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Re: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508

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From: Joe Clark
Date: Feb 10, 2004 10:48AM

What an endless post.

>Graphic designers seem to prefer fixed size layouts and precise
>sizing and positioning of fonts. That might be part of their
>psychology,

They're *graphic designers*. Their "psychology" isn't at fault.

>In any case, designers have tended to want to control the appearance
>of web pages down to the n^th degree, and this is one actors that
>historically led to the web becoming inaccessible.

*Historically*. What you're saying may have been generally valid in
1999, but it isn't anymore. Of course there are still developers out
there who pretend that Web standards don't exist (usually they've
simply never heard of them-- you wouldn't believe the conversations
and E-mails I've had on the simple topic of valid HTML), but I can
assure readers there is a substantial cadre of designers and
developers out there who want *and achieve* good visual design and
good accessibility.

>I do not think graphic designers relate well to the idea that the
>web browser user can control what they see, and shatter their
>carefully conceived designs.

Please update your thinking. Some designers don't understand that,
true. Many have learned the truth.

>Font size on web pages from a designer's viewpoint may have
>something to do with the low resolution of computer screens. The
>stems on typefaces at the usual sizes designers use are one pixel
>wide on screens. If one goes one or two point or pixel sizes larger
>than browser defaults, the fonts suddenly become two pixels wide.
>Visually it looks like the fonts have become bold when in fact, they
>have not.

This is a crudely accurate summation that applies when subpixel
rendering is not involved. It is certainly true for most CRT
displays, for example.

>Thus designers are, I believe, using smaller sizes to avoid this
>unsightly appearance, and fixing sizes to prevent the user from
>messing up their design.

And here we come across the recurring bugbear of accessibility
advocates who simply have not updated their thinking the way
designers have. Designers can specify font sizes and site visitors
can override them. It's as simple as that.

If what is really being said here is "IE on Windows makes it
difficult to resize fonts sized with the px unit," then that's a
separate issue. The WCAG 1.0 requirements concerning relative and
absolute sizes were written on the basis of incorrect information
(among other things, px *is* a relative unit) and were the result of
an anti-design ideology. Plus, they assumed that the author has sole
responsibility to sort out every possible accessibility detail. The
visitor must take responsibility for his or her own needs, too. As
with everything in Web design, it's a balance: The Web designer can
suggest HTML and CSS renderings, the browser can reproduce them
accurately or inaccurately, and the visitor can override them.

> Web browsers also initially began to give more control to the
>designer, with the implementation of fixed font sizes.

And every graphical browser in current use-- I exclude Netscape 4, as
we all should-- can resize fonts. Some better than others,
admittedly, but that's merely an argument for low-vision people to
stop using broken products.

>The newer browsers except for Internet Explorer are basically giving
>font size control back to the user regardless of what the designer
>sets in HTML or in style sheets. In Internet Explorer, there are
>more limited options for overriding page display, and the user needs
>to find out how that is done because they are buried in the menus.

Correct!

I don't suppose the real solution could possibly be "Get low-vision
users off the addiction of IE for Windows," could it?

>Browsers also until recently rendered font sizes by reference to point size,

Not strictly accurate. The issue is the assumed dot pitch of the monitor.

>If a page was designed on a Macintosh, the same page on a PC would
>show images smaller in relation to fonts.

*In old browsers*. IE 5 on Macintosh and subsequent browsers have
implemented the 96-dpi standard (written down in some W3C spec
somewhere, I am told), and some browsers let you select 72 or 96 dpi.

>Some browsers, such as Mozilla also correlate the screen resolution
>setting (i.e., 72 or 96 dots per inch) with the font size, so that
>true uniformity across operating systems is possible.

Yes.

>The graphic designer's historical connection to the Macintosh (and
>it seems still their preference) has perhaps tended to tie web page
>design to the concepts of print design, maybe because this is the
>kind of software designers are used to using.

That isn't true to any significant extent anymore. All my
standardista friends who use Macs also test on Windows. The curious
thing is that Windoids do not do the converse, except insofar as they
announce on their sites "If anybody has problems on Macs, let me
know."

> But web design requires design to work with screen sizes on small
>cell phones up to monitors quite large, some with browsers that show
>graphics and some which do not. Creating a design that can flow,
>bend and change, drop out features such as scripting, pictures, and
>multimedia, and still present themselves satisfactorily goes against
>the design trend graphic artists are used to.

