jadelennox (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jadelennox) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_accessibility2009-08-10 05:13 pm
jadelennox) wrote in dw_accessibility2009-08-10 05:13 pm
suggestion for style documentation
I'm curious as to whether or not I am the only person who ends up having accessibility issues when people modify their styles to change the text of basic features. Specifically:
1. It's bad enough when the text goes back and forth between two different standards (e.g. "user info" versus "profile").
2. It's worse when the text is something the style designer came up with to be original but which still carries clear meaning (e.g. "about me").
3. It's extremely difficult when the text is all flavor and doesn't convey much meaning (e.g. "happy tracks in the sand").
Am I the only person for whom this is an accessibility issue? If this is a general issue and not just me, perhaps we could write some documentation and propose it to the style team as guidelines for what kind of textual changes are worth avoiding if you really care about accessibility in your style. Since end-users can change those texts, not just style designers, we could come up with something brief and nonintimidating for the customization pages.
(By the way, I know I was working on a couple of open accessibility tickets, and I vanished for several months due to personal issues. I'm back as of this week, and have started looking at those tickets again. Sorry for the vanishing.)
1. It's bad enough when the text goes back and forth between two different standards (e.g. "user info" versus "profile").
2. It's worse when the text is something the style designer came up with to be original but which still carries clear meaning (e.g. "about me").
3. It's extremely difficult when the text is all flavor and doesn't convey much meaning (e.g. "happy tracks in the sand").
Am I the only person for whom this is an accessibility issue? If this is a general issue and not just me, perhaps we could write some documentation and propose it to the style team as guidelines for what kind of textual changes are worth avoiding if you really care about accessibility in your style. Since end-users can change those texts, not just style designers, we could come up with something brief and nonintimidating for the customization pages.
(By the way, I know I was working on a couple of open accessibility tickets, and I vanished for several months due to personal issues. I'm back as of this week, and have started looking at those tickets again. Sorry for the vanishing.)
no subject
When you meet an unfamiliar web page you will expect certain things as regards the layout, the way navigation works, what types of things you can do on a page. This is an example of consistency (doing what everyone else does) helping make the web easier for everyone to use. Hence a lot of accessibility techniques are in fact just about trying to codify and implement consistency in one form or another. So it's not just about learning specific techniques, its about a whole attitude, a way of looking at the web.
Hah! Put like that it sounds all romantic and beautiful!
But if you prefer a specific example: I have an illness that can make thinking hard on occasion, when it strikes I literally cannot process the information to understand language easily. On those days, finding a familiar text link will be much easier than having to 'translate' unfamiliar links and work out what each one means.