11 Developing zoom enabled sites

As “zoom enabled” layouts seem to be less complex then their counterpart, it makes one wonder whether it would be a lot simpler to start out with a zoom enabled layout and add in additional detail, columns etc afterwards, instead of working the other way round.

This streamlining process would benefit navigation and usability issues, creating an incremental development cycle?

Any suggestions?

posted at 03:58 am on January 12, 2005 by Sander

12 Make Page More Readable Favelet

This favelet could be a good start: http://jan.moesen.nu/code/browser/bookmarks/#rdf:#$cq9f42

It toggles the use of a minimal set of CSS rules to enhance page readability. It’s a favelet, so it’s easy to edit, and to add to your own site in a customized form.

posted at 05:32 am on January 12, 2005 by Mathias Bynens

13 Opera, IE and Dynamic CSS zooming

Using the available zoom functions on Opera and IE (yes it really can work) or creating CSS that zooms with font size as linked to by Caspar are all well and good for a small amount of zooming.

But one of the point in the article is that this is no good for people who need quite a lot of zoom if you go above too much, wham all the content shoots off the right side of the browser. We all know that left-right scrolling is annoying but imagine having to to back and forth for each line.

No I fear that these methods are not the answer here.

Chris Hester also says that the best way to get a single column is to switch off CSS, again I fear this is a quick fix, this does not address the issue of contrast which is important here.

Incidentally great article Joe!

posted at 06:14 am on January 12, 2005 by Briski

14 So column width in em's is evil now?

Since specifying column width in em’s will end up in horizontal scroll bar after setting big font sizes. So back to percentages or pixel width?

posted at 08:47 am on January 12, 2005 by Mindaugas

15 agreed

http://www.alistapart.com/discuss/lowvision/2/#c9808

I would definitely think that starting out with a zoom layout would be easier than developing a full design, then having to tweak it. This way you can get most of your preferred styles out of the way without having to disipher which one’s they are by going back and forth between the alternates.

posted at 09:17 am on January 12, 2005 by Dustin Diaz

16 Don't Require Reverse Contrast with Enlarged Fonts

Depending on the type of visual disability, forcing the user to reverse contrast can make the readability worse. Low vision users with Albinism, for example, prefer the common white background with dark type. As Joe said, there are many types of visual disabilities. The idea that all low vision users like a reverse contrast is a dis-service.

Excellent article on single column and simplified navigation. I will try it out this weekend. I have been meaning to put in a CSS stylesheet switcher for zoom text. This is good motivation.

Thanks!

posted at 10:41 am on January 12, 2005 by Jeanne Spellman

17 Fix URL

Sorry, my site’s URL didn’t get posted correctly. Probably user error! :-)

posted at 10:45 am on January 12, 2005 by Jeanne Spellman

18 User preferences are for sissies

Great article that clearly outlines many of the common misconceptions and design mistakes that disadvantage users with disabilities. I usually, however, tend to find myself in the ‘user preferences are for sissies’ camp – http://www.yourtotalsite.com/archives/usability/user_preferences_are_for_/Default.aspx.

User agents for enlarging page content (from ZoomText to Opera to IE) tend to perform nearly all of the functionality described here whether through simple font enlarging or (selective or complete) style switching. The only exception is the removal of multi-column layouts, though even most of these COULD be designed to allow fairly significant scaling.

Why place the onus of implementing style switching, creating multi-display designs, and determining specific ‘accessible’ styles (even experts can decide on these) on site developers when the end user can and should be able to customize these natively without the additional burden of discovering and using user preferences?

In short, if your design is one that requires user preferences, then you’ve PROBABLY messed something up or are too chicken to make a solid design decision in the first place.

posted at 01:47 pm on January 12, 2005 by Jared Smith

19 The way I see it (HA!)

“The idea that all low vision users like a reverse contrast is a dis-service.”

Oh c’mon. Next thing you know, you’ll be trying to tell us that all brown eyed men don’t love fried banana sandwiches. ;)

Usability is a very very complex issue. No single article can cover all the angles, not even of such a narrow area as vision impaired users. I think anything that gets people thinking about it at all is a step in the right direction.

The way I look at it (and I’d love to see some research that could back me up [or prove me wrong]) is that, if I were vision impared beyond my present state (I keep my font sizes bumped up a couple of notches just to avoid headaches) and ran across a site in the vast and rather unfriendly ocean of the internet which took my needs into account, they’d earn themselves a loyal customer pretty damn quick. And it doesn’t take that much work on our parts. So why not do it?

posted at 07:18 pm on January 12, 2005 by Derek Pennycuff

20 Research on light on dark?

Was there some research or testing to determine that low vision people are better off with light text on a dark background? It seems counter-intuitive.

I hate light on dark and if I take my glasses off I hate it more. I took over a site with light text on a dark background a few years ago and switching to dark on light light has gotten me more complments than any other change I made.

posted at 07:43 pm on January 12, 2005 by Stan Furlong