1 Zooming the whole website

Well maybe it’s interesting because it’s sort of related to this article:

http://www.gic.nl/

In this website you can zoom everything, it’s quite handy for people with low vision.

That’s it ;-)

Bye,
Caspar

posted at 08:57 am on January 11, 2005 by Caspar

2 Adaptative fluid designs

I have tried to create a fluid design for my website. I think with that I have covered the font size issue.

This article have open my eyes regarding excessive use of navigation aid and complex multicolumn designs.

posted at 09:23 am on January 11, 2005 by Edgard Durand

3 Helen Keller's Revenge

We’re getting to the point where the blind and vision-impaired have it better than the seeing. I think we need to concentrate more on DOM programming that enhances navigation, brilliant little Perl pouches, and creative new ways to trick the blind (possibly “next page” buttons that are secretly “buy it now”). And yes, I realize where I’m going after I die. Same place you are.

posted at 09:48 am on January 11, 2005 by Andrew

4 "the now-infamous skip-navigation link"

When and why did the skip navigation link become infamous? I find it very useful when surfing with a handheld…

posted at 10:16 am on January 11, 2005 by LittleBoyLost

5 title: {empty}

Little correction at line 736 of the article, the correct link is:

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:87PBcn9orYoJ:research.microsoft.com/asia/dload_files/group/ims/9.pdf

just a letter missing :p
Bye,
bogyit

posted at 10:32 am on January 11, 2005 by bogyit

6 I had it backwards

it’s funny. I always thought that low vision users would like the black on white. Since white on black would be optimal and is the case… what colors are we supposed to make links? Do we just make them the same but with underlines?

Anyway, good article. I am currently using an “undesigned look” at [url=“http://www.dustindiaz.com/”]DustinDiaz.com[/url] for the low grade ‘easier-to-read’ layout. But after reading this article, I think I might add an extra style sheet to change the contrast settings to white on black.

posted at 11:12 am on January 11, 2005 by Dustin Diaz

7 High contrast link color

Great article, Joe. It got me moving. One thing hit me right away when I started designing the high contrast portion of the style sheet: What’s the best way to differentiate link color (e.g. in a white-on-black configuration)?

Did a cursory look-around for some research that hit on this, but didn’t see anything right away. What would you recommend?

posted at 01:04 pm on January 11, 2005 by Brian Williams

8 Link Position

funny thing about the second example…
I couldn’t find the style switcher. The first one was easy (right at the top)….

which brings me to ask the question, “Where are we supposed to put our style switcher links?”

for someone who has supposive low vision, wouldn’t we want to make the “go to impared vision layout” link quite big with lots of contrast? I mean, I know none of us want to break our beautiful layouts that have a 10 pixel type-face with 18px line-height.

I think part of this article assumes that you don’t need to risk any design changes to your current layout, but if your ‘go-to’ button isn’t easily accessible, you might as well not have a separate zoom layout. Don’t get me wrong, still an excellent article with plenty wisdom, especially on teaching the mechanics of developing the zoom layout itself and some extra knowledge about visually impared users that I never knew before.

I just think that designers are eventually going to have to budge a little more than they wanted to.

posted at 10:12 pm on January 11, 2005 by Dustin Diaz

9 Now, *this* is useful _and_ relevant...

Thanks!

posted at 11:59 pm on January 11, 2005 by Seth Thomas Rasmussen

10 Comments

1. IE6 has a ‘zoom’ filter. It can enlarge the entire page elements, including fonts set in pixels (honest!), images and scrollbars! Sadly it is buggy and can’t be used out of the box. See my post on this here:

http://www.designdetector.com/archives/04/07/IECanZoomPagesLikeOpera.php

2. Opera is surely the answer to anyone with low vision. Like anything else in life, you use the right tool for the job. It allows the entire page to be zoomed, stylesheets to be knocked off completely at the press of a button (handy even for people with good eyesight) and high contrast stylesheets to be added, again just via a button. These include black on white, white on black, an accessibility layout and more. It’s also very easy to add your own custom stylesheets. Plus Opera 8 has SSR (and MSR?) built-in.

3. Surely the best way to get a single column is to turn off styles? Then everything flows down the page. You can then enlarge the text as you see fit.

4. The example Zoom layout given by Cameron Adams is messed up in Opera – text overlays text.

5. “Don’t specify font, size, or color.” – this contradicts what is stated earlier: “Switch to a big font” and “Customize colors”. Unless ‘low vision layout’ is not the same as ‘zoom layout’.

6. Study the way existing systems like Betsie (the BBC’s low vision website parser) work. They tend to show the screen black with large yellow and cyan text set in Verdana. (Are sans serif fonts a better choice than serif ones? If so, we need to set the font, as many browsers use Times as the default font for unstyled text.)

7. Any options (such as styleswitchers or font change menus) would be best put in the top left corner. That way they can’t be zoomed out of view.

posted at 01:10 am on January 12, 2005 by Chris Hester

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