Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report
Zeldman has a mini-review of Mark's post about font sizing on the web. He also adds some commentary based on his business site, Happy Cog.
At Kottke's site, you'll find a post a running discussion about styling links so they don't end up breaking up sites designed to be read.
At the bottom of both these discussions are points about doing what is necessary to appeal to your audience. Kottke makes a comment about user oriented design being "design with the user in mind (as opposed to design by committee or design by whatever the vice president's favorite color is)". He justifies his design decisions based on the theory that he is doing what is necessary to provide the best user experience for his readers.
On some level I agree with this, since each site serves a unique audience that must be satisfied. However, having family members with disabilities, I firmly believe that accessibility must be built in. Now if you're designing a site and you watch your logs and you never see a user agent string from a voice or text based browser, I can understand how you would automatically discount those users as not part of your user base. However, what if they're not visiting because they've given up on the idea; they have heard there are no accessible sites, so what's the use?
As I sat in a dinky little pizza parlor today, I heard a family talking about visiting sprite's web site to see if they had won a prize. The web has become an integral part of our lives, in an extremely fast amount of time (a topic unto itself). Here's my point: unless we create an environment where everyone can assume that the web will be easily available to them, how can we expect to see their traces in our logs? It seems like a catch 22.
It's a little cliché, but gees... What a twisted web we weave.