Accessibility stylesheets?
New development in my quest to get my fellow gutenberg volunteers to produce more accessible eBooks....
One guy wants to offer an alternative stylesheet. Mainly as an excuse not to put such dreadfully ugly things as underlined links in the main version.
It's not yet clear whether or not PG will actually allow this (they normally insist on a single file of HTML with CSS in the header).
Anyway: I am doubtful that many users know how to switch to another stylesheet, even if their browsers let them. Can anyone comment? (It quickly became apparent that most of the other HTML-creating volunteers couldn't work out how to use the stylesheet even when informed of its existence
but the guy gave me the usual "well if they're disabled they ought to have found out by now" excuse 
)
If this plan does go ahead, what else should go in the stylesheet? I suggested that rather than merely underlining links, users probably expect accessibility stylesheets to have bigger, sans font, no justified text, and a friendlier colour combination. Does anyone know what colours are considered good?
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It can be dangerous to create Accessibility CSS Alternative Sheet unless you really know what you are doing. If the user needs such a style sheet there is a good chance that they'd need a User customised one (or an assistive device) anyway which would overrule the Author Sheet.
Basically you could go for stripped-down sheets of fairly high contrast and larger default font size and few distracting background images.
};-) http://www.xhtmlcoder.com/
WVYFC chose the Yorkshire Air Ambulance as the main charity to fund raise for in 2006
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If a user needs a special colour scheme to access web content, they'll need it throughout the OS as well. As such, this is more effectively solved at the operating system level.
In Windows (from XP back to 95, probably others too) there are special themes for high contrast and large text. Font styles can also be set. These themes can be shared, enabling users and disability support groups to share themes fairly easily.
Failing that, there are ATs which adapt the operating system colours. This is present in ZoomText, for example. Screen magnifiers can zoom the whole screen, making text in images accessible.
Accessibility-centric stylesheets are a good attempt at helping people. But the best solutions work at a higher level, throughout the whole OS.
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So, it's either "dangerous" or "a good attempt"? 
I'm not too sure what advice I'm supposed to give him, then. Bear in mind that adding/removing images is never an option (we're creating a version of an existing dead-tree book) and that our books normally specify no colours or fonts at all (so most people get black text on white background with blue links).
Normal practice is to make just one version. The trouble is I have suggested that we ought not to remove the default underlining of links (since then the information is conveyed only by colour) ... and this one volunteer responds by wanting to put everything "ugly" like underlined links into a separate stylesheet.
Good idea? Bad idea? Does underlining of links really matter?
On one hand, I want to be encouraging towards him because a lot of the volunteers don't seem to give a damn about accessibility, whereas he has put a lot of effort in. But on the other hand, I don't want to get dragged into a campaign to get PG to allow separate stylesheets if it's really not going to help anyone.
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| laurawisewell wrote: |
| I have suggested that we ought not to remove the default underlining of links [...] and this one volunteer responds by wanting to put everything "ugly" like underlined links into a separate stylesheet. |
By "good attempt" I meant "well intentioned attempt". They aren't a really good solution, as Robert mentions.
A user who needs special colour combinations will tend to need them throughout the operating system all of the time. Web browser stylesheets alone won't help them; they need to whole OS to be accessible. Similarly, a user who needs extra-obvious link state indication will tend to need it on every website. So a user stylesheet might be helpful, but not an alternate stylesheet provided by a page author.
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So ... I can tell him it's better to not bother underlining the links, rather than kid himself that this extra stylesheet will help?
Accessibility complaints will never get back to us. We don't get to revise our files. Once it's on PG, it's out of our hands and that's it.
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| Quote: |
| If a user needs a special colour scheme to access web content, they'll need it throughout the OS as well. As such, this is more effectively solved at the operating system level. |
Not necessarily.
Most users now use the internet far more than anything else on their machine.
Also it might not be their machine they are at.
Plus OS level interaction tends to be more graphical, and less bulky text content.
