Re: flexible design

Hello Sarah and all,

I agree entirely with you about the importance of flexible design for peope 
with low vision.

In your suggestion :

>Change window width and screen resolution and observe whether the page 
>contents remain visible within the width of the browser window without 
>requiring horizontal scrolling. If not, check the page source for table 
>attributes and style sheet properties that are defined using absolute units.

I just replace "window width and screen resolution" by "window width or 
screen resolution".

Thanks for your contribution.

Jean-Marie D'Amour M.Éd.
Formateur
CAMO pour personnes handicapées
www.camo.qc.ca

A 11:43 2002-04-12, Sarah Horton a écrit :
>Regarding the screen resolution discussion from today, I wanted to clarify 
>that if a page is designed to be flexible it should collapse and expand to 
>adjust to the width of the window (or the screen resolution) without 
>requiring horizontal scrolling. I tested a couple pages that I know are 
>designed to be flexible in Opera (5.0.485/Mac) and pages reflow, even with 
>the bookmarks frame open:
>
>http://www.dartmouth.edu/~access
>(This is a work in progress so don't look too closely!)
>
>You can run into trouble even with flexible layouts, however, when there 
>are graphics on the page because they force the page to be at least the 
>width of the graphic (text can reflow nicely but images cannot):
>
>Layout works okay here:
>http://www.dartmouth.edu/~anatomy
>
>but breaks down here:
>http://www.dartmouth.edu/~anatomy/wrist-hand/radiograph/radio1.html
>
>I think the point about flexible layouts is an essential one, particularly 
>in the context of resizing (enlarging) text for readability. If enlarging 
>the font means you wind up having to scroll horizontally to read the page 
>then you have what I would consider a fatal usability flaw, or a page that 
>for some is simply not usable. I would like to keep something about this 
>in the evaluation document because I think it is an important step, but I 
>am concerned that there is not a resource to point to that describes fixed 
>versus flexible layouts.
>
>Current wording:
>Set screen resolution to 640 x 480 and observe whether or not this forces 
>the page into horizontal scrolling.
>
>Suggested rewording:
>Change window width and screen resolution and observe whether the page 
>contents remain visible within the width of the browser window without 
>requiring horizontal scrolling. If not, check the page source for table 
>attributes and style sheet properties that are defined using absolute units.
>
>It's not great rewording, but at least it gets the issue on the table. Any 
>other ideas?
>
>-Sarah

Jean-Marie D'Amour M.Éd.
Formateur
CAMO pour personnes handicapées
www.camo.qc.ca

Received on Thursday, 25 April 2002 20:29:32 UTC