an olympian effort

accessibility problems return?

[theonliest]

I've just been looking at the Olympics site having reread a bbc article [news.bbc.co.uk] on accessibility problems thrown up by the Syndey Olympics site where some guy sued the organisers for $20,000 (not sure if thats US or Australian dollars!)

anyway, the site seems very nice, lots of info, regular updates, easy to navigate; everything you'd expect. however, it uses fixed font sizes!

I have to say I did a bit of a double take when I spotted this. Even worse the default font for most content is 8pt... which is (a) about as small as you can get without beeing illegible (for a normal sited person) and (b) using a font measurement unit that has no use in web based layouts.

now, I have to say, I'm not a big fan of relative fonts and have spent many hair-pulling nights trying to implement them on sites where it was absolutely necessary (ie where I couldn't convince the client not to use them), but I would've thought that the people involved in building the olympics site would have made absolutely sure to cover all accessibility issues after the last debacle.

Considering the amount of traffic this site is bound to generate in the coming weeks it amazes me that the designers are so flagrently ignoring the needs of any visually impaired users.

[pageoneresults]

If a user is visually impaired, there are other tools that they will most likely have at their disposal to assist them with their impairment.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 Web browser provides users the ability to override web page styles and view content in their preferred style. While in Internet Explorer 6, follow the below instructions on how to modify your browser accessibility settings.
Tools > Internet Options > General > Click Accessibility button at bottom right.

Using fixed font sizes only affects those using IE. Other browsers allow the user to utilize their standard browser tools to increase and decrease font size and/or zoom in or zoom out on content and graphics.

[ronin]

That's interesting, I didn't know you could do that with IE. I just checked out my site - it looks great in black and white.

Fixed font sizes don't really exist any more, as such. Font sizes can be absolute or relative (rather like positioning) but that's the end of it. The only thing that can fix a font size is the browser.

And... er... there's only one browser which does that.

I agree, they shouldn't really be using pt though.