Finding your way:

Accessible Web Page Design:
Using the <FONT> Tag.

When HTML was conceived it was a "platform independent" markup language. The page designer was not intended to have much control of how information appeared on an end-user's display. The developer could suggest that the client software (the browser) change the characteristics of text that was marked with HTML tags (like BOLD or ITALIC), but how, or if, that enhancement was shown depended entirely on the browser.

HTML has evolved to the point where the developer appears to have much more control of how text is displayed on some browsers. Use of the <FONT> tag allows the designer to specify character size and colour (and other attributes too).

Remember: you, the page designer, do not have ultimate control the font types, sizes or colours that the end user (your client) sees. Most graphical browsers allow the end-user to over-ride your fonts and colours and choose colours and fonts that are more personally pleasing. Does your page survive this test?

One site I visited used the <FONT> tag to double the size of the first letter of each word in a title: at least one screen-reader for MS-Windows couldn't handle this. If you could see the screen, you could read the line, but the screen-reader software only read the unenlarged text. Thus, a sentence like:

The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Fence

would be rendered as:

The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Fence

and would be read by a screen-reader as:

he uick rown ox umped ver he ence

Finding your way.

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