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Hi Paul, I just read your accessibility policy "....It was our feeling that, after experimenting with both scalable and elastic sites, complying with this checkpoint would undermine the design. This would jeopardise our first objective, which was to show sites could be both accessible AND visually appealing." But the design was only one part of the first objective? I'm confused, :| but more than that disappointed that this statement should come from a web design company that specialises in accessibility. Is it really unattainable? IMHO it's this type of thinking will continue to jeopardise the development of websites that are accessible AND visually appealing. :( Best regards, Christina PS Was just about to send this as your email asking for review came in, hence the quick response. Paul Boag wrote: > FIXED OR VARIABLE WIDTH > This is one of the biggest debates that exist on the web and one where people never agree! However, from a purely accessible point of view fixed width can prove a problem if you are going for more than single A compliancy. > > Checkpoint 3.4 (Priority 2) says: > Use relative rather than absolute units in markup language attribute values and stylesheet property values. > > Our interpretation of this is that you cannot use pixel values to fix the width. > > You may find this page from our new site useful: > http://headscape.headscapedev.com/text/159/our_accessibility_policy.html > > Please note this is not a live site so do not pass the url around. > > However, to complicate the issue still further there are some who argue that pixels are not an absolute value! See: > > http://blog.fawny.org/2005/09/21/measures/ > > As normal, if you want to chat this over give me a call on 01258 453889. > > Paul > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Managing an institutional web site [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of K Fearon > Sent: 07 December 2005 11:54 > To: [log in to unmask] > Subject: Two queries > > Apologies for cross posting. > > We're having our web pages redesigned at the moment and a couple of issues > have arisen on which I'd appreciate some feedback. > > Firstly, the designers have advised us to have some intro text on our main > welcome page to make it more friendly to search engines. Currently we only > have links to content, and meta tags. We'd originally cut any text on our > home page as it tends to be uninformative and people don't really read it, > but we might reconsider if they're right. Any comments? > > Secondly, we're having a discussion about fixed width vs relative width > designs. They are keen for us to go for fixed width, but this goes against > accessibility standards. I know a lot of university pages are designed at > a fixed width - was this a point you decided to compromise on? Was the > compromise worth it? > > Thanks > > Kriss > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Web Coordinator Stables S010 Tel: (01904) 434682 Fax: 434466 > University of York, UK 9-5.15, Mon-Fri http://www.york.ac.uk/coord/ > -- Christina McGuire Web Development Officer Library & Information Services (Room 410A) National Institute for Medical Research Ridgeway, Mill Hill London, NW7 1AA Tel: +44 (0)20 8816 2233 http://www.nimr.mrc.ac.uk "Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine."