For web marketing training, presentations and workshops visit Pacifica Training. If you wish to ask questions about website marketing please head over and register free at the website marketing forum, a knowledge base and community driven discussion group.
Zoom the web
Published: October 5, 2005
Perusing many of the forums of late has brought back the debate about alternative stylesheets that offer larger font sizes, inverted colours and linear layouts, often referred to as zoom layouts. One common factor is how do you present the fact you have a zoom layout available and what do you call it?
I've got a bit of a problem with zoom layouts. Are they really practical? Can they possibly help anyone access the internet? Isn't it over-engineering what is already available to users with visual impairments and the tools they use?
ZoomText does a great job of exploding the screen for people that are visually impaired. People may certainly prefer an inverted colour scheme to what is presented to them but if hi-vis is absolutely needed then there are accessibility settings within the operating systems profile options that will do this. Why would the web be different from the operating system itself? Surely this setting is core to their personal system profile and not needed on the internet alone!
One of the biggest problems with scaling the text using browser settings is that the layout often expands beyond the window and takes content with it. Not good! But ask yourself, how far does text need to be scaled with the browser before a zoom tool is needed to read the screen? I feel that there is sufficient overlap between browser settings and zoom tools to not warrant a seperate stylesheet.
Another over-engineered feature I see is a range of available text sizes to choose from. I fail to see what benefit this has over using a font size all browsers can scale. The added overhead of creating a script to handle this and the seperate stylesheets to render the text means it's just not worth it. All browsers can scale text so keep costs and complexity down and don't worry, your site is still accessible.
If you want accessible, keep content well structured, good strong contrast between elements, name your links well and always use alt attributes with images. You'd be surprised how good assistive tools are.
Even something as messy as Amazon is accessible with ZoomText and Jaws.