In a perfect world, accessibility would come first. In the “real world” it’s an afterthought for most companies. I’ve sat in meetings and heard comments from managers like “why would a blind person want to use the internet?”, and “our statistics show all of our users have javascript, so why should we make it unobtrusive?”

I have argued for using relative font sizing in all of these companies and have been shot down every time. Corporations care if their site looks good and runs good for the majority of their visitors. That’s what makes them money.

IE6 is down to less than 20% of the market share right now, and it’s continuing to drop by .5 – 1% per month. I’m on a web accessibility list populated by a lot of “real world” people with disabilities, all of them know how to resize their text, and not a single one of them uses IE6. And anyone who doesn’t know how to resize their text, probably also doesn’t know how to increase the default size of their text in their browser settings either. So setting the font size to “.75em” is going to have exactly the same effect in reality as using “12px”

You know who still uses IE6? People with bootleg copies of Windows XP. That’s because you can’t install IE7 without service pack 2, and you can’t install sp2 without a legit copy of Windows.

This sort of comment is indicative of someone who spends very little time out in the real world…

A large – I would suggest a majority – percentage of computer users do not know how to resize text, think “Google” is *the internet* and are fearful when their browser or operating system suggests they upgrade. If your target market is anything older than the teens and 20 somethings, you’d better be designing for readability by those with less than perfect vision. Demographics, at least in North America, suggest that’s a growing market.

Up until recently, I was adamant about specifying pixels in ems, but then I stopped and thought about it…

If you had bad vision and you went to a website and tried to resize the text, only to find out you couldn’t, wouldn’t you do a little research to find out why? And once you found out that the problem was unique to IE6, wouldn’t you switch browsers? And if for some reason you absolutely couldn’t switch browsers, don’t you think you would figure out that you can override the size of the font on all web pages by using the accessibility settings in IE6? Just because people have bad vision, doesn’t mean they are stupid, and it’s time we stopped treating them as such.

It’s fine to use ems if you are building a small, simple site. But I worked for one of the largest social networking sites in the world and quickly figured out it was just not realistic to use ems. The designers hand you a comp where everything is specified in pixels, and you can’t sit there and do a bunch of math to try and figure out what the size of the parent element was, what percentage of that you need to use, etc.

All that aside, IE6 is almost a decade old and it’s a piece of garbage. If we all stopped pandering to it, it would go away a lot quicker.

I didn’t think Safari supported page zooming at the moment?

Safari 3.1.2 does, text magnification only.

Whether or not Microsoft or any other vendor chooses to support a particular browser, OS, App, whatever is, at best, an unreliable guage on whether or not to support it ourselves.

I think that the need is less in supporting older browsers and more in educating people. We need to be concentrating on ways to educate, rather than spending too much time supporting outdated technology.