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Re: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Feb 1, 2004 2:12PM

On Sat, 31 Jan 2004, Lennart Borgman wrote:

> However I believed that the guidelines said that you
> should not use fixed font-sizes.

As far as I can see, the guidelines don't say that. Since fixed
font-sizes, which are typically small, affect far more people than most
WCAG 1.0 guidelines, this just proves that accessibility shall not be
identified with accessibility guidelines, which in turn shall not be
identified with the reports of purported accessibility checkers.

It is true that users can override font size settings if they know how to
do that, even on IE. But similarly they can override color settings, yet
WCAG 1.0 checkpoint 2.2 specifically discusses sufficient color contrast.

> The issue came up when I looked at the web page for Uppsala University
> (http://www.uu.se/).

It's not bad as a whole, except for the fixed small font size.

> The page can not be checked by Bobby for some reason.

Fine. Roughly speaking, Bobby is worse than useless.

> As far as I can see (without actually looking at the code;-) they are using
> fixed font-size.

Yes, font-size : 11px.

> So I mailed them to ask if they knew about the guidelines.
> Indeed they did,

That's what they say.

> they had been getting good remarks from some vision
> impaired and blind students.

That's what they say. They have, for example, _lots_ of repetitive links
on every page, including a list of all letters a links. I wouldn't like to
listen to those pages. And it's painful reading even for my relatively
normal eyes if I don't override their clueless font size setting.

> My thought is that the problem can be quite different for those
> with a slight vision impairment and those who are nearly blind.

Certainly. Setting fixed font size cannot disturb completely blind people.
Nearly blind people who still can read large text _have_ to use
browsers set to override font size settings on pages and use whatever
suits the user. So it's just the majority of people that gets disturbed,
especially including people with somewhat reduced eyesight, so that they
can still read e.e. 11px text, though not easily, and they haven't yet
learned how to make their browser ignore such settings (or switched to
a browser that lets them set a minimum font size, such as Mozilla).

Typically the "necessity" of setting font size to something small stems
either from assumed esthetics (as seen by young designers) or from the
portal disease, i.e. an attempt to make a main page contain everything.
In this case, the main page is not too crowded, but it still has too long
a main menu and quite pointlessly duplicates some of it in another menu,
so it's an unnecessary challenge to people with cognitive disabilities.
Thus, if you just ask them to fix the font size - that is, to stop fixing
it! - they probably don't pay attention, since the proposal conflicts with
the overall design. I'm afraid this is fairly common. Fixed small font
size typically reflects a completely wrong approach, and it's not easy to
make site management understand that.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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