1 Brilliant!

That is all.

posted at 05:10 am on June 15, 2004 by kadavy

2 Is this really accessible?

Is it not an Accessibility requirement that you must be able to resize text? with this method I don’t see the possiblity of increasing the size of the dynamic images?

Other than that minor flaw, the method is excellent!

posted at 05:14 am on June 15, 2004 by Colm

3 Colm

Good question, however, if we look at accessibility in a logical way, it does not make sense to only zoom the text anyway. Screen magnifying software (every OS these days has inbuilt ones) magnify the whole screen. So does Opera, btw. It would be interesting to see how much more users use these tools rather than the hard to find (at least in IE) browser zooms.

posted at 05:21 am on June 15, 2004 by Chris

4 Accessibility

One method to solve the accessibility method is to add a JavaScript script which doesn’t just increase the font size, but also loads new images.

posted at 05:52 am on June 15, 2004 by amon-re

5 Screen readers

Interesting idea. Personally I find it a bit heavy and limited, as you can’t kern or otherwise manipulate the headline image dynamically. This could lead to fitting problems.

The other flaw is that this doesn’t work for screen readers. Most modern screen readers use IE as the rendering engine, and merely speak everything that it sees. If the javascript replaces the headlines with images, they will no longer be read.

This however is untrue in regard to text-only browsers. Obviously they will work “properly”, as the text will not be replaced.

posted at 05:54 am on June 15, 2004 by CM Harrington

6 some more thoughts

Does this method allow for different coloured matts? or are the images using an alpha channel? Also is it possible to set the images to render with only one picture as the volume of connections this would create could affect busy sites. Im certainly not criticising this. I think its a wonderful idea, just some thought for version 2 :)

posted at 05:55 am on June 15, 2004 by Andy Moss

7 Asp.net?

Anyone care to make an asp.net version of this? Microsoft uses dynamically generated in a lot of places now: see the gray banner “Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003” at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/sbs/howtobuy/default.mspx
They use an asp.net script with the text to display encrypted as parameter to generate these headers: http://www.microsoft.com/library/toolbar/3.0/subbanner.aspx?t=TWljcm9zb2Z0IFdpbmRvd3MgU21hbGwgQnVzaW5lc3MgU2VydmVyIDIwMDM=&f=FFFFFF&b=757575&s=A7A7A7&r=False&font=Segoe,+13pt&v=0&c=HgjbLWiigY01WAeFBYwa4dzXjGY=

posted at 05:59 am on June 15, 2004 by oVan

8 Re: Screen readers

I believe this could be fixed by specifying an “alt” attribute, no? :)

posted at 05:59 am on June 15, 2004 by amon-re

9 Answers to Questions

To answer some questions posted here:

1) Yes, this method allows for different matte colors. The matte color (if transparency is chosen) will be the $background_color variable. No alpha channels are being used (because of IE’s lack of support), but this script could be altered to do so, if you were inclined.

2) As mentioned above, screen readers should all read this text correctly, because the ALT tag is maintained throughout this process. To my knowledge, no screen reader will ignore an ALT tag, if it is present.

posted at 06:00 am on June 15, 2004 by Stewart Rosenberger

10 Safari doesn't store the images in cache.

Safari (v1.2.2) doesn’t store the replaced images in cache, so each time you reload the page you have to wait for the images to load. This doesn’t occur in Moz (and I haven’t tried yet in other browsers).

The HTTP headers sent by the PHP script are :
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 14:17:51 GMT
Server: Apache
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.7
Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=99
Connection: Keep-Alive
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: image/png

Maybe adding headers like “Expires”, “Cache-Control” and “Pragma” will force Safari to store them ?

Cheers.

posted at 06:25 am on June 15, 2004 by Ned Baldessin

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