Appendix A

Summary of the recent changes to Mosaic

to facilitate operation by people with various disabilities

(prepared by the Mosaic Access Group)

  1. Implemented on the Mac and Windows platforms the display of ALT (text) tags on IMGs whenever alto-load of images is turned off. (Also benefits the "bandwidth impaired".)
  2. Provided the ability to control font selection and size for all HTML text types on both the Mac and Windows platforms.
  3. Provided the ability to control background color from the entire spectrum and intensity range for both the Mac and Windows platforms.
  4. Provided the ability to control font colors for all HTML text types on both the Mac (whole-spectrum, all intensities) and Windows (16 color choices).
  5. Provided the ability to completely change the default rendering instructions for both the Mac (by launching Mosaic via double-clicking on any of a set of Preference files you've built for yourself) and Windows (by commanding the use of a different file to fulfill the role of "Mosaic.ini") platforms. This will allow reasonable sharing of a physical machine by, say, someone with visual impairments and others without those impairments. The user with the disability will not have to item-by-item reconfigure the Browser each time it is to be used.
  6. Implemented on the Windows platform the use of the left and right arrow keys as a means of navigation to the next adjacent hyperlink. Further, the user has a choice of 3 ways to indicate which anchor is "current" (i.e., will be fetched if RETURN is pressed), and one of these choices is a bordering box of any selectable color/intensity.
  7. Added command icons to the Windows platform which are taken from the 'standard' Microsoft collection, hopefully facilitating interoperability with Screen Readers.
  8. Added a series of audio-triggering events in Windows Mosaic. Upon one of these events occuring, Mosaic can now trigger a user-chosen, user-supplied audio file. Different audio files can be chosen for each supported event.
  9. Continued to extend our bi-directional interface between Mosaic and sibling processes, to facilitate all forms of interactive augmentation, including (potentially) HTML-aware screen reader software. (We have provided the copyrighted Mosaic source code to at least 2 Universities recently who are working on such screen readers.)
To Table of Contents
To Previous Section - Thanks
To Next Section - Appendix B (Experimental Solutions and Discussions of d-tags, alt-text, text anchors, forms and edit boxes)

Please send comments and suggestions to: web-team@trace.wisc.edu