inaccessible site due to css [was: Re: Politics: Strict Guidelines Considered Harmful]

Hi

On Tue 19-Dec-2000 at 08:44:43 -0500, Bailey, Bruce wrote:
> (2)  Most of use have seen sites that were inaccessible because of the use
> of <font> and the like.  Can you cite one real-world reference where valid
> CSS was used but the results decreased accessibility?

I'm sorry to say that I can :-(

The AltaVista help pages:

http://doc.altavista.com/adv_search/ast_haw_index.html

Valid CSS:

http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://doc.altavista.com/adv_search/ast_haw_index.html&warning=2

In Netscape 4 in Linux the use of point sizes for the main body of the
text and the links in the margin makes it totally unreadable (I know
this is not WAI compliant!).

When CSS is turned off the main body is readable but the links in the
margin are not (blue on blue) since the table cells colours are set
using bgcolor and the links are made white using css. Netscape 3 will
have this problem as well. 

If they had used <font color="#FFFFFF"> in the left margin then these
pages would be even more of an example of CSS making things worse.

The problem is basically caused by Netscape4 (and especially NN in
Linux) being totally crap, but I do think it's a case of CSS making a
site less accessible. 

I came to the conclusion a while ago that the only sensible thing to do
with text sizes is not to set them _at all_, not using font tags, not
using css -- use structural mark-up and leave all the sizes to the user
agent (apart from print media css where I do use point sizes). 
 
Chris

-- 
Chris Croome <chris@webarchitects.co.uk>
work: http://www.webarchitects.co.uk/
play: http://chris.croome.net/