WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: WCAG 2.0 'accessibility supported'

for

From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Date: Feb 6, 2009 6:50AM

On 6/2/09 12:56, Steve Green wrote:
> Strictly speaking, Patrick is correct when he says "there are widely
> available user agents that support resizing". However, 75% or so of Internet
> users do not have such user agents.

I'm not sure it's strictly true that Internet Explorer 6 does not
support resize text sizes specified in pixels, although it's a
half-truth relevant to real-world usability.

Granted IE6 does not resize such text styles with the Text Size menu or
Windows High Contrast mode, but you can scale them by applying a user
stylesheet with IE's accessibility options and specifying the "zoom"
property in your stylesheet.

http://www.microsoft.com/enable/training/ie6/formatpage.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms531189.aspx

Try this to test:

javascript:(function(){document.body.style.zoom="4";}())

Browser marketshare statistics are difficult to gather and interpret,
but the publically available statistics:

http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm

suggest that at least two thirds of users are using user agents other
than IE6. While neither IE7 nor IE8 resizes text sizes specified in
pixels with the Text Size menu, both include Zoom functionality in the
primary interface, removing even the need to use the user stylesheet
functionality.

> they have no way of knowing that using a different user agent would
> allow the text to be resized.

They may not know, but they have lots of ways to find out.

> This is a very different scenario from being prompted to install a plug-in that
> you currently do not have.

That's true, although it's a lot easier for a user to ask for help with
resizing text than to ask for help with plugins. There's less jargon
involved.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis