Recently, I wrote a series of posts about what I choose to call pseudo-accessibility — part of which is the provision of website tools which emulate native browser functionality.
The reason these tools proliferate is because of developer laziness, not because of developer interest in accessibility. For some strange reason, it’s considered more difficult to educate the user about their browser than it is to build a text-resizing widget. (Granted, text-resizing widgets aren’t exactly rocket science.)
Ian Lloyd, of Accessify, has taken to video trying to address the text-resizing problem. You can see the video at his own relevant blog post — Teach a man to fish (or how to resize text).
The video isn’t necessarily a finished product. As of this writing, it’s in it’s second version , as Ian has been graciously accepting comments and re-working the video in order to provide the best video tutorial possible on the subject.
Video, of course, isn’t a perfect solution — but the transcript is available (not on Accessify.com yet, however,) and this is a good start towards user (and developer) education.
Thanks, Ian!
Thanks to Accessites and Mike Cherim for bringing this to my attention.
Joe Dolson
Thanks, Mike. 😉
Mike Cherim
Great heading, Joe! Don’t rebuild the browser indeed 🙂