Accessibility (was Re: [Gllug] Argos site)

[Dave Jones]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 06:34:49PM +0100, John Southern wrote:
 > Rather than show you how to switch on the screen magnifiers that come
 > with most OSes they almost pressurise their clients to buy screen
 > magnifiers such as ZoomText (starts at £300 and the only difference
 > in my copy to those that come with the OSes is the inverse video
 > mode).

In a past life, for my sins I was an NT sysadmin at a university.
We had some visually impaired students, and some regulations
or other meant that we *had* to make a certain number of PCs
accessable for use by them.

The program we 'invested' in for this purpose was nothing more
than a small app that when you pressed the middle mouse button
'zoomed' the area the mouse pointer was pointing at.
It was as crap as it sounds, and after seeing the students using it,
I realised it was effectively worthless.
Most definitly not with the four figure sum that it cost us
in licenses.

Instead of using it, the students used hand-held magnifiers
in front of the screen, which they found to be infinitly
more useful.

Sometimes best intentions don't yield the best results for all.

 > The easy way is to have a text only page with no default fonts or colours set 
 > - Forget Flash and Javascript on your opening page.

Flash is an abomination that impairs usability not only to those
with disabilities. Amusing cartoons are about the only thing
I've found it useful for. Every flash-based interface to
a commercial website I've seen has been so dire I've taken
my business elsewhere.

It sickens me how much flash 'programmers' get paid. Really.
 
 > Me - I am waiting for Gnome2 and a decent screenreader.

Do tell how you get on 8-)

        Dave

-- 
| Dave Jones.        http://www.codemonkey.org.uk
| SuSE Labs

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