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Thread: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508
Number of posts in this thread: 11 (In chronological order)
From: Lennart Borgman
Date: Sat, Jan 31 2004 5:00PM
Subject: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508
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Hi,
I am new to this list and my knowledge of accessability is not the best.
Still I try to encourage web-site owners to follow the guidelines (maybe
there is a little narcissistic police man inside me;-). I mostly found to
obstacles, either that they are not aware of the guidelines or that the
web-designers think it is difficult to make good looking page if the
guidelines are followed (though I seldom get that answer explicitly).
I have been reading a little bit in this list's archive to find out what the
opinions about fixed font-sizes are. I found nothing that deviated to far
from my own thoughts. However I believed that the guidelines said that you
should not use fixed font-sizes. Can you please explain this to me?
The issue came up when I looked at the web page for Uppsala University
(http://www.uu.se/). The page can not be checked by Bobby for some reason.
As far as I can see (without actually looking at the code;-) they are using
fixed font-size. So I mailed them to ask if they knew about the guidelines.
Indeed they did, they had been getting good remarks from some vision
impaired and blind students.
They made me realise that there is much I don't know about this. How can
this be? My thought is that the problem can be quite different for those
with a slight vision impairment and those who are nearly blind. I would
really appreciate if someone could tell me "the story behind". How has this
been handled in groups working with WAI?
To make you better understand my question I can tell you that I am hearing
impaired. Beeing just a little bit hearing impaired, beeing much hearing
impaired and beeing death gives rise to some very different difficulties
(though some difficulties are of course common too).
- Lennart
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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Sun, Feb 01 2004 2:12PM
Subject: Re: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508
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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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From: Karl Core
Date: Sun, Feb 01 2004 2:24PM
Subject: Re: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508
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----- Original Message -----
From: "Jukka K. Korpela" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
To: < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
Sent: Sunday, February 01, 2004 4:04 PM
Subject: Re: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508
> 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.
Hear Hear!
If I have to explain the shortcomings of "bobby" to another client, I'm
going to explode.
-Karl
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From: Mark Magennis
Date: Mon, Feb 02 2004 4:33AM
Subject: RE: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508
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Lennart Borgman wrote:
>
> > However I believed that the guidelines said that you
> > should not use fixed font-sizes.
Jukka K. Korpela replied:
> As far as I can see, the guidelines don't say that.
Isn't this covered by WAI checkpoint 3.4 which states "Use relative rather
than absolute units in markup language attribute values and style sheet
property values"? Font size is an attribute value and a fixed size is an
absolute unit. I've always assumed that 3.4 therefore rules against fixed
font sizes. Forgive me if this has been discussed before, but if I'm wrong
then can you explain why?
> 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
I absolutely agree. Even if 3.4 does rule out fixed font sizes, putting it
at priority 2 is too low. The Uppsala University site uses a font size for
content and navigation which is way too small for a lot of people to read. A
lot more than most of us realise. The fact that it cannot be resized using
the standard browser controls means that, for all those people, the
information and navigation are inaccessible. It should therefore be priority
1, defined by WAI as:
"A Web content developer must satisfy this checkpoint. Otherwise, one or
more groups will find it impossible to access information in the document.
Satisfying this checkpoint is a basic requirement for some groups to be able
to use Web documents."
Mark
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From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Mon, Feb 02 2004 5:11AM
Subject: RE: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508
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On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, Mark Magennis wrote:
> Isn't this covered by WAI checkpoint 3.4 which states "Use relative rather
> than absolute units in markup language attribute values and style sheet
> property values"? Font size is an attribute value and a fixed size is an
> absolute unit.
You are quite right. I'm very happy to stand corrected. (Technically, the
Uppsala site uses the font-size property in CSS and not the size attribute
in a font tag, but the checkpoint refers to properties as well.)
I guess I missed it since it's under "Guideline 3. Use markup and style
sheets and do so properly.", which is natural in retrospect, in a sense.
But I wrongly remembered that the guideline only discusses proper use HTML
and CSS in the sense of using the according to specifications, both
syntactically and semantically.
On a finer point, 3.4 says: "For example, in CSS, use 'em' or percentage
lengths rather than 'pt' or 'cm', which are absolute units." Interestingly
it does not mention 'px' in the example, despite the fact that 'px' is
probably the most commonly used unit in CSS. Surprisingly, many people say
that 'px' is a relative unit, and in a sense it is relative to
_something_.
But the techniques document http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10-CSS-TECHS/#units
says: "Only use absolute length units when the physical characteristics of
the output medium are known, such as bitmap images." I'm not sure I see
what this really refers to, but surely the only unit that makes sense for
a bitmap image is 'px', since such an image is inherently a matrix of
pixels. Thus, the 'px' unit is implicitly declared as absolute.
