[WEB4LIB] Re: angent to Re: Inline forms in CSS problem

[Susan M. Johns]

<soapbox on>*

CSS and all the neat ADA/Bobby stuff is not exclusively for "THE blind".
Quite honestly THE blind don't care what font size it's in so long as the
screen reader can read the text.  You could code the page in -5 and THE
blind could read it so long as the tag was marked up appropriately for the
reader to recognize it.  Some sites work this way, even to the advantage of PDAs
and other handhelds.  Surprisingly, PDA sites are often *very* readable
because of the lack of graphics and concise outlines for a very tiny screen.

The W3C guidelines for XHTML and HTML 4.0 and CSS also support LOW VISION
users.  These are the people for whom the tiny print is impossible.  Want to
know what they're going through?  Take your glasses off.  Try reading the
screen without your bifocals.  Roll your chair back as far away from your
screen as you can with your arms outstreteched to still touch the keyboard,
or better yet, take your keyboard and stretch out the cord on it as far as
it goes.  Now try to read your screen.  Now take that times a factor of
about 10, and you'll start to simulate what the LOW VISION user sees.

Remember that you are not coding just for THE blind.  Low vision users are
an extremely large portion of your "able" viewers.  Throw in all us boomers
with the bifocals and all the librarians with the coke-bottle-lenses, add
your parents and grandparents with cataracts and low-light vision problems,
and all the high-tech folks with the PDAs who read them while they're driving.
No one should ever mandatorily have to read anything in 10 pt.  Everyone
should be able to magnify and adjust that 10 pt relatively within your
page, and adjust the size of the font on their screen depending on their 
visual needs.  

<soapbox off>*

*non-compliant XHTML tag, does not validate :_) 



Susan Johns 
Systems/Circulation Librarian            Voice:  (620) 235-4115 
Axe Library, Pittsburg State University  Fax:    (620) 235-4090 
Pittsburg KS  66762                      
suzyq at mail.pittstate.edu
http://library.pittstate.edu/staff/susan 




> > [First things first: "font-size: 10px;" is bad.  You don't know how small
> > 10px is on the user's monitor.  Stick with relative sizes.]
> 
> Are px's really so bad in CSS? It seems that if the user has their pixels
> set really high, they expect teeny tiny fonts. The relative sizes seem
> almost arbitrary across different platforms.
> 
> 
>