Re: handicapped - opinions/info

Hi Paul,

My husband is blind but used to be visually impaired.  I assume you are
referring to a visual impairment when you are talking about the handicapped
as those without visual issues are not impacted by the problems you describe.

It's easier when discussing specific impairment issues to be very direct
about what you're talking about.  There are four handicapped people in our
home and only one of them has issues with what browser to use and how
to adjust it.

Sound and movies/slides/flash, etc. on sites can be a real problem to the
blind, the visually impaired and the deaf, so let's not forget those,
either, shall we?

All of the visually impaired individuals I know use IE 5+ and they set the
override in the browser itself.  Using 5.50, if you will go to:
Tools
Options
General

on the bottom of the box you will see a button that is labeled Accessibility
- Click it

This will take you to a box with the ability to ignore colors, styles, and
fonts - you can use them all if you like.

You can also tell it to format documents using your own style sheet.

If you check this you can make your own, easy to read style sheet.

Of course, you must OK out of the box and probably reboot, but this should
do it for you.

Additionally, you can also adjust text size on the fly using View/Text Size.

Style sheets have no impact on the blind who use text to speech readers.  My
husband's JAWS program can read black text on a black background - with the
monitor turned off.  Inappropriate use of graphics for mission critical
information, inadequate alt tagging or inappropriate alt tagging are more of
a problem.  In the case of a 1 pixel.gif  or space gif the appropriate alt
tag is "(with two spaces inserted)" because it is not spoken.  Who wants to
listen to "spacer gif"?  A good example of a well done site for the blind
or visually impaired is the new White House site -
http://www.whitehouse.gov

If using fonts, use a lot of them so that if one does not have Trebuchet MS,
one may have Helvetica, Arial, or san-serif.  It's a matter of organizing so
that one has a good array of fonts.  Most fancy fonts are no good for
anything other than the odd header, anyway.  In fact, if one wants special
fonts that look decent one is almost always going to go with graphics and
use extensive alt tags.

I believe about 97% of browsers in current use (the last I checked) support
style sheets at least somewhat.  I have held off using them until very
recently and am only now starting to change over to very simple stylesheets
that are able to be read by the IE 4/5 and NN 4+ or at least not adversely
impacted by the interpretations of those browsers.  I always use multiple
fonts for flexibility.

You have two other options - create a secondary, text only site using
default everything, with no tables and nothing but text.  It might be a
bit long in terms of the width of the page width, but as many of the
visually impaired never see anything but specific words due to the use
of screen enlargers or hand-held telescopes, binoculars, etc.

I believe the vast majority of people with significant visual impairment use
software or hardware screen enlargement devices.  I haven't recently run a
check of my visually impaired acquaintances or the person I know who is
doing her PhD on how to address the needs of the visually impaired on the
net.

The other option you have is using a sniffer to detect all the various
browsers and using something like ASP or CF to dish up sites that meet the
needs of those browsers - not something most small businesses are willing to
do.  Too costly in terms of programming time alone.

By the way, your post came through hashed as if it is using enriched text.
It was full of = signs at the end of lines.  You might want to check the
settings on your mail program as most lists (I'm not sure about this one)
require plain text as it is more accessible to all list readers.

Good luck with your site.

Regards,
Marsha Graham

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