Re: Stipulating fonts or not to stipulate.

At 02:52 AM 10/29/2001 , Paul Davis wrote:
>Is there an accessibility reason that <FONT face="geneva, arial, helvetica,
>sans serif"> should not be used? or to put it another way is there any
>software, text reader or browser that has a problem with this? 

Not a particularly good reason, no.  A decent reason is "you should
instead use Cascading Style Sheets" in which case you might happily
write your <font> as <div style="font-family: geneva, arial,
helvetica, sans serif"> and go on with the blessing of many.

In truth, nearly every browser has a way to override the font choices
of the author, either through preferences/options or in better CSS-esque
manner (user style sheets).  Therefore I can't really support the idea
that particular font choices constitute a barrier to access -- anyone
for whom fonts _will_ be an access problem _should_ appropriately
modify her browser settings to resolve this problem.

--Kynn

PS:  If you aren't using CSS -- which it sounds like you may not
      be doing -- I think you should look into it.  There is a large
      enough set of "safe" CSS these days that the added power over
      the <font> tag will really appeal to the artistic designer within
      you.


--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@reef.com>
Technical Developer Liaison
Reef North America
Accessibility - W3C - Integrator Network
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Received on Monday, 29 October 2001 11:42:06 UTC