Once again I participated in the CSS Reboot and the Standards Reboot for my main site (blog not touched yet). It’s only been 6 months since the Fall Reboot but I never really liked the old site and it gave me an opportunity to make the site a little more accessible.
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I received 354 spam comments on my “Rebooted!” post since 11/02/06. 354! After reading Dave Shea’s blog post “Borderline” I am now implementing a new WordPress plugin called Akismet that boasts it nearly eliminates all comment spam.
I’ll update you on the results later.
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Yesterday I participated in my first “reboot” of the MCG Web Development website (no not this blog unfortunately). My first two actually, the CSS Reboot and the new Standards Reboot.
For those who do not know what rebooting is: The CSS Reboot and now the Standards Reboot is a community event for web professionals and enthusiasts. Every November 1st and May 1st at 18:00 GMT, Rebooters from all over the world launch their standards based website redesigns simultaneously; bringing traffic, interest and a little respect to their sites. There are no prizes or arbitrary winners, just great exposure and the knowledge that we all participated in something great.
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All future sites designed by MCG Web Dev. will now feature font sizes set with ems. Here’s why:
Yesterday I received an email stating one of the websites I designed wasn’t accessible to the vision impaired. The lady noted she had trouble reading the website because she couldn’t enlarged the text with her browser.
After a quick look she was right. Apparently Internet Explorer will not allow a user to change the font size when a site’s text is set in pixels (note the Firefox browser will).
I have always used px in my CSS to set font size as it gives the web designer the greatest amount of control. However, as the lady above noted, “10% of computer users (as well as non-users) are vision impaired.” Now that can add up to quite a few people to alienate.
There are quite a few options you can set font size with; pixels (px), points (pt), keywords (xx-small, x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, xx-large) and percentages (%). I however choose ems (em). Why? Not only will ems allow users to re-size their text (unlike pixels), they also give more precision then points and keywords offer. Plus you can setup ems to work like pixels.
In modern browsers the default size text is “medium” or 16px. By reducing the base font size to 62.5% ( BODY {font-size:62.5%} ) this takes 16px down to 10px. Thus 1em is now 10px, 0.8em is 8px, 1.6em is 16px, etc. For more information on using ems see Clagnut’s How to size text using ems.
Received an “Atta Guy” award for the accessibility updates I made for the lady mentioned above. Turns out she is Sheila Ashcraft, Commissioner of the Michigan Commission for the Blind.
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Today marks the 1 year anniversary of the incorporating of MCG Web Development. Not that it chages day to day business but MCG Web Development, Inc. has been acting as a C corporation for the past year, after being a sole-proprietorship for the previous four.
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