Terence de Giere: There is definitely a clash between the desires of
graphic artists and accessibility. My experience has been graphic
artists tend to prefer fixed sizes and layouts for pages, a habit that
comes over from print media, where it is possible to specify fixed sizes
effectively.
The pages on the Internet are like a book, but they are not books, and will be rendered in many ways the designer cannot anticipate. The user can turn off styling. The user can substitute their own style. Certain browsers, such as WebTV type devices will always substitute their own fonts, and reformat the page to some extent so it will be readable on a TV screen. Low vision browsers (as distinguished from screen magnifiers) also substitute their own format, usually blocky sans serif text on a plain background with a choice of colors and sizes set by the user.
The fixed format “every page looks the same everywhere” mentality is one of the reasons the Web has become so inaccessible, because it involves twisting HTML in ways it was not really designed for, to work around browser variability to maintain an identical rendering as much as possible.
This is not to say a fixed design is bad, but perhaps it is not really the best approach to Internet media. … There are challenges like this in print media, such as having to use just two colors of ink instead of four or five or six. Certain kinds of printing cannot register images exactly, so some flexibility in the position of page elements is required. One learns the capabilities of the medium, and then works back to the techniques to make it work effectively with whatever limitations are there.
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim