Because it might be relevant

[redbird]

The official web site of the lieutenant governor of New York state. What jumps out of the middle of the page is, in LARGE friendly letters, 'For the visually impaired:To enlarge text, hold the Control Button and Press the “+” key.' Patterson is legally blind. He's also the first black person to be lieutenant governor of New York. He's from the city, which is another point in his favor from my viewpoint.

Comments

[darcydodo]

That's pretty awesome.

Although, for me, my laptop screen is small enough that the message isn't even visible without paging down.

Then again, I suppose anyone visually impaired probably wouldn't have that small a screen.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I'd prefer it if it made a mention of which browsers it worked in (even if it's all the most popular and everyone else knows) but indeed, it's great to see someone making an effort.

[redbird]

Visually impaired, no. Someone completely blind might get such a machine with the intent of plugging it into a screen reader, so keyboard size might matter but screen size didn't.

[daharyn.livejournal.com]

He also actually bothered to come out to the far-flung, oft-forgot campus (http://www.york.cuny.edu) on which I used to teach when they were in the middle of campaigning. His speech there (public funding of higher ed, naturally!) was quite moving, and he came and poked around the classrooms and stuff afterwards. At the time I thought he seemed almost too sincere, for a politician. But yes, wholly agreed on his good points.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Which did you try that it didn't work in? I thought it was a standard.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Well, I think it does work in all the widely used browsers, I didn't have any in mind for which it wouldn't, (a quick google suggests netscape and opera) but I expect also some text browsers, mobile phone browsers (unlikely for visually impaired people), dedicated web browsing terminals, etc don't.

I didn't mind because it was likely to be a problem for anyone, I think it wouldn't be, just that I still cling to the idea that HTML should by default be browser independent, and this is an example of ignoring that.

[redbird]

My understanding is that text-only browsers are configured to override all the HTML commands to do with appearance, and that anyone using them knows and expects that. Hence, something like <bold> or specifying a particular font isn't a problem there; deciding that one wants a particular font enough to provide an image of the text in 14-point Palace Semi-Distressed, rather than text and a <font> tag that some browsers may ignore, is.

Also, I haven't looked at the code for the page in question beyond noting that this bit is inside a "span" tag, so for all I know it's dealt with gracefully somewhere on there.