zoom design is the new black
Joe Clark seems to have caught everyone's attention with his @media presentation Zoom the Web: The problem of giant fonts.
Just after the conference, I had several references go through my RSS reader; most notably references to:
- Stopdesign | Zoom layout (Doug Bowman scores extra points with everyone's inner hacker by getting started right there during Joe's @media presentation)
- Juicy Studio: Zoom for Low Vision
- Plus people reminding us that Joe was talking about this months ago: Big, Stark & Chunky: A List Apart
Now Joe has followed up with Le blog personnel de Joe Clark | Zoom layouts - again.
If you are confused about where this is going, consider it this way... Users with no vision (or extremely low vision) generally use a screen reader, which makes the visual design more or less irrelevant to that user group (they can't see it). People with partial vision might use a page zoom tool, which is a completely different mode of use - they are still visual users. The way they interact with the web is entirely different from screen reader users, so we should not treat them as one group.
At least, that's how I read it :)
To a great degree this is a bit of a wakeup call for us all. We've got the technology but we're not making nearly enough use of it. It's a great stage where we can turn around on the mountaintop and give a thoughtful squint at the next one.