[Deque Ramp PE Beta] Ramp PE Help Text
- From: Terence de Giere <tdegiere@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: deque-rpebeta@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 31 May 2004 14:29:16 -0400
Ramp PE Help Text
As I mentioned in a report that was e-mailed to Ms. Holmes, the help
text is too small to be easily readable. Especially in Mozilla browsers.
I also just had my wife look at the help text, because she is
near-sighted and wears fairly strong prescription glasses which makes
text appear even smaller.
To get the text to a size easy for her to read I had to increase the
font size by 60% in Mozilla, set Internet Explorer to "Larger Text" and
Opera to at least 120% magnification. She also complained the text was
gray (on a CRT monitor where fonts, especially small fonts, appear
softer than on the newer high-contrast LDC monitors). The text is
actually a slate blue, but that lowers the contrast of the small fonts
even further.
While most recent browsers except Internet Explorer allow resizing
absolute sizes set in HTML or CSS, many users are in fact unaware that
there are settings in browsers that allow fixed font sizes to be
overriden. Some of the CSS formatting the help text is in absolute sizes
so some information doesn't change size in IE unless the user knows how
to set the accessibility settings in Interent Explorer.
The noframes link to a non-framed version of the help text was good! The
disadvantage of frames for non-sighted users is unlike sighted users
they cannot experience the content of the windows simultaneously but
must switch back and forth, which reduces the usability significantly.
Note that HTML 2.0, 3.2, HTML 4.0/4.01 strict, ISO 15445:2000, XHTML 1.0
strict, XHTML Basic, and XHTML 1.1 do not allow framesets, which are
allowed only in the transitional HTML DTDs. The HTML versions mentioned
here do not support the TARGET attribute, so they cannot be used as
pages within a frame either, as it is not possible to specify which
frame window the page will display in without invalidating the HTML.
Terence de Giere
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