Web Accessibilty for those with a disability or some sort of impairment

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[Sueblimely]

This subject is something that I do not see often, especially in relation to blogging - How to make your site as easy to access and read as possible for those with disabilities, vision problems etc etc. As it is an issue I am keen on and am trying to incorporate in my own blog I have just done a post on the subject: Accessibility and Blogs - A Win Win Situation

I tried to make it as non technical as possible - hope I succeeded

[Lani]

Oh, I'm so glad you've posted this, I've been meaning to start a topic on it myself.  I know I have a lot of work to do to get my blogs what I would consider up to scratch in terms of accessibility.  It's one of my goals for the year.

However, I much prefer fixed width blogs, so my aim is to make an alternate theme to cover all the accessibility requirements.  I think that's the way to go for me.  More research needed.  Must go read your post.  Thanks. 

[Jayne13]

Great post Sue
I've got a vision deficit (I'm legally blind) and I find dark backgrounds with pale writing isn't so glarey on the worn-out old eyeballs.
BUT what works for me doesn't always work for others.
My son has autism and he concentrates better with lighter coloured backgrounds and dark text.
 We avoid each others favourite webpages for a happy medium lol.

[macgirvin]

I recently (last week) added a font resize ability. I'm not a spring chicken anymore and usually need reading glasses and 14pt fonts. But I know a lot of my readers are younger and abandon the site quickly when they see big text. "Must be for old people".

Yeah, Firefox and IE both let you change the default size, but often this looks horrible if the page was designed for pixel-perfect presentation. So I only want my own site bigger since that's what I look at the most, but keep it small for visitors that still have 20/20 vision. (Don't worry, your time will come).

Anyway it wasn't too hard. The key is to use 'em' fonts and avoid 'px' and 'pt'. Em font sizes are all relative to your top level body div (or inherited from any div that contains them). This means that you can change one number and every font on your site changes size accordingly.

I'd encourage anybody messing with CSS files to use these 'em' font sizes and avoid using px/pt for this reason.