WD-WAI-UA-BROWSER-0312
WAI Accessibility User Agent Guidelines:
Browser User Interface
W3C Working Draft 12-Mar-1998
- Editor:
- Jon Gunderson, University of
Illinios at Urbana/Champaign
-
- Please see the Acknowledgements section
of the Appendix for a full listing of contributors.
Status of this document
This is a W3C Working Draft for review by W3C members and other
interested parties. It is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or
obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use W3C
Working Drafts as reference material or to cite them as other than "work
in progress". This is work in progress and does not imply endorsement
by, or the consensus of, either W3C or members of the WAI User Agent (UA)
working group.
This document has been produced as part of the
W3C WAI Activity, and is intended as
a draft of a proposed recommendation for how to improve browser
accessibility. The goal of the WAI-UA working
group is discussed in our charter.
Abstract
This document is a list of browser features that browser developers
should follow in order to make their browser technology more accessible to
persons with disabilities. Following the list of guidelines is a checklist
that browser developers can use to identify and prioritize accessibility
features. This document is part of a series of accessibility documents
published by the Web Accessibility
Initiative.
Comments
Please send detailed comments on this document to
w3c-wai-ua@w3.org. Public comments
about the WAI author guidelines can also be sent to this mailing
list.
Each guideline is accompanied by a rating that describes its importance
and scenarios about how the :
- [Priority 1]
- Very important, otherwise it will be impossible for
one or more groups of
users to access this information on the page, or it will
significantly improve the access to WWW pages designed without
accessibility considerations.
- [Priority 2]
- Important, otherwise it will be difficult for
one or more groups of
users to access this information on the page, or it will improve
the access to WWW pages designed without accessibility considerations.
- [Priority 3]
- Makes access to information on the page easier, but not critical for
access.
- Scenarios
- Short descriptions of how the changes impacts persons with different
types of disabilities on common WWW tasks and how it compensates for WWW
pages that are not designed for accessibility.
- Implement
- Considerations, options and ideas that developers can use for implementing a particular access feature.
- Test Pages
- Self explanitory test pages that can be used by browser developers to
determine if a browser complies with a specific guideline.
Table of Contents
- [Priority 1]
User can adjust the default font face
used by the browser. Persons with visual impairments and learning
disabilities can adjust the font to the style characteristics that is
best for them to view WWW pages.
- [Priority 1]
User can adjust the default font size
used by the browser. Persons with visual impairments and learning
disabilities can adjust the font to the size that is best for them to
view WWW pages.
- [Priority 1]
User can adjust the default
foreground and background colors used by the browser.
Persons with visual impairments and learning disabilities can adjust the
display colors to the colors that are best for them to view WWW pages.
- [Priority 1]
User can adjust the highlight
foreground and background colors used by the browser.
Persons with visual impairments and learning disabilities can adjust the
display highlight colors used to indicate selections of text.
Highlighted text is often used by third party assistive technologies to
indicate what the user wants to read through speech output. Highlighted
text can also be used by screen readers to indicate the focus of what
the user is trying to read. Some screen readers are sensitive to the
highlight colors.
- [Priority 2]
User can specify a Cascading Style
Sheet to be used in cascading order after the document
style sheets have been loaded. The style sheet is an external linked
style sheet that will be applied to the currently loaded page.
- [Priority 3]
User can used an external file to set
default browser style. This is very useful in public
access computers where there are multiple user of one computer. The user
can quickly adjust the browser to their preferences.
Scenarios
- Visual Impairment
- Learning Disability
- HTML Accessibility Markup Foregiveness
- [Priority 1]
A user selectable option is available to turn off
font face information
specified in the page being rendered by the browser. The default font
face is used to render the page text. This feature maintains users with
visual impairments and learning disabilities font face preferences and
are not overridden by page font face specifications.
- [Priority 1]
User selectable option is available to turn off font
size information specified in the page being rendered by
the browser. The default font size is used to render the page text. This
feature maintains users with visual impairments and learning
disabilities font size preferences and are not overridden by page font
face specifications.
- [Priority 1]
User selectable option is available to turn off color
information specified in the page being rendered by the browser. The
default colors for text and highlight are used to render the page text.
This feature maintains users with visual impairments and learning
disabilities font size preferences and are not overridden by page font
face specifications.
- [Priority 1]
User selectable option is available to turn off page author specified
cascading style sheets (CSS).
CSS font, size, color and positioning information would be ignored in
the rendering of the page. The page would render using the default
browser options.
Scenarios
- Visual Impairment
- Learning Disability
- HTML Accessibility Markup Foregiveness
- [Priority 1]
A user selectable option is available to turn off
images and have the
ALT attribute text be presented.
The ALT text needs to be presented in it's
entirety and should not be cut off by limits of the orginal page size or
other spatial formatting specified in the source document.
- [Priority 1]
A user selectable option is available to turn on the presentation of the
TITLE attribute
of a anchor tag. The
- [Priority 1]
A user selectable option is available to turn on
LONGDESC
- [Priority 1]
A user selectable option is available to turn off
OBJECT
Scenarios
- Visual Impairment
- Learning Disability
- HTML Accessibility Markup Foregiveness
- WAI Markup Guidelines Working Group Chair:
- Jon Gunderson, University
of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
- Staff contacts:
- Judy Brewer and
Daniel Dardailler
-
- In addition we would like to thank the following people who have
contributed through review and comment.
- James Allen, Kitch Barnicle, Kevin Carey, Wendy Chilstrom, Chetz
Colwell, Neal Ewers, Geoff Freed, Larry Goldberg, Jon Gunderson, Chris
Hasser, Phill Jenkins, Leonard Kasday, George Kerscher, Josh Krieger,
Greg Lowney, Scott Luebking, William Loughborough, Charles
McCathieNevile, Masafumi Nakane, Charles Opperman, Mike Paciello, David
Pawson, Helen Petrie, David Poehlman, Michael Pieper, Jan Richards, Greg
Rosmaita, Liam Quinn, T.V. Raman, Robert Savellis, Constantine
Stephanidis, Jutta Treviranus, Steve Tyler, Gregg Vanderheiden, Jaap van
Lelieveld, Jon S. von Tetzchner, Ben Weiss, Evan Wies, Chris Wilson,
Hank Wittingen, Tom Wlodkowski
HTML 4.0
Recommendations.
W3C WAI Page Author Guidelines