Re: A11y woes

[Clytie Siddall <clytie riverland net au>]

On 19/02/2006, at 10:58 PM, Don Scorgie wrote:

> 1. Fonts
> I've added a little about the "Fixed width font" and "Document  
> font" so
> far.  However, I don't really know what they're actually used for : 
> ( So,
> are these descriptions even vaguely related to reality:
> Document font: font to use for displaying documents.
> Fixed Width font: font to use for editing documents.

I can contribute a little here.

Variable-width fonts, which I hope the 'document fonts" are, are  
reading fonts. However accustomed we might become to reading terminal  
text, variable-width fonts lead the eye more effectively. (Serif also  
comes into this, for body text.) More specifically, accented  
languages look terrible in fixed-width fonts. (I was recently unable  
to start using an application I would have found very useful, because  
it didn't support variable-width fonts, and I can't edit for long in  
Vietnamese in fixed-width.)

True Unicode variable width fonts include: Lucida Grande, Arial,  
Gentium, Junicode, Titus Cyberbit Basic, and fonts created by  
language groups for Unicode (I have some beautiful fonts created for  
Vietnamese, but they cover the whole Unicode set.)

Fixed-width fonts are used for code, numbers, some types of tabular  
display and ASCII art ;). They make it easier to distinguish  
individual letters, and columns of letters. They are not for fluent  
reading, reading of sentences, paragraphs etc. You do get accustomed  
to them, to some extent, if you edit a lot in the terminal, but they  
are are harder to scan through, particularly for very ill/disabled  
people like me.

The only true Unicode fixed-width font of which I know is Everson Mono.

I hope this is useful.

from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm  
Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN