Inactive UI components and WCAG 2 compliance

[Jonathan Hung]

Hi Jan,

Greg and I were having a conversation in the IRC channel about WCAG
compliance and inactive/disabled UI components. According to the WCAG
guideline, it states:

"Text or images of text that are part of an inactive user interface
> component, that are pure decoration, that are not visible to anyone, or that
> are part of a picture that contains significant other visual content, have
> no contrast requirement."
>

(Reference:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211/#visual-audio-contrast-contrast
)


In the context of a button that is active and then becomes inactive when
activated (i.e. a Submit button that is enabled until pressed), how should
we interpret this guideline? It seems the *act* of becoming inactive is
significant (this merits contrast?), however, the guideline states that the
contrast requirement doesn't apply to inactive components. How should we
handle contrast styling in this case?

- Jonathan.

---
Jonathan Hung / jhung at ocad.ca <jhung.utoronto at gmail.com>
IDRC - Interaction Designer / Researcher
Fax: (416) 977-9844
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://fluidproject.org/pipermail/fluid-work/attachments/20101012/5774e7e7/attachment.html>