Download ready made style sheets to meet your access needs

Here is this weeks web accessibility tip: download ready made style sheets to meet your access needs.

I came across this tip while reading through the latest copy of The E-Access Bulletin: technology news for people with vision impairment.

It is a little known fact that users of the Internet Explorer 0n Windows can apply their own style sheets to web pages by setting the appropriate accessibility option in their browser. However, the flaw in this scheme is that most users don't know how to create their own style sheets, and if they did it would take a while to develop one that meets their needs exactly.

Daljit Singh has addressed this problem by providing a service where users can choose their preferred font sizes and colours, and have a style sheet created for them - based on those preferences. The resulting style sheet can then be downloaded, installed, and set to be automatically applied to any standards based web pages using style sheets for presentation.

While I am talking about style sheets, I'll take this opportunity of reminding you of my own PHP based turbo charged style switcher.

Follow up on last weeks tip.

Last weeks tips was about using Javascript to get around the problems caused by adding characters in form fields to pass WAI accessibility guidelines. Here is some of the feedback related to the tip:

The general consensus was that the Guideline itself is obsolete, and creates more of a usability issue than solves.

Patrick H. Lauke has spoken to Shawn Lawton Henry, and it looks like we will see this checkpoint disappear in the next version of the guidelines.

Patrick also pointed to a similar technique he has used.

Tomas Caspers also uses a technique to deal with the problem.

Gez Lemon wrote to suggest a modification of the javascript: Rather than specifying a string literal for the check, you could reuse the same event handler with: onfocus="if(this.value==this.defaultValue)this.value=''"

Thanks, I appreciate the feedback.

Contributed by Jim Byrne
Updated Friday 20 Feb 2004

Free weekly accessible web design tip

Register for your weekly accessible web design tip 

Email:

Comments