Weblogs: Web Accessibility

Joe Clark submitted the news flash to Slashdot yesterday. The competition was for the best looking, compliant, backwards compatible and accessible version of the W3C home page. The deserved winner was Radu Darvas. His design is an excellent example of the modern blend of skills needed to create a professional and standards compliant website.

From the discussion arose this very interesting post from Joe, on the subject of accessibility and fixed fonts:

The requirement for variable font sizes is something of a myth in accessible Web design. The only browser with a problem resizing fonts is IE on Windows. People with an actual need to resize fonts, as distinct from people who are visually-impaired enough to require screen magnification (which blows up everything on the screen), should switch browsers. It's an oversold problem.

Joe is uncannily spot-on-the money again, as evidenced by a further post saying that People with limited eyesight don't use MSIE, but use something like Mozilla and Opera instead, which are fully functional in resizing fonts (unlike MSIE).

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