Accessible?

I am not suffering from any handicap which makes me need accessibility options, so it's not really my place to speak. If I were blind, or color-blind, or deaf, or some other thing which by politically correct standards I suppose we should be calling a benefit, I could talk about how my life has been ruined by not being able to visit various web sites, and people would believe me. Come to think of it, I could lie right now were it not for the fact that I've just said I wasn't. I could delete all this, but I'm lazy.

But in having to set up (for the ninetieth time, it feels like) the template for this stupid blog, I have run into the problem that always plagues me on the web (with a capital 'I'): font size. Everyone seems to think that a ten point font, especially sans-serif, is a good idea for long passages of text, which makes me squint at the screen like I was blind, which as I've established, I'm not. I've tried enlarging the text with the functionality provided by IE (yes, I use IE, deal with it) but half the time, this doesn't work. I've tried either the new IE7 expando-page zooming tool or various others, which make the page impossible to see or impossible to scroll or both. I don't understand why zooming something in should suddenly slow the scrolling to a crawl. It's not like IE doesn't cache the file before it zooms; it's not having to send back to the server for each new pixel. And zooming pictures is not really what I care about. The picture zoom could be crappy and low-res and I wouldn't care. I just want to be able to read the text.

And that explains why the text in this particular blog may be larger than people expect.

But that's not all. I think I've figured it out; the lack of accessibility I mean. Because all pages seem to be formatted to occupy the middle 25% of the screen (see any other blog for examples of this) the creators obviously feel the need to cram as much content as possible into that narrow stripe, so the page won't continue down into the depths of the non-rendered part of the screen, like a very long pencil with microscopic writing on it. In order to accomplish this, people make the font microscopic, as in the above simile.

Now there are some who would say that the narrow stripe of text design is terribly important and should be safeguarded. These people are idiots. You may feel free to spit on them. So, when faced with the choice between small text or long stripe, I have chosen both. Or neither, actually. As you can see, there is large text and a very fat stripe. I might even make it fatter, or the text larger. That's me, sticking it to the man.