I have been meaning to write this article for some time now. Never got around to write it. So… what am I on about? Well, remember all those beautiful web sites with latest design thing implemented. Enable Zoom Text Only in your Firefox browser (View->Zoom->Zoom Text Only) and zoom in or set larger fonts in windows, restart your machine, open your browser and check it out. Yes, that is what I am on about.

In recent years, I had pleasure (yes, let’s call it pleasure) of working with several web designers. I also had pleasure of observing the latest stuff made by web designers on the net. I am yet to find a single designer that thought about people with disabilities. And I am not talking about heavy disability either. Not every one of us is young with perfect sight. Many people have problems with high resolutions, and even distinguishing colours. And we are not that old as well. Take WordPress theme I am using atm. Enhance fonts. You see what happened with tabs and search box? Yeah. But it looks nice in normal size. Right?

The funny thing though. I always pointed out the problem to designers. Nobody cared, but insisted the design stays as is. And I don’t even want to start explaining how much clutter do you need to add to HTML code to make fields rounded and expendable. Sure, you could do it using Javascript and perhaps this is the way to go anyway. But enough of that.

It is more than obvious that some don’t get the importance of great looking float-able, accessible and useful designs. And that is not OK. And it is not only a design issue as well. There is about 10% of people with some sort of optical problems. So 10% of all users will, in worst case, see your site distorted, or find it unusable. Excellent. Specially, if those are your customers.

Building web page as designer drew it is just not enough. Web sites that don’t scale are behind an era we are living now and in best case annoying to people with sight issues. So, use techniques that are available nowadays (and when CSS3 finally gets support it deserves, we all will be happy hypos) and don’t forget that you don’t represent everyone.