S schreef: The 350px height is needed to ensure that the background image for the nav
area shows up completely. As for the font size, that was established by this
company's corporate guidelines long before I ever started this project. I
doubt they ever considered people who are sight-impaired or who do not enjoy
small type when they wrote their guidelines.
It's the webdesigners job to point out the differences between print and
digital media to the company, and: is
the Company's Logo on top of their building printed in 11px type?
I'm a contractor who has alimony to pay and a 2-year-old to raise in the
Silicon Valley with Christmas approaching FAST. It may be my job to point
design flaws out, but it is more my job to make sure I have a check at the
end of the week to feed my daughter and to pay rent. I'll forego a bit of
design excellence if that means that I don't piss off my Client by
questioning his designs. Trust me on this one, you have not met this guy.
It's a good gig, and it makes sense to keep quiet.
I, for one, LOVE small type on a page. I love to be presented with as much
data on my three monitors as I can get my hands on. I run 3 1600x1200
screens, and the type gets pretty small. I occasionally test pages with the
type at larger sizes, but I mostly leave that decision for the individual
viewer, as they have final say as to how their browser can re-interpret text
styles and sizing.
Just realaize that a lot of people don;t share that love!
I realize that, and those people can use their browser prefs to bump up type
as much as they want. Does Opera still do that cool thing where they also
scale the images with the text? That was cool.
The site I am building is for a very specific audience, and only 1 or 2
pages will live on the internet. The rest will live behind a secure server
with restricted access. The people who view these pages number in the tens,
and they are all running current browsers and modern screens. It's a real
treat to develop for a narrow audience, no worries about MSIE5 or Netscape
6! ;)
So if one of those happy few (customers) is sight-impaired you'll get the
blame for missing an account worth a
lot of money, just think about that.
The money I earn is paid by my Client, who honestly does not care about such
things. He also is not paying me to care. That being said, I'll inject as
much concern for the issue as I can, under the circumstances.
Personally, I think that a good layout (i.e. Use of white space, no huge
blocks of run-on text, creative layouts) do a lot more for a site than text
size. Size matters, of course, but I have been to a LOT of sites that use
10, 11, and 12pt text as default, and I have not seen any problems with
readability.
My Dad bought a 17" Powerbook about 6 months ago. Great computer, man! He
immediately reduced the resolution of the screen so that the things that
appeared on it would be bigger. At first, I almost freaked out! I have the
same Powerbook, and I LOVE how I can get so much on the screen. It's GREAT!
And he was defeating the very purpose of paying an extra $300 for that great
big screen. Then I thought about what he was doing. He was adjusting his
equipment to meet his personal needs. The big screen was helping him fit
more on the screen, because it was still more than a 15" screen could fit at
his increased sizes.
I have seen people in this group spouting gospel about how web design is NOT
print design. That is true, to a point. (This is all opinion, by the way).
Magazine layout uses fairly small type as well. Not all periodicals are
available in the "big type" versions that sight-impaired people enjoy so
much. Let's face it, small text is a standard in print, and it's here to
stay. I still have yet to see a preferences pane on the first page of the
Wall Street Journal (GREAT layout, by the way) allowing readers to adjust
type size. Why? Because you just can't do that in print.
But you CAN do that with HTML. Browsers can be set to display text at larger
type sizes for people who need it. I think that's GREAT! The w3 has gone to
great lengths to incorporate standards that facilitate sight-impaired
people. I don't always follow them (I'm learning to as we speak), but it is
great that they have recognized the need.
So when my Dad goes to wsj.com, his Safari prefs are set to display text
much larger than I'd be comfortable with. But it does him just fine.
So I have to ask - is there some elusive coding practice that I am not
employing that will allow my pages to be read by all people equally? Is
there some way for me to code that will more easily allow sight impaired
people to view the content at large type sizes without changing the look of
the site for people like myself? If there is, I'd love to hear about it.
Because as far as I know, the only way to do this without altering a
browser's prefs is to code my page with 18px type, and I won't do that
because it makes pages waaay to ugly.
Perhaps you are alluding to the use of "em" sizing. I have heard that this
may help in the war against visually stringent sites. I have not used em
sizing on my pages, because I do not yet fully understand it. The px is a
unit I know, and I'm new to CSS, so I'm using it. But I'll investigate the
em, and I'll see how much more work it is to integrate.
I agree that it would be stupid to ignore this group of people, but there
are mechanisms in place that allow them to view my content with little or no
hindrance in design and flow. Could I do a better job? You betchya! And I
will, over time. This is an area I'm learning about more every day (and
thank you for enlightening me, by the way). In the mean time, I've got
deadlines to meet, and pages to code.
Take care,
-----------------S
