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From: David Ashleydale
Date: Jun 3, 2009 5:55PM

Hi,

Sorry to keep harping on this, but could someone help me find a definitive
answer to the points vs. pixels thing? My designers keep telling me that
Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. are their main tools and that when the WCAG
standard says "14 pt / bold" can be considered "large", they think they
should be able to choose 14 pt and bold in Photoshop and have that work. I
took a look at what Photoshop considers to be 14 pt and it's a lot smaller
than what HTML considers to be 14 pt.

But they insist that they are following the WCAG standard because they chose
14 pt in Photoshop.

Do any of you have an explanation for this that I can give to them? Is there
a reason that 14 pt in Photoshop would be different than 14 pt in HTML?
Which one did the WCAG mean? When I look at WebAIM's Color Contrast Checker,
there is a sentence that says "I am big text." I looked at the source and it
says that it is 14 pt and bold. This 14 pt is much larger than the 14 pt
that Photoshop uses by default.

1.2 em and 1.5 em are useful units, but how big is 1 em? If it's 16 px, then
1.2 em would be about 19 px and 1.5 em would be 24 px. But one of our
designers said he thought that 1 em was equal to 12 px, not 16 px.

If choosing 14 pt in Photoshop is incorrect for following this standard,
what should the procedure be for using Photoshop?

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated. It's causing quite a stir in
my company. ;-)

Thanks,
David