This is an excellent point, but I part of your rational. You state that this is like providing an audio recording for the website. I'd argue that the recording exists and not making these small sacrifices is like denying it to the impaired.
As designers the responsibility is ours to make sure that our target audience can access and use our pages. If our target audience has trouble navigating or reading our pages the fault lies on us, not on the browser manufacturers. After all solutions do exist for our problems. Forcing someone to upgrade to Firefox works fine in a personal setting or for an informal website which will likely be used during a user's off time. However, what about a web based application which a user may use at work and may not be given the option of having Firefox installed on their provided computers? (As is the case with a few of my co-workers in the past). Sure this may only alienate a small portion of a site's user base, but it's these small details which can create passion among your users and keep them coming back for more. In my mind, if there's a way to provide an accessible site with minimal extra effort (such as the 76% and em sizing solution) which is also cross browser and contains no hacks then it's worth the extra few minutes. Then again a cost-benefit analysis by the bean counters upstairs might tell me that those few extra features compared to the cost of paying me for those few minutes aren't worth diddly. Cheers. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Eric Anderson Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2006 9:23 AM To: rails-spinoffs@lists.rubyonrails.org Subject: [Rails-spinoffs] Re: Text sizing Sam wrote: > Setting the css body {font-size: 12px} or {font-size: 12pt} will cause IE to > disable the browser's "View Text Size" control. I guess this is why > percentages are preferred over px/pt in CSS-only solutions. (Crippling the > view text-size reduces the accessibility for persons with poor vision, or > unusual monitor resolutions.). I'm not sure I understand this rational. It seems like the correct method for making a font the same size across all browsers is to used a fixed font size (px or pt). Under these situations IE is not accessible. This to me seems like a fine situation and no additional user control should be needed. The fault is in IE not your web page. If no browser existed that could make the page accessible I could understand adding a user control (sometimes you have to fill in the gaps for browsers) but since many browsers exist that can make the page accessible I don't see why extra effort should be put forth. Especially when one of those browsers (Mozilla/Firefox) is free, high quality, cross-platform and efficient. By choosing to use IE the user is making a choice to use a non-accessible browser. That is their fault not the fault of the website. To me this is like adding an audio recording of all your pages so the page is accessible to the blind. Most developers do not do this. Most developers just make text available and rely on the user to have the proper tool to read the text (screen reader). If you are blind you need a screen reader (or some equivalent tool). Every website on the planet should not have to provide an audio recording. The same goes with fixed fonts. If you have poor vision you need a browser that will allow you to resize fixed fonts. According to your tests IE is not the proper browser for that but Firefox will work well for that. Therefore no user control should be needed. Just to be clear I'm not trying to be insensitive to the disabled. I think making accessible websites is very important. I see it as a collaboration. Web developers develop websites that allow a disabled person to access their website with preferably free or low-cost tools. But it is not the responsibility of the website developer to ensure that the site is accessible on every browser on the planet. As long as a reasonable choice of tools can view the site and the site is standards compliant I think the developer has done their job. After that it is up to the disabled user to pick a tool that will work for him/her. This is all getting a bit off topic but I welcome feedback on this. I'm not opposed to changing my view but I am just not sure we should be spending hours developing user controls (which also need to be accessible) instead of requiring the user to work with us and install a free, high quality, cross-platform tool that will do the job even better. Eric _______________________________________________ Rails-spinoffs mailing list Rails-spinoffs@lists.rubyonrails.org http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails-spinoffs _______________________________________________ Rails-spinoffs mailing list Rails-spinoffs@lists.rubyonrails.org http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails-spinoffs
