Re: New Wiki page with SC text proposals to combine issues 79, 78, and 74

Gregg C Vanderheiden
greggvan@umd.edu



> On Jan 24, 2017, at 5:27 PM, Alastair Campbell <acampbell@nomensa.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Gregg,
>  
> So working from those principles I think we have to keep the SCs separate, as they have different levels of difficulty and different boundaries of how, or how-much a user can adapt them.
>  
> First punts in this direction:
>  
> Font-family: Changing the font-family used on a web page to [Comic Sans] does not cause loss of content or functionality.
>  
> NB: If we use comic sans people will think we’re trolling designers, does someone know of a ‘nicer’ font that is cross-platform and of a similar size/proportion? We can use Arial otherwise, it is just to pick up where people rely on a tiny font-family and don’t allow buffer, or use font-icons badly.

GV:  I think we can just say ‘change font to similarly sized font’ and not name one.     You can define "similarly sized"  as being  +/- 10 % for accuracy i

>  
> Colors: Changing the foreground and background colors used on a web page to white on black does not cause a loss of content or functionality.
>  
> NB: Specifying a colour combination helps in general, as it should highlight most issues. But, it could miss particular situations like a dark background image, where the test passes but someone using dark-on-light text would find an problem. Any ideas?

GV:  interesting.  I’m not sure it works though.  backgrounds are sometimes used to show visual fields that are programmatically determinable but otherwise invisible if you make it black and white. ….  

>  
> Spacing: Changing the line-height of all text to .8 to 1.3 and spacing around elements containing text to   - .01em to 0.5EM does not cause loss of content or functionality.
>  
> NB: Line height it best dealt with as unit-less [1]. Also, I know I’m going to get some comments such as “why don’t you recommend pixels for this?”, because I always do recommend pixels. The answer is that EMs are relative to the text they enclose, even though they are calculated to pixels. If we can’t say EM because it is too technology-specific, perhaps spacing of “½ the font-size of the text” could be used?
GV2: Em is a technology agnostic way  —  and avoids the pixel problem with scaled screens today (and tomorrow).   So agree with this. 

you didnt talk about spacing of word and characters etc? 

>  
> Cheers,
>  
> -Alastair
>  
> 1] http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/02/08/unitless-line-heights/ <http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2006/02/08/unitless-line-heights/>
>  
> PS. I running training tomorrow, so probably radio-silence from me. Sigh of relief all round? ;-)
>  
> 
>