screen magnifiers and fragmented text

Anyone ever have text "fragment" when using a screen magnifier? Any ideas
why that would happen?

At www.accessdome.com/preview I'm using Verdana as a main body font. The
size is expressed in em's. I'm getting a feedback from a lady using Zoomtext
Extra Level 2 on a new PC through IE6. She tells me that the software acts
as a screen magnifier and a screen reader. On the magnification side, she
says that the headings (which are Georgia font) enlarge just fine while some
(but not all) of the body text fragments and is hard to read when magnified.
I asked her to look at the National Organization on Disability site

http://www.nod.org/cont/dsp_cont_loc_hme.cfm?locationId=12&locationNm=Home )
which I'm told is highly accessible. Her feedback was that the regular text
enlarged properly but any link text was fragmented.

My only guess is regarding the use of styles - the inheritance rule.
Netscape 4.x has inheritance issues (among many many many other problems but
I won't go there). I've got a separate style sheet for Netscape however in
places where it doesn't listen to the font-size, I add a class to force it.
For example, I have a style applied to <p> and <td>. In my web page, I have
a table. IE 5.x renders the font just fine but in Netscape, it ignored the
size (it displayed the proper font-family however so go figure). So I add
class="table" (which contain the same properties as my regular body font)
to the table tag then most times, the font size displays properly in both
IE5.x and Netscapte 4.x.  Here's part of my netscape style sheet. The one
for "everyone else" is exactly the same, only the values are different.

p, body
{
font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;
font-size: .8em;
color: #333333;
}

p
{line-height: 1.1em;}

.table
{
font-size: .8em;
line-height: 1.1em;
}

td
{
font-family: verdana,arial,helvetica,sans-serif;
font-size: .8em;
color: #333333;
}

So, do you think the fragmentation occurs because of a style being applied
twice?

Any assistance is appreciated,
Michelle Podd
Web Designer

Received on Thursday, 7 March 2002 12:32:41 UTC