We could rest our case, if WCAG 1.0 had legal and enforceable power. :-)
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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From: Lennart Borgman
Date: Mon, Feb 02 2004 2:59PM
Subject: Re: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508
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Hi Larry,
Thank you for pointing out the terms of use. I am a bit ashamed, but I did
not read them before. I have scanned other pages and it has always worked
well. My thought has been that it should be good to test with Bobby first
before suggesting it to the people responsible for the web site.
Hearing impairments? It has no direct bearing. I just wanted to say that I
found it plausible from my own better knowledge of this disability that
different degrees and kind of visual impairments could face you with very
different problems when trying to read a web site. Just as you and others
have replied.
To you and Jukka, Karl and Mark who have also replied I want to say thank
you for the help. My knowledge of this problem is now much better. I also do
think that it is unfortunate that the fixed font size problem is not a level
1 priority, since so many people are affected. It is also unfortunate since
it seems to be so temptating for the web designers use fixed font sizes.
(And if I am not mistaking it was quite difficult before to use relative
font sizes (problems with how style inheritance was handled) and the
solution using BIG and SMALL tags was not that well known.)
Of course I then wonder why the problem with fixed font sizes is not given a
level 1 priority, but that might be due to whom is asked whether this is a
big problem. I hope it will be moved to a level 1 priority.
Kind regards,
Lennart
----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry G. Hull" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
To: "Lennart Borgman" < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
Cc: < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 4:56 PM
Subject: Re: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508
Hi,
Perhaps the answer to the "good remarks from some vision impaired and
blind students" at (http://www.uu.se/) is simply that these
individuals are using screen magnifiers and screen readers that are
largely unaffected by the fixed font size.
Individuals who use their own style sheet to set font size may have a
problem if their preference is overridden by a fixed font size as may
those who use a different platform and/or operating system than the
developers. I understand a fixed 9pt font size may look fine on a
Macintosh (my machine as it happens) but appear enormous on Windows
and be unreadably small on Linux.
As far as the problem running Bobby, the online version terms of use says,
"You shall not:
1. use the Service to scan a website page that is not owned by you
or otherwise under your management and control, unless you have
received permission from the person or entity who owns or otherwise
has management and control of such website page...."
And, there may be some enforcement mechanism in place.
What bearing has a hearing disability (your last paragraph) when it
comes to the fixed font size problem?
Larry (who has a severe hearing loss himself)
>The issue came up when I looked at the web page for Uppsala University
>(http://www.uu.se/). The page can not be checked by Bobby for some reason.
>As far as I can see (without actually looking at the code;-) they are using
>fixed font-size. So I mailed them to ask if they knew about the guidelines.
>Indeed they did, they had been getting good remarks from some vision
>impaired and blind students.
>
>They made me realise that there is much I don't know about this. How can
>this be? My thought is that the problem can be quite different for those
>with a slight vision impairment and those who are nearly blind. I would
>really appreciate if someone could tell me "the story behind". How has this
>been handled in groups working with WAI?
>
>To make you better understand my question I can tell you that I am hearing
>impaired. Beeing just a little bit hearing impaired, beeing much hearing
>impaired and beeing death gives rise to some very different difficulties
>(though some difficulties are of course common too).
>
>- Lennart
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From: Jens Meiert
Date: Tue, Feb 03 2004 2:24AM
Subject: Re: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508
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> Of course I then wonder why the problem with fixed font sizes is not given
> a level 1 priority [...]
Basically I agree, but in principle a fixed font size does not imply
illegibility or inaccessibility. E.g., 'font-size: 30px;' normally is readable, but
something like 'font-size: 0.1em;' will be even hard to read when using IE's
'increase font-size' function (in fact, it's impossible).
Best regards,
Jens.
--
Jens Meiert
Interface Architect
http://meiert.com/
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From: julian.rickards
Date: Tue, Feb 03 2004 7:01AM
Subject: RE: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508
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I often forget that font-size: xx-small/x-small/small/ ... /xx-large also
are applicable to CSS but I certainly don't use them (choice and
forgetfulness being the only reasons) and I think that many other designers
don't use them either.
---------------------------------------------------------
Julian Rickards
Digital Publications Distribution Coordinator
Publications Services Section
Ontario Ministry of Northern Development and Mines
Phone: (705) 670-5608
Fax: (705) 670-5690
>
From: Sandy Clark
Date: Tue, Feb 03 2004 1:50PM
Subject: Accessibility speaker needed in DC
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The ColdFusion Users Network Conference - CFUN (an annual event in the DC
area) has agreed to host an accessibility track at the conference this year.
At this time, there is a call for speakers for the accessibility track. The
idea is that if there is enough demand for this track, that a separate
conference on accessibility would be offered in subsequent years.
