Re: User Agent Accessibility Guidelines comments: font-size UI

At 1:23 PM -0600 11/22/99, Al Gilman wrote:

>The CSS specification does not presently meet accessibility needs because
>it is vague to a debilitating degree as regards the kind of user
>abstraction that Todd is explaining.

Excellently phrased.

>However, this is style-control
>behavior that the user with partial functional impairment in vision
>requires, and hence it is properly in scope for the UA group to articulate
>in their own planned work products, so far as I can tell.
>
>Furthermore, we should consider adding a checkpoint abstracted from Todd's
>techniques to the effect that there should be one control in the UI which
>accomplishes a general increase or decrease of the font sizes throughout
>the document, while preserving size ordering of different text fragments to
>the maximum extent with user directives.

If WAI authoring guidelines (and the techniques I've suggested) are 
observed, users should be able to accomplish this simply by 
re-specifying their preferred font size - no special 
checkpoint/technique required.

When authors use pixel- or absolute-length units (e.g., points) for 
text, however, it is charitable (and sometimes correct) to assume 
that the text must maintain a consistent size relationship to 
non-textual elements. In this case, I think a "zoom/magnify" 
functionality (such as implemented in the Opera UA) should be 
required to override specified measures. Otherwise you'd have to 
treat pixels or points specified for text as less privileged than 
pixels or points specified for (or inherent to) other objects, and 
that strikes me as unclean.

--
Todd Fahrner

Received on Monday, 22 November 1999 19:30:49 UTC