RE: CSS Accessibility Analyzer

> Jens:
> 
> Well, I'm not very convinced of these techniques. Absolute 
> units are not
> to
> be equated with inaccessibility.
> 
> Roberto:
> Instead I agree with techniques doc where said: "Only use absolute
> length units when the physical characteristics of the output 
> medium are
> known, such as bitmap images."
> 
> If u create a div with width=750px; u make problems to people with
> differen resolutions than 800 x 600 or more...

But is a resolution for which the page was not designed an accessibility
problem? I don't think so, it's just bad design with some usability
problems. If you want to ban bad design, you've got your work cut out for
you... 

Also, in your example, setting the width using relative units (for example
15em) doesn't eliminate the problem as em is not relative to the resolution.
People with small resolutions will get a horizontal scrollbar with a 15em
width just as easily as if you specify a 750px width.

I agree with Jens, only some absolute units cause accessibility problems.
The most important case being the font size. But even for that, I think it's
as much a user agent problem as it is a web content problem. I think we
should encourage content creators to use relative units for font size, but
WAI should also stimulate user agent creators to favor the user preference
over the font size specified by the page. In other words, even on a page
that says 10px for font size, my browser should enlarge the text if I set my
font size preferences to larger. 

Yvette Hoitink
CEO Heritas, Enschede, The Netherlands
E-mail: y.p.hoitink@heritas.nl

Received on Monday, 16 February 2004 05:43:30 UTC