Web Accessibility Under Section 508

Professor Raymond J. Kimball

© 2003-2006

"Accessible" Formatting Using Cascading Style Sheets.

W3C Cascading Style Sheet Home Page
W3C Cascading Style Sheet Tutorial - How to build a basic stylesheet.

The Problem Presented.

At first reading the rule on cascading style sheets seems contradictory and inconsistent. That's because it is; The W3C and HTML stylists generally have "flip-flopped" on the use of CSS.

To your relief, the currently acceptable 508 policy is to use external Cascading Style Sheets to control a document's display. The caution, however, is to be reasonable in what you format in CSS, so that the page will still display properly if an older browser does not support CSS.

The Rule:

Section 1194.22(d) provides:

(d) Documents shall be organized so they are readable without requiring an associated style sheet.
 

Now, on first reading, this rule would seem almost to prohibit the use of CSS. In 2000, when the rule was drafted, that was the general consensus. The logic taught in Montgomery College classrooms went something like this:

"Cascading Style Sheets are great, but Netscape's 4+ browsers don't support them. 30% of the market can't read CSS. Therefore, CSS pages aren't accessible, so don't use them, even though they're a great help to designers."

That has all changed. Cascading style sheets were one of the hottest area of debate in 2000. The W3C had "deprecated" font tags in HTML 4.0, urging designers to use the vastly superior CSS coding, which provides both coding efficiency and increases download and display speed. However, citing the limping, battered Netscape 4+ browsers' inability to handle CSS, the accessibility advocates "won" the day....

...sort of. But then a number of things changed.

Broswer Support for CSS. First, AOL released Netscape 6.0, a bulky, slow-loading piece of softwware which handled CSS. Netscape 6.0 and its successors, Netscape 7+ through AOL 9.0 have dramatically changed the landscape and thinking about browser support for CSS.

Sight-Impaired Visitors Substitue their own Style Sheets. Secondly, the accessibility advocates began to realize that sight-impaired web visitors could rapidly improve their ability to use web pages by substituting their own external style sheets for in the designer's <link src> tag. Also, visitors could, or paste internal style sheets directly into a document once downloaded. Internal style sheets override external style sheets under browser rules. A visitor can quickly use an internal or external Cascading Style Sheet to produce a "customized" display.

Try this!

  1. Create a new external style sheet using the following piece of code.
  2. body {
    font-family: "Comic Sans MS", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
    font-size: 36px;
    color: #006600;
    }
  3. Name the style sheet big.css.
  4. Save it to your Desktop.
  5. Then follow the steps below to change a web page's appearance:
  6. Download a page from a web site using Internet Explorer (IE);
  7. In IE, go to File>Save As...
  8. Save the web page to your Desktop;
  9. Double-click on the web page you saved to your Desktop;
  10. Open the source code to the web page: View>Source
  11. Notepad will display the source code
  12. Find the closing </head> tag in the source code;
  13. Paste the following link code into the header of the source code:
  14. <link href="big.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
  15. Hit "Save" within Notepad..
  16. "Refresh" the page on your desktop in the IE browser.
  17. The new stylesheet should change the appearance of the page.

Once you made up a style sheet formatting most of a page, you would save it to your desktop or the Internet Explorer file folder on your C:\ drive and use it over and over.

So, stylesheet use is permitted. Here is what the Federal Accessiblity guidelines say about Readability Rule (d) and the use of stylesheets:

Style sheets can enable users to define specific viewing preferences to accommodate their disability. For instance, users with low vision may create their own style sheet so that, regardless of what web pages they visit, all text is displayed in an extra large font with white characters on a
black background. If designers set up their pages to override user-defined style sheets, people with disabilities may not be able to use those pages. For good access, therefore, it is critical that designers ensure that their web pages do not interfere with user-defined style sheets.

In general, the "safest" and most useful form of style sheets are "external" style sheets, in which the style rules are set up in a separate file.

That's not a prohibition statement, is it? The first statement is actually endorses style sheet use. Style sheets are "enabling" for those with disabilities. That's quite a difference from the literal reading of the rule:

(d) Documents shall be organized so they are readable without requiring an associated style sheet.

So no one cares anymore about browsers that won't read style sheets.

Your textbooks also reflect this sea change about the use of style sheets. In the Fourth Edition of Elizabeth Castro's HTML for the World Wide Web, ( ) fonts styling was covered in Chapter 3, and Cascading stylesheets were covered in Chapter 17. In the recently released Fifth Edition (2003) the order is reversed. Discussion of styling HTML pages with <font> tags is now an afterthought, considered "old hat" and outdated, its inclusion required simply for thoroughness.