Quantum Star SE for the Visually Impaired

After the recent (September) requirements review for QS, one of the areas which popped up as a medium level requirement was support for those with visual or hearing impairments. I know its a little presumptious to put this at medium – no offence to anyone affected by such – but it was dependent on other areas which got a higher priority – and it is largely a web design issue.

After looking through some of the current web design material at hand in the QS Installer, and testing it myself (for what it was worth) on a screen reader emulator, I think the installer at least is fairly safe. This is probably an area I need to go away over the Christmas and research properly. I validated the web pages so far against the 3 Priority levels of WCAG 1.0 and passed all three levels. I won’t celebrate yet – I haven’t heard from anyone who needs these measures.

A few other decisions were made as a result of the requirements review.

1. No red on green, or green on red colours in the web design styling
2. No use of CAPTCHA unless a logic alternative is available for the visually impaired 3. Availability of a high contrast b/w or w/b style via CSS
4. Addition of a javascript function to dynamically alter Font-Size on any page
5. Use of Header tags for all section titles, in correct order. CSS can manipulate the appearance all it wants so long as the HTML content is following a logical flow.
6. Use of / in all the right places – no or tags which are purely visual.
7. For alt/desc/longdesc attributes use full worded sentences.
8. Review current draft of WCAG 2.0 as available after above requirements are implemented.