Last Modified
2008/09/08
© Felix Miata
Felix's Home
| Shame | Friendly |
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| Dishonorable Mention | Tyranizing the Disadvantaged8 |
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| Note 1 indicates use primarily of the visitor's default text size for body text, and adequate contrast, for most of the home page, when visited with Netscape 3. | |
| Note 2 indicates text is sized either wholly or substantially using pixels and/or points, which prevents users of Internet Explorer from enlarging text to a readable size with its text sizer. | |
| Note 3 indicates substantial text is sized by embedding in images, which prevents users of most browsers from enlarging text to a readable size. | |
| Note 4 former member of the Shame column, redesigned to make site friendlier. | |
| Note 5 former member of the Friendly column, redesigned to make site less accessible. | |
| Note 6 If you can't read it, nothing else matters. | |
| Note 7 Missing content in Netscape 3. | |
| Note 8 This paradoxical group consists of sites targeted directly to the physically challenged or to reducing burdens upon the physically challenged, or sites addressing usability and/or accessibility issues, or sites targeted largely or wholly to senior citizens, the group with poorest average eyesight. | |
| Note 9 They decide what size their browsers should default to. Why don't they use it on their web sites? | |
| Note 10 Site sets a font-family rule that makes no sense: 'Verdana, "Times New Roman", sans-serif'. Times New Roman is a sans-serif font that is significantly smaller than Verdana. This means visitors who do not have Verdana installed but do have Times New Roman or some other Times variant installed can expect to see text substantially smaller than those with Verdana installed, and with serifs instead of without. The only rational explanation for such a rule is that the site was created by non-sighted persons with no assistance from anyone with professional site design experience and normal vision. This problem is compounded by the imposition of fonts 85% of the visitor's default. This is a screenshot of the site and several others on a system without Verdana installed. | |
| Note 11 Why don't they use what they recommend on their web site? This is how hypocrisy is defined. | |
| Note 12Mixture of CSS and presentational markup produces large horizontal scrollbar when viewed using minimum font size or text zoom or with author styles disabled, and extraordinarily long line lengths otherwise. View screenshot taken with 12pt minimum font size engaged. |
Here, the pages were visited using a screen resolution of 1024 X 768 or above. Since the advent of very high resolutions and monitors of 17" inches and larger, the old standards of 640 X 480 VGA and 800 X 600 SVGA have lost so much ground that fewer than 20% of users use them. 1024 X 768 is the most common "happy" or "ideal" resolution for popular low cost flat panel displays. 1024 X 768 is today's median resolution.
Next, the most web-standards-compliant browser currently available, Firefox, was used to visit each site. Firefox was used with its default (1em) font size of 16 pixels. At 1024 X 768 and 120 DPI, 16 pixels produces a default font size compatible with other apps and the OS, 10 point, which is the size recommended by usability expert Jakob Nielsen as a web page minimum.
So, what means "tiny" and "micro"? Using the above settings, "tiny" is approximately equivalent to 7 point and the CSS value "x-small". It renders at approximately .6875em, which, if CSS is enabled in your browser, looks like this: tiny. "Micro" is approximately equivalent to 6 point and the CSS value "xx-small". It renders at approximately .5825em, which, if CSS is enabled in your browser, looks like this: micro. Also if CSS is enabled in your browser, actual x-small and xx-small are: x-small and xx-small.