I may use that metaphor one of these days!

Lol! Don’t forget to cite us!

Thanks again for your advice. It seems that, in many cases, accessibility has a lot of common sense - it just needs to be taken into consideration.

Glad to help! You’ve pretty much hit it on the head, there: it’s mostly common sense. It’s just common sense which requires you to anticipate a lot of problems you personally may never encounter!

Buildings allow wheel-chairs to enter using a ramp and that ramp should also be at the front of the building with the main stairs. To cater for wheel-chairs, it doesn’t mean we need to get rid of the stairs, we just need to make sure that people with wheel-chairs can enter the building as easily (so to say) as people without.

Nice way of putting it. I may use that metaphor one of these days!

We also came to unanimous agreement with what you’ve said. The base font has been set in em’s with 1em = 12px. The width of the site is also measured in em’s, whilst page structure is measured in percentages to give a zoom/scalable layout.

On a 1024 resolution screen, the font can be resized to up to 15.5px without the bottom scroll bar kicking in and will grow/zoom as much as needed for larger resolution sizes.

Whilst we were very concerned about the issue of mixing accessibility with design, the concept we took hold of was…

Buildings allow wheel-chairs to enter using a ramp and that ramp should also be at the front of the building with the main stairs. To cater for wheel-chairs, it doesn’t mean we need to get rid of the stairs, we just need to make sure that people with wheel-chairs can enter the building as easily (so to say) as people without.

Thanks again for your advice. It seems that, in many cases, accessibility has a lot of common sense - it just needs to be taken into consideration.

Most users who have a routine need for larger fonts no how to make that change in their browsers. This ability is built into the browser, and you should allow the user to maintain control over their experience.

What you particularly need to avoid is using pixels or points to size text. Although pixels should be resizeable universally, they are not. IE6 doesn’t allow the user to change the size of text if it’s sized in pixels. Use ems or percentages, instead.

Large fonts are not, in fact, absolutely more accessible than large fonts. For a bit more advice, I recommend reading Improving Accessibility Through Typography, an article I published recently at Accessites.org.

Obviously, large fonts are more accessible than small fonts. But does that mean our design should use a font which is acceptable for good vision users (e.g. 12px) and allow scaling so that let low vision users can increase the size in their browsers. Or should we keep the site in 14px and automatically scale down for low resolution monitors that don’t have enough space for 14px text. (Note 4% of our users have an 800×600 resolution).

The complication is that the immediate look of 14px is considered by most, including our entire development team, to be unprofessional. At the same time, however, there is issue of accessibility.

Do you know of any corporate sites that have adopted large fonts? What can you recommend?

Thanks

I’ve made a note of the sensitivity to bright colors issue - we were aiming for high contrast, but perhaps we overshot into “too high” contrast, instead…

Thanks for the comments!