Appendix E: Accessibility Support
Contents
This appendix is informative, not normative.
E.1 Accessibility and SVG
Drawings done in SVG will be much more accessible than drawings done as image formats
for the following reasons:
- Text strings in SVG are represented as regular XML character data rather than bits in an image.
(See Text.)
- At any place in the SVG hierarchy, a drawing can include a long set of
descriptive text
and/or a short description
in the form of a title. Both of these features can be used to help the visually
impaired interpret both the intent and specific content of a drawing. The drawing
can be architected such that there is a single description for the drawing as a whole
or there are multiple descriptions which are distributed within the drawing
and describe each separate component within the drawing.
- The description of Conforming SVG Generators
defines a set of accessibility requirements for SVG authoring applications
which will promote the accessibility in SVG documents generated from authoring applications.
- Because of SVG's support of Cascading Style Sheets Level 2 (??? need to add link),
there will be the ability to set up personal style sheets to adjust the color
contrast of graphic elements.
- Because SVG documents are scalable, people with partial visual impairment will
be able to zoom in on graphics for easier viewing.
- (See Tooltips.)
(Additional information on accessibility is forthcoming.)
E.2 SVG Accessibility Guidelines
The definition of a Conforming SVG Generator
requires that it adhere to W3C accessibility authoring guidelines [ACCESS].
(We are considering an authoring guideline where certain classes
of authoring applications would automatically translate object names
such as layer names into the content of <title> or <tooltip>
elements. Furthermore, SVG viewers would be required to display the
given text string when the mouse was positioned over the SVG viewport.
The result is that visually impaired people could "hear" the shape
of the drawing by moving the pointing device around and listening to the
vocalization of the tooltips.)