This weekend I got a mac mini to use as my media / entertainment box. I got it set up and so far, I’m pretty damn impressed with it. Videos off iTunes look great and I can watch podcasts and have it feel like actual tv. Assuming the whole tv-on-demand-over-the-internet thing takes off like everyone is saying it will, maybe I can ditch cable in a few months and just download whatever I want to watch.
The one part I was dissapointed in, although not terribly surprised by, was the screen resolution. I knew TV resolution was bad, but I hadn’t stopped to think about how sucky actually using it would be. Add the fact that I’m now sitting across the room instead of 2 feet away from the monitor, and anything other than watching movies seemed almost useless. Frustrating, yes. But it also made me realize something kind of neat:
Trying to use a computer through a tv monitor acutally makes accessibility issues relevant to me.
As a web developer, we all talk about accessibility, and we all know a ton of reasons why it’s important. But personally (and I’m sure I’m not alone on this), I’ve never been able to experience a situation where good accessibility design is necessary for me to be able to use something.
The first thing I did was just hit command + a bunch of times on every web page I visited. After some trial and error, I figured out this works better on some sites than others, and it was really annoying when it didn’t work. I’m definitely going to start paying a lot more attention to that in my design work. The next thing I looked for was a way to increase the size of all the system fonts. Apparantly, there’s not an easy way to do this in the system preferences. I downloaded a little utility called TinkerTool which seemed to help some, but still there’s a lot of apps that ignore the system settings and display all their interface so small that it’s not readable. For the most part though, I was able to figure out how to tweak the settings for all the apps I use the most (iTunes, Firefox, Mail, and iChat).
The default firefox theme seemed a little small to me, so I was glad when I discovered Access Firefox a project aimed at furthering accessibility in Firefox. I installed the HiVisGnome Big theme, and while it’s not the prettiest, it sure does make everything big and chunky, and really easy to read on my tv. I kicked up my minimum font-size to around 18px and that seems to make most pages look pretty good.
My site looks better than I thought it would. The positioning gets a little screwed up, but things are readable and display in the right order. And when worse comes to worse, I can always disable the css. I definitly rely on text replacement too much. There’s a few headings that I just had to have in a specific font, that now look dumb as hell to me becuase they don’t scale with the rest of the text.
As someone who doesn’t spend a great deal of time around people with assistive needs, it’s easy for me to think of accessibility as an abstract, far-off concept. But the more I think about it, it really shouldn’t be. The more web browsing moves off the internet and onto other devices like TVs and cell phones, the more web presentation is going to need to be able to adapt to it’s environment. That’s pretty much what accessibility is all about. My need to be able to type this from my TV is probably a pretty selfish motivation considering all the other benefits of good accessibility, but I guess the important thing is that I got it through my head, oh and all the nerd points I scored by devoting my whole easter weekend to it. :)