.NET Buzz Forum - Visual accessibility of web pages: no real progress yet

Working a lot with a computer has a couple of health risks, which get bigger and bigger over the years. There are several ways to fight this:

The thing I always liked best about Firefox is not tabbed browsing but the impressive way you can simply set the font size by pressing ctrl-+/- or ctrl-scrollwheel. IE does this as well but the thing Firefox does far better is wrapping the text. And Firefox has a far greater range of text sizes. Many a site is easier to read with FF. Although it can be irritating that many a site has the width of a text block set absolutely, you end up with big text on a quarter of the screen width and 3 quarters of the screen width empty. Such a waste of resources

Making a web page easy to read is not difficult at all. I wanted my new website visual accessible both in FF and IE. This is how I did that.

<div>

<tr>

<td class="big">Gekko Software</td>

</tr>

</table>

<tr>

<asp:Menu ID="HoofdMenu" runat="server">

<Items>

<asp:MenuItem Text="Services" Value="Services" NavigateUrl="~/Services.aspx"></asp:MenuItem>

<asp:MenuItem Text="Portfolio" Value="Portfolio" NavigateUrl="~/Portfolio.aspx"></asp:MenuItem>

<asp:MenuItem Text="Publications" Value="Publications" NavigateUrl="~/Publications.aspx"></asp:MenuItem>

<asp:MenuItem Text="Contact" Value="Contact" NavigateUrl="~/Contact.aspx"></asp:MenuItem>

<asp:MenuItem Text="Blog" Value="Blog" NavigateUrl="http://codebetter.com/blogs/peter.van.ooijen/default.aspx"></asp:MenuItem>

<asp:MenuItem Text="About" Value="About" NavigateUrl="~/about.aspx"></asp:MenuItem>

</Items>

</asp:Menu>

</td>

</asp:contentplaceholder>

</td>

</tr>

</table>

</div>

Quite simple. The page heading is a three column table. Its width is set to 100% so it will use all real estate available. The images in the left and right column will also fill them according to space available. The middle column contains plain (CSS decorated) text. The middle part of the page is even simpler: a fixed size column for a menu and one column for the content.

The content I want to demonstrate here is no big deal either. It reads an htm file, extracts the body and assigns that to a label (read here for the details)

At a given moment a horizontal scroll bar will show up. The moment this happens in FF is (coincidental ?) when the text reaches the maximum size of IE.

In comes IE6 which brings tabbed browsing and also a far greater range of text size. But just look what happens when you increase the size to more than 100%

A horizontal scroll bar shows up which makes the text unreadable. Which makes IE6, when it comes to visual accessibility, a big step back.

IE6 is in beta and beta does have bugs. What worries me is that such a (imho) blatant bug has not been spotted before the beta release. What worries me even more is that Charles Petzold had a quite similar story of a WPF bug when changing Window's DPI. Are computer screens becoming something just for the young?


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