When accessibility is not your problem

I’m asking you all to sign up to a new philosophy

It’s not even that new, but what certainly is new is the fact that I’m calling for everyone to take a pledge of some kind. The philosophy is really simple: If a browser or adaptive technology can or should handle an accessibility issue, I won’t.
You can say this in a really crude, punchy way: “It’s not my problem.” Because sometimes it isn’t.
Font resizing

The easiest example is font resizing. It just isn’t your problem if any visitor, with or without a disability, prefers a different font size. It still isn’t your problem even if the visitor cannot use or read your page without a different font size.
It isn’t your problem because you do not control the font size. You merely suggest the font size. It’s up to the browser and adaptive technology to decide what font size to actually display.
You find this problem expressed in a couple of ways. And people restate the same points over and over again until it seems like they actually make sense. They don’t.
For example, we’re constantly told not to use pixels as a unit to size text. Or we’re told that pixels are an absolute unit and you must only use relative units. Usually we’re told this by people who only recently found out there’s such a thing as Firefox.
Pixels are a relative unit by spec, full stop. You can use them if you want, full stop. You can use any unit for any purpose. You are merely suggesting the font size. It’s up to the browser or screen magnifier or whatever to pick the real size.
You usually won’t use px as a unit because there are really very few cases where type has to be a certain exact number of pixels in height. Maybe the fine print at the bottom of a page that lists the copyright notice and various disclaimers, that sort of thing. Standards-compliant authors aren’t gonna use pixels very much because the semantics of the pixel unit don’t come up very much.
If you run into a site that uses px for a lot of text, that’s gonna be the least of your worries. It’s like saying it’s OK to use tables for layout as long as you use exactly one table. It may be OK, and that’s debatable, but you never find that in the wild. You find a dozen tables for layout on one page. You don’t find just one table.
By the same token, you never find a really well-made site whose only flaw is the use of pixels for all its text. Those are 1997-era sites we’re talking about that use tables for layout and spacer GIFs and JavaScript links and all that nonsense. Picking on standards-compliant developers who very occasionally use the px unit avoids the real problem. It’s fundamentally dishonest. The people who overuse the pixel unit are the worst authors on the Web. Go after them instead.
There’s a variation of the complaint about pixels: We’re told not to use pixels because they can’t be resized. Well, they can’t be resized in a couple of broken browsers, IE6 and IE7. Yes, it really is true that they didn’t fix this bug in IE7. Incredible, right? The IE team fell down on the job there.

• If you’re using IE6 because you don’t even know there is such a thing as a browser, let alone more than one of them, then you need to have your grandkids over so they can download Firefox and teach you how to make the fonts bigger and smaller.
• If you’re totally blind and your screen reader only works with IE6, which isn’t true anymore, then it doesn’t matter to you what size the fonts are. You’re blind.
• If you’re using a screen magnifier whose voice output only works with IE6, then font size is irrelevant because it’s a screen magnifier and its entire purpose is to blow up the type size to something you can read.

And anyway, font resizing is an issue for nondisabled people – or people who don’t have a visual impairment, more accurately. People with crap vision are already using a screen magnifier or a screen reader. I dispute the idea that making your fonts even 50% bigger is truly an accessibility issue. I dispute that it’s a dealbreaker for an actual person with a disability. If they’re that visually impaired, they can’t use their whole computer without help. The fact that your copyright notice is nine pixels tall isn’t gonna be make-or-break for them.
Font size just is not your problem as an author. We wouldn’t be using cascading stylesheets if we didn’t believe in the cascade. Whoever visits your site has ultimate control over how it looks, even if they don’t know that or they’re using a broken browser.
If you’re worried about text inside Flash movies, yes, it’s a nightmare. Why are you using Flash to deliver any kind of text that’s smaller than a headline? If you’re doing that, what business do you have criticizing other people about accessibility?
If you are truly interested in making things better for people who need really big fonts, then you need to agitate for screen magnifiers to produce really clear text. As far as I can tell, everything that isn’t ZoomText 9 blows up the already-drawn bitmap; it scales the pixels you’d be looking at if you weren’t using a magnifier. To my knowledge, only ZoomText 9 re-polls the original outline font file and asks for a new character at something like 250 point. You want things to improve, work on that.
Here’s what should really be happening with font-resizers

• Every browser should have buttons on its toolbars by default to make text bigger or smaller. I see that my esteemed colleague Patrick H. Lauke agrees with me on that, based on the article he wrote for Webstandards.org.
• The first time you run the browser, it should tell you about those buttons and give you the keyboard equivalents. And you should be able to bookmark that page. (I’m not sure that a browser should ask you if you need “accessibility.” Too many people would probably say no, or they just wouldn’t understand it, or they’d just click through it without reading it, like a Windows error message.)
• People who need resizable text for any reason shouldn’t use IE6 or IE7. And if they complain to you as a site developer, your advice should be to switch browsers. If they come back and say that the IT department decided on the browser and they can’t change it, then tell them they’ve nullified their own complaint and their real complaint is with the IT department.
• Your page could have a help screen like the BBC’s, which attempts to teach people how to use their own browsers. It might be a good idea. But ten years into the Web, I refuse to believe that people cannot learn how to press Ctrl-plus or Ctrl-minus or hit a couple of buttons on a toolbar.
• Browsers should remember your text-zoom setting per page, which is what the NoSquint extension for Firefox does.

And yes, this really does mean you should never jimmy up your own font-resizer on your own Web page. Do you jimmy up your own scrollbars, too? It’s a browser problem. You’re a doctor, not a bricklayer.