WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Books on making websites accessibe?

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Apr 16, 2008 8:30PM

On Wed, Apr 16, 2008 at 2:28 PM, Paul Remy < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Thanks for the information. Does WebAIM have information and examples on how
> to design Em-Based layout websites?

Nothing too specific, but then again, that's a pretty specific topic
and one you're not likely to find addressed in a lot of depth in any
*accessibility* book. If you're talking about broader development
books (which it appears you are), then I can't really provide much
info (and it is only marginally on-topic for this list).

If you can be more specific about what you are wanting to accomplish,
I'm sure you can get some assistance and references here. Are you
trying to make just the fonts em-based
(http://www.webaim.org/techniques/fonts/)? Or are you ensuring that
the page layout accommodates user-resized fonts? Or are you trying to
make your page width and entire layout based upon the user's default
font size? Or some combination of the above?

In general, ems are something you need to experiment with in order to
understand how they really work. While I've seen some pages that use
ems for page widths, I don't really see the benefit in this. I've
played around with this a bit and it's rather complex - you need lots
of negative margin in ems to account for the fact that ems are a
height and when applied to width, they get BIG fast.

I think something like the Jello Mold
(http://positioniseverything.net/articles/jello.html) approach that
WebAIM uses is better - the page width adjusts based upon viewport
size, but has both minimum and maximum widths to accommodate
readability (not so narrow that things break and not so wide that it's
difficult to read long lines of text).

Hopefully that helps a bit.

Jared Smith
WebAIM