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| Phil Teare wrote: |
| Plus OS level interaction tends to be more graphical, and less bulky text content. |
If a user needs special colour schemes to access information, how would they be able to find the menu item which launches their web browser unless this was taken care of at the OS level?
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| Quote: |
| E-mail? Word? Excel? Instant messaging? |
I use google for all of these.
We've had this debate before. I need AT if I am going to read a large amount of text in a practical space of time. Otherwise would not be able to hold the job I do. I NEED it.
But I never use it in the OS, just the web.
This is the horses mouth speaking Ben.
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| Phil Teare wrote: |
| This is the horses mouth speaking Ben. |
Even if a user only needs special colours within the browser, it still has to be on every website. As such, author stylesheets cannot solve the problem. It has to be a user stylesheet or a piece of software running on their computer.
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| Quote: |
| One of them, sure. But saying everyone with a reading difficulty uses Google for reading, editing and saving Word documents at home and work is not accurate. |
I didn't say they did, did I?
My point is that I don't use AT on the OS. But I NEED it on web pages.
And I'm always grateful to see styles on websites that make it easier for me to read the site.
In part because I didn't always have AT at hand when out and about. Although thats less the case for me now.
I am only one horse, but my mouth still tells a true story Ben. I've also been in the field for 10 years now, and I'm guessing, I've have seen secondhand, more similar situations more times than you might have. Possibly.
Just my experience...
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Phil, if there was to be exactly one alternative stylesheet offered, what would be good colours to use? It sounds as though it varies a lot from person to person, but is there any combination that's likely to be reasonable for a lot of folk? All I know is that while black on white is max contrast, it hurts some people's eyes or makes the text seem to jump around.
My university's text only layout uses cyan text and yellow links on black. To me it looks downright radioactive.
Is Opera's black on d8f5d3 green good?
Or 456 Berea Street's light grey dddddd on dark grey 222222? (But links are dull yellow cccc3d and fail one of the colour difference tests...?)
And the font ... presumably left-aligned, sans-serif ... but how big?
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Yes, you're right that choosing just one is not best. Giving options is always to be advised I'd say.
Re dyslexia and related issues, dark text (black possibly) on a cream background has been found in studies to be optimal for the majority.
But not everyone is dyslexic (some partially sighted users benefit from maximum contrast) and not every dyslexic is the same (a small number benefit more greatly from cooler colours for the background).
So those three would cover most bases.
Black on cream
Black on pale blue or green
black on white or white on black (preferably both - I'll come in again...
So along side your default (presuming its not one of these), that would be 3 minimum, 4 covers pretty much all angles.
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Thanks. Well, the good thing is, our default is no specified colours at all! Which ought to be ultra-accessible for those who know how to fiddle with browser settings. And for those who haven't, it's likely to come out black on white. (Kind of why I'm not convinced this notion of an extra stylesheet is all that helpful....)
I suspect PG are going to throw a fit if we try to upload 3 stylesheets per book (we don't know yet whether they will let us have any separate CSS at all). But what I think would make a whole lot more sense would be for the PG website to have its own site-wide accessibility stylesheets that could be applied to any book. Then they can have a help page explaining how to switch styles in common browsers, or even some means of switching provided. (Javascript etc not allowed in the eBook files themselves.)
Naturally I'd like to avoid the existence of such stylesheets making our volunteers decide they can forget accessibility again ... cos it's never going to take care of non-semantic markup, ill-chosen alt texts, language changes not marked etc etc.
Anyway. It's interesting that your top 3 are all dark-on-light. I will pass on "black on cream" as the winner
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I may be a bit late with this (my Internet has been down for the past couple of weeks)
If you want a high contrast CSS you could also checkout http://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/index.shtml?hiviz
I was looking for a high visibility style for one of my websites and quite a lot of the ones I found seemed a tad too "radioactive" as you put it but I quite liked that one.
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