[WEB4LIB] Re: Fonts & CSS

[Thomas Dowling]

At 07:27 AM 8/7/2002, Jeremy Foster wrote:
>Thank-you to everyone for their views on this.
>
>Possibly I was reading this line wrong when I was going over guidelines:
>
>"Note that conformance to this checkpoint is important even though 
>Priority 2 Checkpoints 3.1 and 3.3 suggest implementing a stylesheet. Note 
>that conformance to this checkpoint also may require you to violate the 
>Priority 2 Checkpoint 11.2 which advises avoiding old features such as FONT."


I believe this is a Bobby comment, and IMO is not as clear as it should 
be.  The WCAG guideline it comes from says simply "Organize documents so 
they may be read without style sheets."  There's an analogous Section 508 
guideline also.  I don't think you'll run afoul of this guideline if you're 
only adjusting fonts.

Some users will read your page with their own style settings.  They may 
need extra-large font sizes, or very high contrast, or they may just not be 
interested in your style settings.  Serious problems come in if you have 
used CSS positioning to move text around in a such a way that it doesn't 
make sense when "linearized" or read in source code order (this is the 
biggest accessibility issue with tables, too).  Another problem comes in if 
you set some colors in stylesheets and others with presentational HTML tags 
and the user overrides one but not the other, getting for example their 
stylesheet's dark blue background and your <font> element's dark blue 
text.  Best solution is always to assign fore- and background colors 
together and only in stylesheets.

BTW, Opera makes it very easy to test this guideline.  Click the User Mode 
icon or press Ctrl-G and the author's stylesheet, font, and color settings 
will be disabled in favor of a user stylesheet or browser defaults.



Thomas Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu