Piotr ‘Riddle’ Petrus has released a simple JavaScript form to help calculate the em equivalent of a pixel size you want to emulate. I wrote a quick-and-dirty version of this in Excel to help with the typographic rhythm of my CSS framework but this is much nicer. You can add nodes below the body tag - h1, h2, h3 for example - set the pixel size you would like these to appear as and it automagically calculates the em value.

If you want to incorporate this into working with my CSS framework you’ll need to set both the “Default Browser Font Size” and “Body” values to 13px and set the “Show Decimals” value to 4. All it really needs now is a little extra coding to allow you to input a line-height value so it calculates margin and line-height values for any nodes you wish to get an em value for.

Thanks Piotr.

Andy Higgs was somehow tempted to switch his final year dissertation from essentially “Why don’t grannies like using mobile phones?” to “An enquiry into the acceptance of accessible web content and web design standards by UK small businesses.” With only four weeks to spare.

The dissertation approaches some key accessibility questions in the UK; do small businesses know that they are expected to provide accessibility and are they prepared to bite the bullet and shell out for an upgrade? There are also a few more findings and the statistics could be particularly useful if you are doing any work in the area yourself. If you want a one-page overview of the whole project including some key findings, you can read the abstract.

At 9000 words with an underlying online questionnaire Andy devised to base his findings on, it’s a good piece of work, especially given the timescale. Kudos Andy.

Read his full dissertion here.

In my blog entry entitled “Practice What You Offer” back on 1st December 2005, I posted about one of the advertisers within a monthly SiteMorse report who:

…delivers some of the best performing and most accessible websites; you’ll find our specialist expertise invaluable in helping you improve the quality of your online service delivery…

Yet had an appalling 1996-era frameset-based website themselves.

Well, I’ve had a few Google search queries for “Amatica website” find me since then and curiosity sent me to take another look and discover that they have redesigned their website. I noted this in the comments section of the original post but after chatting with a colleague at work where we discussed the merits of calling out bad websites we both agreed that it would be a positive move to congratulate good redesigns also. For me, this largely happens over at Accessites where we are looking for highly accessible websites that are also visually stunning but having a little “applause” category wouldn’t go amiss here especially if someone I’ve blogged negatively about comes good.

A new look Amatica was launched on 21 December 2005, from their news release:

David Roberts, Amatica’s director for marketing said “Our customer’s projects always take priority over our own internal projects. We’ve been concerned about the old website’s increasing lack of W3C compatibility and decided that it was time to sort it out. People expect us to practise what we preach!”.

Yes, indeed we do

This is a good start but I hope that the dev team can further refine and build on what they have. Quick “raising the bar” issues I see include:

• An XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE instead of a Strict HTML or XHTML for a new build?
• A meta tag before the title tag?
• Cascading Style Sheet filters (hacks) for Internet Explorer in the same stylesheet — putting these into an IE-only stylesheet delivered via a conditional comment would allow the main style sheet to validate.
• Bordering on “divitis” perhaps.
• No hover or active states on hyperlinks.
• Footer links using • instead of a semantic, inline unordered list.
• Lastly, and by no means least — lose the accesskeys.

Keep up the good work.