Web Accessibility

[alyson]

I have been getting very frustrated recently trying to learn about making your web site compliant to web Accessibility laws ... how the hell do you control the look of your site when you can't specify type in pixels ... you end up with overflow and columns of type not fitting with the rest of the layout...ARGHHHH!!

[simonbg]

One site I have noticed is good at this is Amazon. If you change the font size when looking at their web site (I am using IE6; if I hold down the "Ctrl" key I can use the mouse wheel to move up and down through the sizes) I think it looks pretty good on all the settings - they manage to maintain a nice layout.

If you do a "View Source" on the page, you can see the CSS commands - they mostly use "font-size: small".

I guess you don't have absolute control over font size if you can't specify pixels, but then you don't have control over users' screen sizes and resolutions, so maybe it's just as well.

[speed]

You can define the dimensions of <div>s in ems that way as the font size changes so does the containing <div>s.

1 <div> = 16px see http://www.wats.ca/resources/relativesizing/20