Akatombo Web Log
Friday, February 20, 2004
Horizontal Positioning and text resizing
This little accessibility tip is not complicated or hard to figure out, but it is good to know and we hope it’ll be useful to someone. When working with layouts that are horizontally limited, for example a two column layout with each column having a set width - nested within a set width container, using left or right margins or padding defined with ems can cause layout problems as users resize the text in their browsers because the definition of an em will expand along with it soon forcing one of the columns underneath the other. If you use a pixel definition however, the text will expand within it’s container wrapping as it needs to to fit into your set width. Since the horizontal padding and margins stay the same you won’t have the problem of outgrowing the width of your layout as easily.