[Irl-dean] Color contrast and WCAG 2.2 priority?

[Paul Walsh, Segala]

Before I start, this isn't in response to Mark's email below but it was
prompted by Gez's response to Mark.

I had a chat with Adrian, my head of accessibility operations earlier and he
said that he doesn't contribute to this list because he feels it's too
negative and he'd rather not be associated with it. Sorry Adrian if I've
misinterpreted this and feel free to correct me. This is sad because it's
the only list known to me in Ireland. However, I do know of a few negative
blogs (not Irish) that get my back up. They shall remain nameless.

I'm a member of a few lists (including god knows how many W3C lists). This
is the only one that appears to have a negative vibe. I can't put my finger
on it, but there are times when I wonder why I bother. Then I remember that
it has a lot of good people I'd like to stay in touch with.

If it wasn't so negative I'd happily contribute more frequently and my team
could impart some extremely good knowledge which would prove useful to some.


Regarding Gez's comments specifically. He probably has done more than most
in this area given that he's responsible for the Juicy Studios colour
analyser that's used by most developers and testers, including Segala I may
add, who evaluate tools with extreme caution. Thanks for this contribution
Gez and for making life in testing that little bit easier.

Cheers
Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: irl-dean-admin at list.eeng.dcu.ie
[mailto:irl-dean-admin at list.eeng.dcu.ie] On Behalf Of Gez Lemon

Hi Mark,

> On 17 Jan 2007, at 14:54, Gez Lemon wrote:
>  For plain text in an image, a user can access the text alternate.
>
> Well yes they _can_ but how? Some methods are:
>
> 1. Use a screen reader, which will speak it to you.
> 2. Use a browser that displays alt attributes on mouseover.
> 3. Look in the page source code.
> 4. Use some other tool that can interrogate a web page to extract alt
> attributes.

Other methods include user-defined style sheets, user-defined scripts
(including Greasemonkey type scripts), or disabling images completely.
None of these are ideal, and neither have I suggested that they are
equivalents.

> It seems to me that, for someone who just has a slight colour or
> brightness deficiency, it is unreasonable to expect them to resort to
> any of these methods. Of course, others will disagree.

This list has a bit of a habit of attributing statements to people
that are out of context. I'm not the person that suggested this was an
equivalent in the first place. In fact, I'm the only person that that
suggested there might be other reasons as to why colour contrast in
images should be considered important in WCAG 1.0. If you disagree
with Barry's assertions, it would be more appropriate to take it up
with him than me. I most definitely do not advocate that people don't
need to worry about colour contrast, regardless of the medium, and I
think I've done more than most to try and improve accessibility in
this particular area.