Cory Doctorow on the Cost of Free

This is must reading for anyone interested in copyright and the current legal climate around the globe.

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Scalable Fonts

I just wrote a post on a flickr discussion in the Ideas group, suggesting flickr add font scalability. If you surf the web a lot, you've seen the feature, typically 3 As along the top of the page, usually on the left, or so I've noticed: A A A.

Here's part of what I said:

Yes, I know you can change the text size via browsers and operating systems, but that can be fairly wonky and unreliable depending on how the site is coded. For instance, while I don't have poor eyesight, I do have an eye condition that benefits from slightly larger text size when I read large chunks of text, such as posts in discussions here. Yet bumping up the font size in FF has had no visible effect on most of the text on flickr.

People with visual impairments severe enough that they benefit from screen enlarging software can do more to make the site readable than those of us who just would like, on occasion, a little boost to the font size.

One thing that makes scalable sites better than changing the settings in the browser is that the browser settings would be for all sites, even when not needed, and you have to go into the settings each time if you only want to bump up something for a few minutes to read one item on a site, and it might not work on all parts of the site if the site isn't coded to allow that. If the site has scalability, you just click the text size icon you want, read, then click to return to normal for that site. It's a much more elegant option.

It also sends a signal to people who have visual difficulty that they're welcome on a site. For people with visual impairments who enjoy photography and for those who are photographers (http://blog.blindphotographers.org/)

Here's an excellent article on web accessibility.

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