distorted web pages

[mac]

My tables on my web pages get distorted if my internet explorer font settings is changed from "Meduim" to "Large".

How can I make MEDUIM as a defult size that can NOT be changed by anyone visiting the site?

I dont want to have a choice to choose small, med or large.
I want the choice to be only Medium.

[rmladden]

I don't think you can, but I would not recommend doing it anyway. Many people have trouble seeing and need large fonts to be able to read the screen.

[NormanRouxel]

If you're using a CSS theme you may be able to change the font sizes in actinic.css (make a backup first) to use absolute pixel values instead of the relative values that are there. E.g. replace all xx-small with 9px, etc.

However, as Bob rightly points out, that will be alienating all users with eyesight problems where the ability to adjust the font size is essential. These people will be much more tolerant of lumpy pages than of being able to read nothing.

Indeed you may even fall foul of the law in some countries as I believe there are requirements to make pages accessible to people with disbilities. I think the Sydney Olympics website got prosecuted for lack of accessibility.

Norman

[Tiger]

Talking of accessibility. Using tables for laying things out is a bit of a no-no as far disabled access is concerned. Some of the technology used by the visually impaired or those unable to use a mouse is confused by heavily nested tables (such as the method favoured by Actinic templates).

As far as I can tell, it's not actually something that could get you prosecuted under the Disability Discrimination Act (at the moment) but if you're looking to make your site accessible to all then it's something that needs to be considered.

Personally, I would advise using layers instead (it means a bit of work on all the templates but it's worth it in the long run).

Whilst I'm here, I would also ask if Actinic are going to be considering accessibility issues in their next release?

[pinbrook]

Yep I agree. Always use relative font sizes. I have a blind friend for whom we supply tech support so I see his difficulties all the time.

If there isn't legislation now there may well be in the future, so it is best to do the right thing now

[cdicken]

I had a look through the W3C guidelines recently.

All the fonts in Actinic should be resizable as we never use explicit font point sizes in the themes (if anyone sees a place where this is not true then please let me know).

With regards to table layouts, the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines v1.0 recommend that tables are only used for grids of data, rather than requiring it. In the recent v2.0 documentation, this recommendation made in much gentler language.

To my mind, tables are the standard way of doing layouts. We will investigate layers when we come to look at re-vamping Actinic's templates at some point in the future, but at the moment we are sticking with tables.

You may be interested to know we have added in some new accessibility features into 7 such as using asterisks to indicate required fields in the online store.