Web Development
Web Developer Guidelines
Visual Design Recommendations

Checkpoint 3.1 - XML/XSLT

Provide default stylesheets for multiple output modalities

XML Accessibility Guidelines

Guideline 3: Design an accessible user interface

Separation of presentation from structure provides greater flexibility for the developer as well as for the end user. Providing multiple stylesheets that target multiple output modalities increases that flexibility and requires minimal effort on the part of the user to configure. This adds to the usability of the output document.

Requirement

Ensure that a default stylesheet is provided to cater for different output modalities

Techniques

This snippet of code showing default rendering of some HTML in an audible environment comes from a stylesheet that describes the typical formatting of all HTML 4.0 and is available in full at W3C: Appendix A. A sample style sheet for HTML 4.0  (www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/sample.html).

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@media speech {
  H1, H2, H3,
  H4, H5, H6    { voice-family: paul, male; stress: 20;
                       richness: 90 }
  H1            { pitch: x-low; pitch-range: 90 }
  H2            { pitch: x-low; pitch-range: 80 }
  H3            { pitch: low; pitch-range: 70 }
  H4            { pitch: medium; pitch-range: 60 }
  H5            { pitch: medium; pitch-range: 50 }
  H6            { pitch: medium; pitch-range: 40 }
  LI, DT, DD    { pitch: medium; richness: 60 }
  DT            { stress: 80 }
  PRE, CODE, TT { pitch: medium; pitch-range: 0; stress: 0;
                       richness: 80 }
  EM            { pitch: medium; pitch-range: 60; stress: 60;
                       richness: 50 }
  STRONG        { pitch: medium; pitch-range: 60; stress: 90;
                       richness: 90 }
  DFN           { pitch: high; pitch-range: 60; stress: 60 }
  S, STRIKE     { richness: 0 }
  I             { pitch: medium; pitch-range: 60; stress: 60;
                       richness: 50 }
  B             { pitch: medium; pitch-range: 60; stress: 90;
                       richness: 90 }
  U             { richness: 0 }
  A:link        { voice-family: harry, male }
  A:visited     { voice-family: betty, female }
  A:active      { voice-family: betty, female; pitch-range: 80;
                       pitch: x-high }
}
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Information Source

The original source of this information is located on the W3C web site  (www.w3.org/TR/xag#cp3_1)

 

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