me because I can’t take that much time away from my work day AND because I am hearing-impaired. It’s ironic that a group that promotes accessibility would set up an accessibility barrier for a potential volunteer with writing experience, when writing experience is sorely needed by the WAI to make it’s material more accessible to those who are not technical.
Lori (or anyone else with a vested interest in the development of wider accessible standards for the web), would you be interested in contributing ideas and findings from WAI Groups to a new venture called GAWDS (Guild of Accessible Web Designers)?
If so, pop over to http://www.accessifyforum.com/forum15/ and say hello.
Meaning of title: Any game that is too hard will have few if any players, and thus no one watching (or benefiting). It will be only unactualize theory.
After seven (7!) months of trying to upgrade my service-oriented site to full CSS (done), and WAI Level II standards (done), while getting it to work in the zoo of browsers in use (done), I’m so tired and peeved that I can’t find the words to describe it. I’ve been programming for 30 years, but I’m a counselor in real life. I do my site to help my peers. I’m not a web design/production professional, and I don’t have a budget. My revised web site still hasn’t seen the light of day, and I personally haven’t seen much of that light, either, for months. This is nuts.
I find it inexplicable and inexcusable that existing supported browsers still can’t meet standards acceptably. So we get to hack away. But I can’t. Can’t afford the time costs.
I find also it inexplicable and inexcusable that the W3C and the WAI, along with supposed leaders like Microsoft, cannot seem to understand the needs of the common woman and man. Computers in general, operating systems, the bloody WAI accessibility guidelines aren’t accessible. They’re not even understandable. So…the majority of the population, being left out, turn their back. I’d give a lot for fewer tricks and MUCH more reliability and ease of use. It’s about priorities, and I now set my own.
Where this all takes me is in the direction of SIMPLE. I now do as little as possible. I’m not waiting for any new light. If it comes, good, but meanwhile, I have work to get out. When you have water to carry, you may not have time to wait for stainless steel buckets. I don’t.
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Bob
Hard to care greatly about accessiblity when ALA and how many others insist on styling text in a marginally legible color. Like, what? You’re so right! My problems with reading your text don’t exist! How could I not know that my use of your site doesn’t count. If only I were visually impared.
Text color is #444, a web-smart medium-dark grey. Background is #fff, pure white.
While #444 over #fff is not as strong in contrast as #000/#fff (the ultimate contrast), #444 is pretty darned dark and the contrast is fairly strong and quite legible unless your monitor is wildly out of step with the wide range of normal gamma settings.
When I speak of normal gamma settings I’m not talking about bothering to calibrate your monitor and set it to the accepted sRGB standard. I’m talking about a wide range of fairly random factory settings, since most users (including some web professionals) don’t calibrate and don’t set their monitors to the standard sRGB baseline.
Even on a Macintosh laptop set to the traditional Mac screen gamma (which is considerably brighter than most PC settings), I can’t reproduce the problem of marginal legibility you describe. I see good contrast between foreground and background.
I hope you’re not saying that any site that doesn’t use 100% black text on a 100% white background is illegible to you.
If you are saying that, you may want to visit your control panels and adjust your gamma to bring it closer to the norm. Not only will doing so make it easier to read text on the web, if you’re a designer, developer or content person it will also help you get a more accurate idea of what your site looks like to the “average” reader. (Admittedly, gamma variants are so all over the place that there is norm.)
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Bob
apartness—You say, “I can’t reproduce the problem of marginal legibility you describe. I see good contrast between foreground and background.” That’s a judgment call. The whole point of accessiblity is that one person’s judgement doesn’t substitute for another’s experience.
As it turns out, I find #555 over #fff hard to read.
What’s hard mean? Squinting. Concentrating. Feeling the eye muscles contract and re-contract, to compensate for a text that’s at the (upper) limits of legibility … Leaving the site early, before I’m done.
Having said all that, I wonder if ALA’s legibiltity issues are compounded by a text color that’s similar to the background color framing the content: DARK background – light background and DARK text – DARK. Maybe creates a visual conundrum that some eyes struggle to understand.
See if it’s any better now. I’ve darkened it a bit more. You make an excellent point that one person’s judgement doesn’t substitute for another’s experience. I absolutely agree. At the same time, to some extent, judgement and experience are all any designer has to work with.
We know that if we put black text on a white background and use blue links, almost nobody will have a hard time with that color scheme, regardless of vision, gamma settings, monitor age and quality, etc. Yet we can’t limit the entire web to black text on a white background with blue links.