If anyone is interested in speaking, please contact me with a quick sentence
or two of the talk. Talks are to be about accessibility and should run
about 50 minutes. The conference is June 26th/27th in Rockville, MD.
http://www.cfconf.org/cfun-04/
Thank you,
Sandra Clark
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From: Terence de Giere
Date: Tue, Feb 03 2004 3:44PM
Subject: Re: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508
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Relative Versus Absolute Font Sizes
Lennart Borgman wrote:
...I believed that the [accessibility] guidelines said that you should
not use fixed font-sizes....
Graphic designers seem to prefer fixed size layouts and precise sizing
and positioning of fonts. That might be part of their psychology, with
their sense of composition, balance and color. I have been told that
designers tend to have excellent vision, although I am not sure this is
a fact. 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.
The web is first and foremost information, and most of that is text,
although in some cases, for example, the current photographs of Mars
from the European orbiter and the United States's rover vehicles, are
pictures that are, at least for the common man, difficult to describe in
text.
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. For accessibility though, we need to consider that
the information in pages has to be presented in a manner that is
flexible, even extremely flexible.
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. Different fonts break to
two pixels stem width at different sizes. Thus, if a designer is using
fonts in the 12 to 18 point range, the visual appearance may be
uncontrollably ragged because of this effect. In print, with its higher
resolution the difference is slight, but on low resolution computer
screens it is significant.
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. Another reason for small sizes is the way users set (or
not knowing how to set it, do not set) their monitor resolution. I have
typically observed that the screen resolution is usually set so the font
size and graphics are scaled larger than life size. For example on my
screen, a resolution of 1152 by 864 pixels reproduces the ruler in a
word processor very close to life size, but many other users with the
same size screen are usually using 800 by 600 pixels or at most 1024 by
768, with the result that point sizes in applications and web pages are
larger in appearance than specified. Using smaller fonts on web pages
redresses this issue, probably to the detriment of those who have their
machines set to a true 'What You See Is What You Get' size.
Go to http://www.proaxis.com/~ferris/docs/dpi-monitor.html for a chart
that correlates screen resolution and monitor size. Note that this chart
does not include Windows when set at the 'Large Font' setting, or 120
dots per inch.
By using smaller fonts, the average user will see more of the web page
'above the fold', that is, the bottom boundary of the web browser
window. Web browsers also initially began to give more control to the
designer, with the implementation of fixed font sizes. Note that the
first Cascading Style Sheet specification also gave control to the
designer by allowing them to specify a rule, '!important', that
controlled the size. If the user used the !important rule in a user
style sheet, the rule in the designer's sheet would override it. In the
second Cascading Style Sheet specification, this was reversed for
accessibility, giving control back to the user. 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.
Browsers also until recently rendered font sizes by reference to point
size, with the result that computer operating systems that displayed at
different resolutions would render fonts in a different proportion to
the size of images. If a page was designed on a Macintosh, the same page
on a PC would show images smaller in relation to fonts. The newest
browsers are using pixels to set font size internally, with the result
that proportion between image and font is constant across operating
systems. However, in this situation, a page displayed on a Mac will
appear larger than on a PC because a PC will be displaying the page at
96 or 120 dots per inch, and the Macintosh at 72 dots per inch, assuming
the screen is set for to What You See Is What You Get size. 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.
What You See Is What You Get really refers to the matching of the
computer screen's visual image to the image on a printed version of the
same information, first developed at Xerox PARC, and first commercially
applied to the Macintosh, or its precursor, the Lisa, in the 1980's. The
Internet has never been a What You See Is What You Get environment. What
each person experiences may be quite different from what the designer
visually thinks is appropriate. nonetheless designers continue to try to
make the web an environment like they have with printing.
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. 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. Designers working in multimedia in some ways are in a better
position because they deal with dynamic presentation in which page
elements move about. Designs using Macromedia Flash, however, are often
even worse than HTML designs, because it allows designers the ability to
use specific fonts in specific sizes, and the result is many extremely
difficult to read web sites, with interfaces that are sometimes hard to
fathom for site navigation and operation. The design in the mind of the
artist is executed more or less, but without reference to what happens
when it is used.by someone else. It is always easy to appreciate and use
a design one creates oneself, but a much different matter when more than
one person is involved.
An accessible design has to be thought through on many levels, 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.
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. Visual design practices and accessibility
practices tend to be at opposite poles sometimes, 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.
Most users are sighted and have something approaching average vision
(because the average is the norm of all these people) and just on the
basis of behavior, the typical person will approach thinking about the
web from a visual viewpoint, and never consider the ramifications of
design on blind, partially sighted, deaf, or motorically impaired users.
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.
Canada implemented almost all of the World Wide Web Consortium's Level
Double-A compliance accessibility guidelines, but interestingly, for
their 'Common Look and Feel' for government web sites, use a fixed font
size, rather than the relative font size required by the W3C guidelines.
