Everything Old is New « Unrepentant
►http://john.foliot.ca/everything-old-is-new
I commented that using #justified_text has some fairly serious #accessibility issues for #Dyslexics and some #screen_magnifier users, who will often see the enlarged white-spaces between words in the justified text, rather than the words themselves. The phenomenon is well known, and is referred to as “ #Rivers_of_White ”.
When I pointed out this problem, my colleague replied “I am using (CSS3) hyphenation — for browsers that support it.” followed by “Graceful degradation is that the text is still fully readable in older browsers. Dyslexics can always upgrade.“
Putting aside the fact that it may very well not be “fully readable” to the user-groups I just pointed out, the comment about “Dyslexics can always upgrade” floored me. WTF? I had originally seen the justified text in question via my smart-phone (Galaxy S III, so not some low-level feature phone), and I checked it in no less than 5 different browsers I have installed on my phone (Samsung’s native web-kit build, Dolphin, Firefox, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini), and the problem remained. (Perspicacious readers will notice one specific browser missing from that list…)
"Les dyslexiques peuvent toujours mettre à jour". Saloperie de légende urbaine, ça, que les gens peuvent mettre à jour leurs navigateurs.