True. But have you ever heard of stylesheet-switchers? You can have
your cake and eat it too.

And please get over the ideology that exactly the same layout must
scale to any arbitrarily huge font size and be equally usable. Above
a certain point, you have to give up multicolumn layout and switch to
single-column, a fact that WAI has yet to grasp. It's perfectly
attainable with stylesheet switching.

>An accessible design has to be thought through on many levels,

As must critiques of *design*.

> and it is difficult to draw such a design because a drawing
>represents only one state of a reflowing design, that might be
>presented in many, many different ways. A very typical method of
>design for web pages has been for the graphic artist to draw the
>page in an application like Adobe Photoshop, and then the developer
>cuts up the drawing, patches and positions the graphics together
>with tables, and replacing some of the drawn text with real HTML
>text, ususally fixed in size, finally ending up with
>a pretty, but often inaccessible web page.

You're describing an extremely old method that is no longer used by
any standards-based designer I know. It just is not done anymore.
Photoshop for comps, yes; using whatever crappy HTML they can get
away with to exactly duplicate the comp, no.

>Accessibility, if applied fully, means designing the information
>structure of the page, using the proper HTML elements (tags) to
>describe the document information as clearly as possible, and
>providing alternatives for non text information. A good accessible
>page, in its basic form, is really very dull looking as it has only
>default browser format, which can be rather variable depending on
>the kind of browser used. The challenge is then to make the page
>more visually attractive, and visually usable for graphical browsers
>by graphic design - using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets, images,
>and multimedia, but without destroying the user's ability to get all
>the information in the page if he or she cannot experience it
>through all the senses, or through the technology being used.

A fair summation of standards-compliant design principles.

> Visual design practices and accessibility practices tend to be at
>opposite poles sometimes,

Where "sometimes" means "in most cases when undereducated designers
are at work and rarely in the case of standards-compliant designers."

> so in most organizations some kind of compromise is usually going
>on if accessibility is supported. Quite a lot of emphasis in the
>last few years has not been on how to design good accessible pages,
>but how to retrofit and patch inaccessible, visually designed pages,
>a procedure that results in poor usability for disabled users.

A debatable generalization.

>Graphic designers, programmers, administrators, and executives will
>all as a group be visually oriented, and this situation provides
>great inertia to overcome when considering accessibility, and
>usability.

It's already been overcome for a large swath of the Web-developer and
-designer circuit.

>Based on usability test results, font sizes on most major sites are
>too small, designers usually setting the normal reading font 20 to
>40 percent smaller than the browser default size.

References, please.

>Thus just about everyone who has a monitor set 'correctly' for real
>life display size, should have at least some trouble reading the
>text on professionally, graphically designed web sites these days.

A huge and unsupportable generalization.

> Considering all the variables of screen size, resolution, vision
>problems and their correction, the ability for the user to adjust
>font sizes is really necessary, even for normal users without vision
>problems.

Right. So get them using better browsers *and also* get the designers
to provide alternatives, many of which are available, some of which
use px as font unit.

>There is only a certain range of features, layouts, typeface designs
>and sizes that uniformly work well,

So don't try to use them all in every site. Use intelligent design
instead. You can simply offer multiple layouts on a site and make
them selectable by the user, who already presumably is viewing the
site in a non-braindead browser.

>A hearing impaired user will not usually have problems with visual
>web sites in the absence of a visual disability unless the content
>contains audio information related to but not the same as the visual
>text or graphics. Note that products like MAGic provide screen
>enlargement and speech rendering of pages,

Not Magpie, no.

>that enlargement alone is not always sufficient.

Nothing is "always" sufficient.

> Windows provides rudimentary speech rendering and magnification.

So do OS 9 and X in varying degrees.

> Presumably a user that was vision impaired and hearing impaired
>could try enlarging fonts in Internet Explorer,

and, since that won't work much of the time, use a better,
more-compliant browser like Mozilla or Opera.

My simple suggestion to Web designers is "Make your beautiful sites
accessible." And my equally-simple suggestion to accessibility
advocats is "Make your accessible sites beautiful." I don't see why I
have to settle for one or the other.

--

Joe Clark | <EMAIL REMOVED> | <http://joeclark.org/access/>;
Author, _Building Accessible Websites_ | <http://joeclark.org/book/>;
Expect criticism if you top-post


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