I find that improving your website’s accessibility is really just abiding to a set of rules. Grea thing is this eveentually because part of your natural worklflow and – hey presto! We’ve accessible websites with ease!

Cheers for the article Ms. Swan!

Typo’s fixed! Thank you.

typos:
“In may countries”
; instead of ‘

Granted that 7 & 8 also include page zoom, but you can’t assume that everyone will use page zoom over the other text sizing option, particularly if the user is already familiar with how it worked in IE6.

Ian mentioning that in a two year development cycle for a website is very valid and raises an important point which is that when making sites accessible you want to consider how best to implement an accessible site depending on your business. So, for example, if you’re a large UK organisation with users based just in the UK then leaving behind flexible fonts makes sense. If your site has more of a global outreach you may want to think again (Korea is locked into IE, China uses it heavily for example).

WCAG are guidelines and not as prescriptive as we all think and should be thought about within the context of the site you work on.

Jamie – I am with you on autoplay completely. Both a usability and accessibility fail :(

Great article, as discussed above i think EM and PX sizing is less of an issue than it once was. I think the WCAG has it right, its a good thing to have, though not anywhere near as important as it use to be. In recent projects i have returned to using PX sizing, i can’t say i ever completely got my head around em sizing and i do find it faster (and easier to code up design accurately!). A good example of this is recently with a large site, i was provided the CSS and HTML for the header and footer and was not allowed to change it on pain of death!

Along the lines of the same topic, much can also be said about the prevalence of full page zooming. Although a flexible layout which does not break when using text resizing is important, i feel that as more and more browsers default to full page zooming this will become less important.

Just to add what Henny has said about video, one of my frustrations with video relates to autoplay. If someone is reliant on audio output or is greatly disturbed or distracted by it, then auto playing video can be a very very painful experience!

Overall a great article and series, nice one to henny and thanks to anna for publishing it!

Cheers,

Jamie & Lion

Couple of points I wanted to add. Like Doug S, I’ve become less concerned about the px issue on fonts for IE. Defining standards for a project at work that will be up to two years in the making, I’ve dropped that requirement on the basis that IE6 in 2 years time will account for so many fewer users and you have to draw the line somewhere … that said, it comes with a warning. I’m reasonably comfortable specifying px sizes for fonts, but start to get nervous if those are anything under 20px.

The other thing was regarding the alt attribute. The images shows the street with the alt attribute, but that’s IE doing what no other browser does – displaying the *alternative* when the original is still there. It *might* suggest to less experienced readers that alt attribute may be used for hover text, which of course it isn’t so, perhaps an example showing a missing image with the alternative text might be slightly safer?

Anyway, minor niggles – always good to have an article that encapsulates the main points well (and I’ll also add that I really like the design of scrunchup -lots of nice CSS text treatments)

That said however there are still a huge amount of IE6 users out there. Many don’t have the opportunity to upgrade or switch their browsers as they ar locked into using IE6 in work situations and so on. I tend to still use relative font sizes so as to ensure these users don’t get left behind but agree that the landscape will have to eventually change. Bring it on I say!

My reason for this is simple: The ONLY people who will even know the difference are IE6 users. Anyone with a remotely recent version of Opera, Firefox or Safari or IE7 and IE8 can scale text whether it’s in %, EMs, pixels or points.

Since this measure only helps a fraction of a fraction of users your time would actually be better spent providing better accessibility to other users. What colors you choose, making sure everything is semantic and with the proper alt or title tags is a better use of your time, in my opinion.