Web accessibility and px Re: web accessibility: reports from Québec and Belgium

On Wed, 05 Dec 2007 08:56:25 +0100, David Woolley  
<forums@david-woolley.me.uk> wrote:

>> 6. 82% of the evaluated sites used absolute units for fonts (pixels,  
>> points, etcetera).
>
> Although, in my view, pixels are an absolute unit when used on display  
> devices,

indeed, which accords with the understanding we had of what relative and  
absolute meant when the checkpoint was written. We were unclear about what  
this meant when we wrote the document, which was a problem :(

> according to the specification they are relative,

According to the CSS specification. The WCAG stuff should have been  
clearer about what it meant. (In my defence, I presumed that people would  
try to work out the intent and follow it, rather than try to work out  
whether they could use some text as a justification to do what they were  
being asked to avoid. And sadly I was not then as good at being clear  
about what I meant, since I didn't understand as much about how hard it is  
to explain things clearly and accurately).

> because, over the full range of resolutions achchievable when one  
> includes print devices, they approximate a fixed fraction of the display  
> device width.
>
> I have several times seen this used as excuse for using pixels. I've  
> also seen the zoom facility (which introduces scrolling problems) as  
> excuse for allowing pixels (and that from one of the major W3C list  
> contributors).

Zoom doesn't necessarily introduce problems. I still don't think it is a  
good reason to use px measures for things like font size...

cheers

chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals              Try the Kestrel - Opera 9.5 alpha

Received on Thursday, 6 December 2007 15:10:03 UTC