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Re: WCAG 2.0 'accessibility supported'

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Feb 6, 2009 8:05AM

Real users just take what they see at face value. If they can't resize the
text with their browser then they assume it can't be resized. If their
browser lacks a feature, they don't go looking for another browser that
might have it because most people assume there is no difference between
them. And life's too short for what may turn out to be a fruitless search.

Zoom serves a different purpose and is not a suitable alternative for text
resizing in my opinion.

"it's a lot easier for a user to ask for help"

Ask who? In most domestic and office environments there's no one competent
to ask. And even when there is, people rarely do.

Steve



-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Benjamin
Hawkes-Lewis
Sent: 06 February 2009 13:45
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] WCAG 2.0 'accessibility supported'

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