We know that some color combinations represent a particular problem for people with particular types of color-blindness, and we try to avoid those color combinations. We also try to avoid combinations that will shift severely in 16-bit mode. But there are many variables. What is orange on a Mac might be brown or vaguely purple on a Dell monitor left at its factory settings.
(Similarly: what to you is a dark background at ALA is medium-bright on laptop and Cinema screen tests here. The laptop is set to Apple Standard gamma; the Cinema screen is set to sRGB in the Windows gamma space. In both cases the background looks almost washed out; yet to you, it is dark. I don’t dispute your experience, I’m merely saying there’s a lot of variation out there and it’s impossible to predict how a color will look from one viewing situation to another.)
Sometimes your judgement tells you something works—and testing seems to verify it. Yet a reader’s experience will tell you otherwise. So you go back in and tweak. Which is what we’re constantly doing.
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Bob
OK, the way I see it, Jakob Nielsen is over-confident in his reliance on feedforward analysis. It’s not surprising that his encyclia miss as much as they net. Like, when was the last time JN & Group saw that separating content from design makes the real-world usability problems of a site rectifiable in real-time, based on real-world user experience. Based on feedback. Dialogue between site users and site designers—A dimension of usability and accessibility as key to site success as the guideline on where to place the search box … Which is to say, thanks for increased contrast between text and background. Makes a difference to my eyes.
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chops
“Foreground/background distinctions are, as they say, a personal thing. WAI has provided no evidence that authors can reasonably anticipate how a person with a visual impairment or learning disability will be confused by figure–ground combinations. Further, who runs in “256 grayscale” anymore, let alone black and white (i.e., one-bit colour, like the original Macintosh)?”
I found this rather amusing. I do not believe that the recommendation of 256 greyscale and black and white legibility is because of people actually running in that mode. I guess you haven’t heard of the design technique in converting to greyscale to check contrast.
It’s a pretty reasonable way to anticipate confusion if you ask me.
(BTW, I see “unclear” is actually an ID on an H3 tag. Have named anchors been deprecated? I acknowledge this is probably more maintainable than having the separate anchor; on the other hand it is a choice that makes same-page links inaccessible to some browsers.)
It is no longer possible on many video cards to test in 256 grayscale; they don’t make grayscale available as an option. It’s a pity, as some people do see the world in grayscale.
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Charles
That is the anchor C_8
(which is on a page which is XHTML 1.0 strict and which works in Netscape 4)
so I can’t use same-page links in Netscape 4 on ALA. this is a shame, as I find the text much easier to read in Netscape 4 where it is black on white and not gray on white, which I, like Bob, find tiring to read.
I have a problem with the idea of having to adjust my monitor, which is set to Mac standard gamma but which is aging, for a particular site. But if you put an id of “alistapart” on your body tag, I could override the text colors for your site in my personal style sheet (in the aware browsers) in the compliant browsers, according to some article or other I read.
26 Reader Comments
Back to the ArticleJames
Classic ALA article. Thanks.
chris hester
“Abbreviations and acronyms are clearly identified each time they occur.”
Wasn’t that the FIRST time they occur before? Doesn’t anyone else find including acronyms for everything often makes a mess of the text?
I’ve started using a Glossary of common acronyms instead down the side of my site. Not sure if it’s a good idea or not.
Isofarro
“If Browser vendors were required to release a ‘accessibility view’ function with all of their browsers you could switch easily to a text only, properly alligned, etc, interface.”
Your solution is unworkable. Accessible websites are not necessarily text only. This is a common straw man argument. An accessible website is one that doesn’t prevent or obstruct a visitor from accessing the content. Text-only websites can also be inaccessible.
Accessibility is a two stage process: 1.) Remove barriers to accessibility. 2.) Add in accessibility features.
A browser could possibly handle 1.), but it can never satisfactorily accomplish 2.) since it is missing the information you need to have given it. Making websites accessible isn’t a browsers job alone. It isn’t a web designers job alone. It is the job of both groups together to deliver an accessible website.
Offloading an impossible job to the browser is just not on.
Lori Gillen
I have to start off by saying that I only had time to skim Joe Clark’s article before writing the following comments. So, don’t attribute anything of what I am about to say to him. Thanks.
I have concerns about how accessible WAI material is to people (such as myself) who are interested in accessibility issues but are not technical.
To combat this problem, I have set up a monthly group to study the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (version 1.0). The first meeting is tonight (11/17). I am amazed that I had to start a group like this, that no other ones exist.
As for participating in a working group with the WAI, I’ve been told that I need to participate in a two-hour conference call every week, which is impossible for me because I can’t take that much time away from my work day AND because I am hearing-impaired. It’s ironic that a group that promotes accessibility would set up an accessibility barrier for a potential volunteer with writing experience, when writing experience is sorely needed by the WAI to make it’s material more accessible to those who are not technical.
Rob Sayles
Lori (or anyone else with a vested interest in the development of wider accessible standards for the web), would you be interested in contributing ideas and findings from WAI Groups to a new venture called GAWDS (Guild of Accessible Web Designers)?
If so, pop over to http://www.accessifyforum.com/forum15/ and say hello.
Tom Cloyd
Meaning of title: Any game that is too hard will have few if any players, and thus no one watching (or benefiting). It will be only unactualize theory.
After seven (7!) months of trying to upgrade my service-oriented site to full CSS (done), and WAI Level II standards (done), while getting it to work in the zoo of browsers in use (done), I’m so tired and peeved that I can’t find the words to describe it. I’ve been programming for 30 years, but I’m a counselor in real life. I do my site to help my peers. I’m not a web design/production professional, and I don’t have a budget. My revised web site still hasn’t seen the light of day, and I personally haven’t seen much of that light, either, for months. This is nuts.
I find it inexplicable and inexcusable that existing supported browsers still can’t meet standards acceptably. So we get to hack away. But I can’t. Can’t afford the time costs.
I find also it inexplicable and inexcusable that the W3C and the WAI, along with supposed leaders like Microsoft, cannot seem to understand the needs of the common woman and man. Computers in general, operating systems, the bloody WAI accessibility guidelines aren’t accessible. They’re not even understandable. So…the majority of the population, being left out, turn their back. I’d give a lot for fewer tricks and MUCH more reliability and ease of use. It’s about priorities, and I now set my own.
Where this all takes me is in the direction of SIMPLE. I now do as little as possible. I’m not waiting for any new light. If it comes, good, but meanwhile, I have work to get out. When you have water to carry, you may not have time to wait for stainless steel buckets. I don’t.
Bob
Hard to care greatly about accessiblity when ALA and how many others insist on styling text in a marginally legible color. Like, what? You’re so right! My problems with reading your text don’t exist! How could I not know that my use of your site doesn’t count. If only I were visually impared.
apartness
Bob:
Text color is #444, a web-smart medium-dark grey. Background is #fff, pure white.
While #444 over #fff is not as strong in contrast as #000/#fff (the ultimate contrast), #444 is pretty darned dark and the contrast is fairly strong and quite legible unless your monitor is wildly out of step with the wide range of normal gamma settings.
When I speak of normal gamma settings I’m not talking about bothering to calibrate your monitor and set it to the accepted sRGB standard. I’m talking about a wide range of fairly random factory settings, since most users (including some web professionals) don’t calibrate and don’t set their monitors to the standard sRGB baseline.
Even on a Macintosh laptop set to the traditional Mac screen gamma (which is considerably brighter than most PC settings), I can’t reproduce the problem of marginal legibility you describe. I see good contrast between foreground and background.
I hope you’re not saying that any site that doesn’t use 100% black text on a 100% white background is illegible to you.
If you are saying that, you may want to visit your control panels and adjust your gamma to bring it closer to the norm. Not only will doing so make it easier to read text on the web, if you’re a designer, developer or content person it will also help you get a more accurate idea of what your site looks like to the “average” reader. (Admittedly, gamma variants are so all over the place that there is norm.)
Bob
apartness—You say, “I can’t reproduce the problem of marginal legibility you describe. I see good contrast between foreground and background.” That’s a judgment call. The whole point of accessiblity is that one person’s judgement doesn’t substitute for another’s experience.
As it turns out, I find #555 over #fff hard to read.
What’s hard mean? Squinting. Concentrating. Feeling the eye muscles contract and re-contract, to compensate for a text that’s at the (upper) limits of legibility … Leaving the site early, before I’m done.