The United State's Section 508 rules do not specify that one must use
relative font sizes, so as a whole the U.S. rules provide for less
accessibility in most cases.
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. The default browser font
size as displayed in browsers on What You See Is What You Get displays
is adequate for most users, except for children and the elderly who read
more efficiently with fonts that are, compared to a printed document,
somewhere in the 14 to18 font size. This size is in the range mentioned
earlier where graphical browsers render fonts erratically moving from a
one pixel stem width to two.
Persons who are near sighted and wearing corrective glasses will see a
smaller image compared to normal sight, so a users in this situation may
have problems even with otherwise corrected vision. Many visual
impairments require larger sized fonts, sometimes huge sizes with large
monitors, and may also require the use of speech synthesized rendering
of the text in pages as well as an additional assist.
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. 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. That most
sites seem to use too small sizes would lead to the conclusion that
these web sites' traffic would be less than if they were readable - lost
customers, more errors in completing tasks, and less success in finding
information. For a big commercial site, the lost revenue could be quite
large; for government sites, the usual problems dealing with government
employees and regulations would be conveniently translated to the web.
It is estimated billions of dollars are lost annually for reasons like
this.
We do know that graphically driven 'concept' oriented web sites that
have unusual design and atypical interfaces and weird fonts that look
striking, have often failed miserably in practice because of usability
and accessibility issues. Less evident issues such as one font size
smaller than needed for easy reading seem to slip by without notice.
There is only a certain range of features, layouts, typeface designs and
sizes that uniformly work well, and when we stray away from that, even
normal users start to have usability and accessibility problems with
sites. This situation is slowly improving, but very slowly. Considering
the negative effects this has on commerce and the efficiency of
government operations, the only explanation seems to be almost total
ignorance of these issues, or that the principles of design as
understood separately by various factions of web design, development,
marketing and so on, are considered more important than empirical
knowledge and success.
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, that enlargement alone is not always
sufficient. Windows provides rudimentary speech rendering and
magnification. Presumably a user that was vision impaired and hearing
impaired could try enlarging fonts in Internet Explorer, and not knowing
how to override defaults or use the built in magnifier could not enlarge
the fonts on a web site, and might try the built in speech synthesis as
an aid, which if there is a hearing impairment might not work well
either. The only viable computer alternative to complete lack of vision
coupled with deafness is Braille used in conjunction with a very
accessible web site and appropriate assistive technology.
A note on the Bobby accessibility checker that came up in this
discussion. The Bobby license as written prevents the user from using
Bobby on any web sites they do not own. A great software license for a
consultant! Presumably one needs to buy a copy for each non owned web
site it is used on. Better would be for consultants to use the software
and recommend it to clients to set up an accessibility testing system
they could eventually use to monitor on their own. I asked WatchFire
about this and got no response. One might as well have a license say the
user may keep a copy on his computer, but not use it for any purpose
other than to take up disk space. I think they should rethink that
wording. Bobby 4.01 (the Java version) has trouble with some sites,
causing it to just leave the site; I do not know the cause, but it might
have to do with HTTP protocols and headers. Bobby 5.0 (Windows only) can
access sites that 4.01 seems to wink out on, as with the www.uu.se site.
As with any tool, Bobby is useful if one knows what it does and does not
do, what its strengths and weakness are. Jukka Korpela is fond of
pointing out that tools do not make a web site accessible, and that is
basically true. They are a sometimes very useful aid, and can tell you
where to look, but such tools are too unintelligent to cope with many
usability issues, and they miss many accessibility points or are
incapable of discovering them. I know of four accessibility errors Bobby
reports under certain circumstances when in fact no accessibility error
has occurred, and I do not use Bobby often. Accessibility software also
has these bugs we have to contend with. When first doing accessibility
using tools, we tend to rely on them very heavily, but with experience
we begin to discover they can be very stupid sometimes, and do not
reflect what the user is actually going to experience using a particular
site. Applying accessibility guidelines manually also can have the same
effect.
IBM has done some studies indicating that some simple accessibility
heuristics can be very effective in evaluating the accessibility of web
sites, even if a long list of technical guidelines is not used, perhaps
because these simple rules can be more easily followed than a complex
list of technical details. (Definition of heuristics: an aid to
learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially
trial-and-error methods or self-educating techniques, such as the
evaluation of feedback, to improve performance)
Links to the IBM articles (my thanks to Dr. John Sorflaten at Human
Factors International for the tip) are:
Part One at h
From: Joe Clark
Date: Tue, Feb 10 2004 10:48AM
Subject: Re: Fixed font-sizes and WAI or 508
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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 ADDRESS REMOVED = | <http://joeclark.org/access/>;
Author, _Building Accessible Websites_ | <http://joeclark.org/book/>;
Expect criticism if you top-post
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