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anecdotal evidence suggests that, as soon as you reduce the colour contrast, the reading difficulties suffered by dyslexics are alleviated, to some degree, across the board.

Contrasts that comply with the thresholds can, and do, create very real problems for dyslexics.

t has been my experience that just about every issue within accessible web design is about balance. Skew any one factor too much in favour of a particular user group and you risk disadvantaging another group with opposing needs.

What I am suggesting is that, if a colour theme is chosen that conforms to, or exceeds, the W3C colour difference threshold, an alternative, low contrast style sheet should be provided as standard.

I then suggested that “disability” be defined as an “inability to pursue an activity because of a medically determinable physical or mental impairment.”

suggest that adhering to the Hewlett-Packard colour difference threshold would represent a more balanced approach to the issue of colour contrast. To that end,

I’ve developed an alternative color contrast analyser for people to try.

it is not a visual problem but a word decoding, or recognition deficit.

Our ability to recognise words is thought to be based upon two slightly different “memory skills” — phonetic memory and lexical memory. Dyslexics may have a good phonetic memory — as evidenced by their tendency to spell many words phonetically — but a very poor lexical memory.

No two dyslexics demonstrate their disorder in the same manner. It can affect boys and girls equally, across all socioeconomic classes worldwide.

“A combination of abilities and difficulties that affect the learning process in one or more of reading, spelling and writing.

Accompanying weaknesses may be identified in areas of speed of processing, short-term memory, sequencing and organisation, auditory and/or visual perception, spoken language and motor skills. It is particularly related to mastering and using written language, which may include alphabetic, numeric and musical notation.”

the more complex the written language is, the greater the likely percentage of people who will have difficulty reading it.

As many as 1 in 10 people in the UK are dyslexic.

Worldwide, it is likely that the number of dyslexics is likely to be equal to, if not significantly larger than, the number of visually impaired people.

poor short-term memory and organisational skills will mean that site navigation and page organisation become more important.

high contrast text difficult or impossible to read. The phrases I’ve heard most often are “the text keeps moving” or “the words seem to dance on the page.”

6. No model for commercial components. It is not clear to me how a component vendor could sell an AIR component while protecting it from unlicensed deployment. This may limit the availability of 3rd party components, with a corresponding impact on productivity.

7. Schizophrenic development model. AIR supports either Flex development, or HTML applications which run in WebKit. The ugly side of this flexibility is that there are two SDKs, even two JavaScript virtual machines with different capabilities and characteristics. While it is nice to have a way to render HTML, I am not convinced that the web application model is worth it, given the complications it causes. After all, web applications run perfectly well in the browser.

Lack of UI standards may lead to annoying inconsistencies between AIR applications. We are used to this on the Web; now it is coming to the desktop as well.