Having said all that, I wonder if ALA’s legibiltity issues are compounded by a text color that’s similar to the background color framing the content: DARK background – light background and DARK text – DARK. Maybe creates a visual conundrum that some eyes struggle to understand.
apartness
See if it’s any better now. I’ve darkened it a bit more. You make an excellent point that one person’s judgement doesn’t substitute for another’s experience. I absolutely agree. At the same time, to some extent, judgement and experience are all any designer has to work with.
We know that if we put black text on a white background and use blue links, almost nobody will have a hard time with that color scheme, regardless of vision, gamma settings, monitor age and quality, etc. Yet we can’t limit the entire web to black text on a white background with blue links.
We know that some color combinations represent a particular problem for people with particular types of color-blindness, and we try to avoid those color combinations. We also try to avoid combinations that will shift severely in 16-bit mode. But there are many variables. What is orange on a Mac might be brown or vaguely purple on a Dell monitor left at its factory settings.
(Similarly: what to you is a dark background at ALA is medium-bright on laptop and Cinema screen tests here. The laptop is set to Apple Standard gamma; the Cinema screen is set to sRGB in the Windows gamma space. In both cases the background looks almost washed out; yet to you, it is dark. I don’t dispute your experience, I’m merely saying there’s a lot of variation out there and it’s impossible to predict how a color will look from one viewing situation to another.)
Sometimes your judgement tells you something works—and testing seems to verify it. Yet a reader’s experience will tell you otherwise. So you go back in and tweak. Which is what we’re constantly doing.Thanks very much for your valuable feedback.
Joe Clark
Andreas K. Bittner has translated the original article into German, and Tomas Casper has HTMLified it.
http://www.einfach-fuer-alle.de/artikel/rettet-die-wcag/
Of course, you have not experienced me until you have read me in the original German.
Bob
OK, the way I see it, Jakob Nielsen is over-confident in his reliance on feedforward analysis. It’s not surprising that his encyclia miss as much as they net. Like, when was the last time JN & Group saw that separating content from design makes the real-world usability problems of a site rectifiable in real-time, based on real-world user experience. Based on feedback. Dialogue between site users and site designers—A dimension of usability and accessibility as key to site success as the guideline on where to place the search box … Which is to say, thanks for increased contrast between text and background. Makes a difference to my eyes.
chops
“Foreground/background distinctions are, as they say, a personal thing. WAI has provided no evidence that authors can reasonably anticipate how a person with a visual impairment or learning disability will be confused by figure–ground combinations. Further, who runs in “256 grayscale” anymore, let alone black and white (i.e., one-bit colour, like the original Macintosh)?”
I found this rather amusing. I do not believe that the recommendation of 256 greyscale and black and white legibility is because of people actually running in that mode. I guess you haven’t heard of the design technique in converting to greyscale to check contrast.
It’s a pretty reasonable way to anticipate confusion if you ask me.
Charles
http://alistapart.com/articles/saveaccessibility/#unclear
(BTW, I see “unclear” is actually an ID on an H3 tag. Have named anchors been deprecated? I acknowledge this is probably more maintainable than having the separate anchor; on the other hand it is a choice that makes same-page links inaccessible to some browsers.)
It is no longer possible on many video cards to test in 256 grayscale; they don’t make grayscale available as an option. It’s a pity, as some people do see the world in grayscale.
http://alistapart.com/articles/saveaccessibility/#impossible
“live description has been attempted a mere five times in the broadcast sphere”
Not to minimize the difficulty or expense of this, but I would put the number of attempts in the thousands. It’s called sportscasting.
Charles
In reference to my parenthetical comment on breaking same-page links in my preceding post, I see the relevant W3C recommendation here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#C_8
(which is on a page which is XHTML 1.0 strict and which works)
This looks like future XHTML plans will conflict with the backward compatibility requirement.
And I withdraw my “some browsers” comment and replace it with “Netscape 4”, as I see IE 5.1/Mac, iCab 2.9 and Lynx accept the same-page link to an ID.
Charles
That is the anchor C_8
(which is on a page which is XHTML 1.0 strict and which works in Netscape 4)
so I can’t use same-page links in Netscape 4 on ALA. this is a shame, as I find the text much easier to read in Netscape 4 where it is black on white and not gray on white, which I, like Bob, find tiring to read.
I have a problem with the idea of having to adjust my monitor, which is set to Mac standard gamma but which is aging, for a particular site. But if you put an id of “alistapart” on your body tag, I could override the text colors for your site in my personal style sheet (in the aware browsers) in the compliant browsers, according to some article or other I read.