Adapatability is Accessibility
The best of man is like water, Which benefits all things, and does not contend with them, Which flows in places that others disdain, Where it is in harmony with the Way. Tao Te Ching; 8 Water
There are those who think that dao is fatalistic. A simplistic reading is that one should wander, without plan, allowing for things to happen and to respond to them. I think of it as saying we should not be fixed in our outlook, with goals far ahead, rather we should be adaptable, not fixed in our views or direction.
"As observing detail is clarity, So maintaining flexibility is strength; Use the light but shed no light, So that you do yourself no harm, But embrace clarity." Tao Te Ching; 52 Clarity
The flexibility I've talked about so far I think of as "adaptability". Everything I've said so far could be summarized as: make pages which are adaptable. Make pages which are accessible, regardless of the browser, platform or screen that your reader chooses or must use to access your pages. This means pages which are legible regardless of screen resolution or size, or number of colors (and remember too that pages may be printed, or read aloud by reading software, or read using braille browsers). This means pages which adapt to the needs of a reader, whose eyesight is less than perfect, and who wishes to read pages with a very large font size.
Designing adaptable pages is designing accessible pages. And perhaps the great promise of the web, far from fulfilled as yet, is accessibility, regardless of difficulties, to information. It's an important belief of the World Wide Web Consortium, and is becoming an imperative of web design, as web pages will be required by law to provide universal access, just as building codes around the world require access to buildings.
It sounds an impossibility, designing the universal page. Perhaps now it remains an aspiration, with browsers so broken, and many of the devices through which we will access the web in their infancy, or not yet born. But there is a lot we can do now which will set the foundations for pages which adapt to the users wishes and needs, and so will be accessible.
The Way
"The Way is shaped by use, But then the shape is lost. Do not hold fast to shapes But let sensation flow into the world As a river courses down to the sea." Tao Te Ching; 32 Shapes
So what can be done to design for adaptability, and so accessibility? Firstly, there are a couple of ways of thinking which might be helpful. Then I have some practical suggestions about steps you can take to avoid making your pages inaccessible.
Firstly, think about what your pages do, not what they look like. Let your design flow from the services which they will provide to your users, rather than from some overarching idea of what you want pages to look like. Let form follow function, rather than trying to take a particular design and make it "work".
A cornerstone of this idea is to separate the content and its appearance. You've probably heard this a hundred times, but it is perhaps the most important step you can take. Let's look at a simple example. On a page there is some text which is italicized. Why is it italicized? It might be for emphasis. It might be a citation. It might be a foreign word used in English. In traditional publishing, the form follows from function. The advantage of web publishing is we can make explicit what is implicit in the appearance on paper. If the reason for italics is emphasis, why mark up your page with the <i> element? Use the <em> element, and so browsers other than PC based web browsers can handle the element appropriately.
On the larger scale, don't use HTML for presentation. No <font> or <b>, <i> and other presentational elements. Where HTML provides an appropriate element, use it. Where it doesn't, use classes. And of course, use style sheets for your presentational information. It's time to look to the future, not cling to the past.
If you use style sheets properly, to suggest the appearance of a page, not to control the appearance of a page, and you don't rely on your style sheet to convey information, then your pages will "work" fine in any browser, past or future. Browsers which don't support style sheets simply present pages that look a little on the plain side. Our biggest concern is browsers which have buggy style sheets support. Today this is an issue. Not too long from now, it won't be much of an issue. For now, you can limit yourself to a subset of CSS which is well enough supported, and still have more presentational effect than using presentational HTML. I've written quite a bit about this elsewhere, so I won't repeat myself here.
In practical terms, there are some things you should and some things you shouldn't do when designing style sheets that will impact on the adaptability of your pages. Aboveall, don't rely on any aspect of style sheets to work in order for a page to be accessible. Absolute units, like pixels and points are to be avoided (if that comes as a surprise, read on), and color needs to be used carefully, and never relied on.
Fonts
Typically, a Windows, Macintosh, or other system will have only a handful of fonts installed. There is little overlap between the default installed fonts on these various systems. Already with many browsers, and increasingly in the future, readers will be able to decide on the fonts they want to view web pages with. With CSS, you can suggest a number of fonts, and cover as many bases as possible. But don't rely on a font being available regardless of how common it is.
More important still is font size. You may be aware that the same font, at the same point size on a Macintosh "looks smaller" than on most Windows machines. In a nutshell, this is because the "logical resolution" of a Macintosh is 72dpi, while the Windows default is 96dpi. The implications of this are significant. Firstly, it guarantees that it is essentially impossible to have text look identical on Macintoshes and Windows based systems. But if you embrace the adaptability philosophy it doesn't matter.
What? If you are concerned about exactly how a web page appears this is a sign that you are still aren't thinking about adaptive pages. One of the most significant accessibility issues is font size. Small fonts are more difficult to read. For those of us with good eyesight, it can come as a shock that a significant percentage of the population has trouble reading anything below 14 point times on paper. Screens are less readable than paper, because of their lower resolution.
Does that mean the minimum point size we should use is 14 pts? That doesn't help those whose sight is even less strong. So what is the minimum point size we should use? None. Don't use points. This allows readers to choose the font size which suits them. The same goes even for pixels. Because of logical resolution differences, a pixel on one platform is not a pixel on another.
You can still suggest larger font sizes for headings and other elements. CSS provides several ways of suggesting the size of text in such a way as to aid adaptability. We'll look at just one to get an idea.
With CSS you can specify font size as a percentage of the font size of a parent element. For example, headings are inside the BODY of the page. If you don't set a size for the text in the BODY, then the text of the BODY will be the size that the reader has chosen as their default size. Already we are aiding adaptability of our page, simply by doing nothing!
You might say "but the text looks too big" if I just leave it like that. Make it smaller then. But in your browser. And your readers will then have the option to make it bigger or smaller in their browsers too, depending on their tastes, or their needs.
We can make headings and other elements stand out using font size by specifying that headings of level 1 should be say 30% larger than the body text, level 2 should be 25% larger, and so on. Now, regardless of the size that the user chooses for their main text, headings will be scaled to be proportionally bigger than the main text. Similarly text can be scaled to be smaller than the body text, however, this can give rise to situations where the text can be illegibly small, so use with caution.
We've done very little really, just avoided using absolute font sizes, and used proportional sizes for headings, and we've already made our pages much more adaptable and accessible. ... >>
1 Same old new medium?
2 Controlling Web Pages
3 Adapatability is Accessibility
4 The Journey
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