Re: Relative Units for Font Size Scaling W3C requirement replaced by zoom techniques in new Browsers?

as i wrote to this list in may [note 1], zoom is to screen 
magnification as simple text-to-speech engines are to screen 
readers...

zooming only earns a single-A compliance, in that it provides a 
BASE functionality (zooming the viewport) just as a simple TTS 
engine performs BASE functions -- such as key echo, typing echo, 
announcing system messages -- but it is NO substitute for a 
screen reader.

likewise, for those with vision over 20/200 zoom is a great 
benefit, but those with less visual acuity need software that 
will follow the flow defined for the document, not merely zoom 
the viewport. likewise, there are those who benefit from a 
limited viewport, with high magnification and often high-contrast, 
who benefit either from supplemental speech and/or aural feedback 
in the form of pure sound cues, something that zoom in IE7 and 
narrator on WinXP cannot provide.  narrator is better than nothing 
when one's main speech engine freezes, crashes or just goes silent, 
but i wouldn't use it to do online commerce or banking.

absolute font values should -- in my opinion -- be relegated to 
the print media type, while the screen media type should use 
relative measurements to accomodate the user's desires -- even if 
a user is viewing text at 75 times normal size, a change in 
font-size defined using a percentage still applies to the zoomed 
text, producing -- only on a larger scale -- the intended result. 

absolute pixel and point settings are meaningless outside of the 
print media selector -- not to mention direct derivatives of print 
conventions, which is where it not only should remain, but where 
it belongs.

so, scaling of fonts according to percentage or using em is still 
necessary, and is a concept that needs desperately to be ported to 
the values defined for aural CSS (or, if you prefer, CSS3-Speech 
Module) instead of defining 50, on a scale of 0 to 100 as the 
baseline from which aural styling starts to affect aural rendering; 
increasing the richness, stress, or pitch by degrees relative to 
whatever the users' default settings are, would be a far more 
effective means of fine-tuning aural style sheets

just my 4 cents (american)
gregory.

Notes:
[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2007May/0045.html

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LANGUAGE, n.  The music with which we charm the serpents guarding 
another's treasure.     -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
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            Gregory J. Rosmaita, oedipus@hicom.net
     Camera Obscura: http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/index.html
UBATS: United Blind Advocates for Talking Signs: http://ubats.org
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Received on Friday, 8 June 2007 20:34:45 UTC