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User defined styles – text adjust and high contrast

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Reply with quote Hi

Reviewing my web best practices, I’m currently assessing the need for a user stylesheet switcher.

I’ve included it in the past to give the user a quick option for changing, but speaking to more and more users who require these sheets reckon it’s best practice to have an accessibility link educating the user how to trigger the alternate stylesheet.

What are your views on this? Should I continue to accommodate these buttons on the front end, should I only have an “accessibility” link teaching the user how to resize, or should I maybe just have the resize links on the accessibility page?

I would be interested to hear your opinions on this, in particular anyone who can reference authoritative sources or studies.
Reply with quote Hi cmcp,

First, welcome to Accessify Forum! Smile

Text resize widgets are a recurring topic hereabouts. My views on text resize widgets are on the second post; you can find some more perspectives on the this later thread about text resizing (which links to two older threads), and on this thread about changing text size on a website.

The overall consensus seems to be to use a decent text size, and if you are concerned that your visitors might not know how to resize text in their browser, consider linking to a resource such as the BBC’s My Web My Way, which offers guidance on how to improve one’s online experience across-the-board.

High-contrast stylesheets are a rather different topic. Again, my personal opinion is to err on the side of sufficient contrast; there are a few tests for this, and to see how your pages will look to visitors with various forms of colour-blindness, that I will look out some links for. Good contrast benefits everyone, vision-impaired or not! Smile

(Then again, note that the BBC themselves use both text-resize and high-contrast widgets on their accessibility page linked above; my take on this is that they are covering all bases, but that for most production websites it is overkill. That the BBC homepage doesn’t have those widgets seems to bear this up!)
Reply with quote Colour contrast test – http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker

Colour blindness tool – http://www.vischeck.com/vischeck/vischeckURL.php

www.heyhudson.com
Reply with quote Thank you for such a warm welcome! When I’ve time I’ll put together a little hello message in the introductions forum.

Those links make a good read. I’m reading lots of advice to lead users to an accessibility page, with emphasis on encouraging education and use of local browser controls.

I was discussing this with a colleague, and we think it would be wonderful to have an open source central repository of browser / accessibility how-to’s. The BBC website is good, however I’m not sure it is an open source project. Website providers may be reluctant to link to a resource that is branded or could change at any time. It would be graet if this information was maintained on something like a google code api, and could be pulled in an styled to each site (like linking to a hosted javascript or css framework).

There are lots of valid opinions on the subject of style switchers, but I’m struggling to find recent studies or solid recommendations based on facts. I’m concerned that many people implement these buttons (correctly or otherwise) to tick boxes.

I think the next step for me is to place some tracking software on my page links to analyse my users clicks.
Reply with quote Coincidentally it seems the BBC are gearing up for a new release. Seems to be along the lines of the Swedish Government example.

Just when I was coming round to educating the user to only control / manipulate the site through their browser, it will be interesting to see where this takes us.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ouch/2010/02/name_that_tool_forthcoming_bbc.html

“The Ouch! team had a quick demo of the prototype tool today and it looks great. It lets you set preferences for text size, spacing, font, foreground, background and link colours. It can convert multiple-column pages into one single column. And it uses preset themes to allow you to do personalisations like this with the minimum of mouse clicks.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ouch/2010/02/name_the_bbc_accessibility_too.html


“I particularly like the fact that there is a plan to share the technology in the future with other websites and platforms (mobile, set-top boxes, etc)…”
Reply with quote
cmcp wrote:
Just when I was coming round to educating the user to only control / manipulate the site through their browser, it will be interesting to see where this takes us.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ouch/2010/02/name_that_tool_forthcoming_bbc.html

“The Ouch! team had a quick demo of the prototype tool today and it looks great. It lets you set preferences for text size, spacing, font, foreground, background and link colours. It can convert multiple-column pages into one single column. And it uses preset themes to allow you to do personalisations like this with the minimum of mouse clicks.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ouch/2010/02/name_the_bbc_accessibility_too.html

“I particularly like the fact that there is a plan to share the technology in the future with other websites and platforms (mobile, set-top boxes, etc)…”


You’ll notice that those blogs are from 2010. The tool they mentioned become
http://www.bbc.co.uk/accessibility/mydisplay/
The work is being actively continued by Jonathan at http://www.hassellinclusion.com/

Web Developer at Big Lottery Fund

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