Hotmail accessibility for the visually impaired

Factual Questions
1

I’ve just spent a few days setting up a new laptop computer for my mother, who is in her sixties, has never used a computer before and has some visual impairment (in a nutshell, can see well enough to drive, but struggles reading very small text).

She’s going to be on the move a bit, connecting to the internet via wireless networks in various locations - because of this, I thought it best to set her up with a webmail solution, rather than a POP/IMAP mailbox and email client. I chose Hotmail, and I’m beginning to wonder if that was the right idea…

The laptop display is set to large fonts and for most web pages, increasing the text to a comfortable size is a simple matter of clicking View>Text Size, or holding down <Ctrl> and spinning the mouse wheel. But it doesn’t work for Hotmail (at least not in IE6). Furthermore, in what I presume must be an effort to be neat and tidy, the fonts on the Hotmail pages are especially small anyway.

Text size on Hotmail can be changed in Firefox, but that doesn’t help because the integrated new messages alert (part of Windows Live Messenger) opens Hotmail in IE even if you have Firefox set as the default browser - I’m not sure what the ‘Email’ shortcut on the Start Menu does, but would not be surprised if it’s similar.

In the end, I had to work around it by installing IE7, which supports zooming, but this is not an optimal solution for several reasons:
-Zooming works differently for different sites - for most sites, it’s just a text size change; for sites like Hotmail, <Ctrl>+Mousewheel does a straight graphical zoom, enlarging images too - everything looks a bit blocky when it’s zoomed in.
-The Layout of the IE7 toolbars is just plain stupid and unintuitive.
-At this point, I’d already spent half a day explaining how to use IE6 - now I have to explain that the ‘Home’ icon is over here, whilst the favorites icons are down here, and the forward/back buttons are up here - all in different places. Yuk.

So… I’m looking for a better solution… any practical suggestions are welcome - I am surprised though, that Hotmail doesn’t seem to have any accessibility options anywhere - I can’t believe Microsoft can have failed to cater for people with impaired vision here.

2

Don’t have any answers for you regarding Hotmail but wanted to suggest that maybe you could try GMail or Yahoo to see how their resolution is.

Or, see if her ISP has free webmail she could use (from anywhere) with her free ISP email account.

If you need a gmail invite give me a holla.

3

There isn’t any ISP, because internet access will be ad hoc, depending on her location.

4

How doe she get online now, at home?

Like, I have Adelphia/Time Warner and thus have zipperjj@adelphia.net (not really) with my account even though I don’t use it. I can go to something like powerlink.adelphia.net and check my email for that account via the Web no matter where I’m at - if I’m connected via AOL or Earthlink or anything.

How is she connecting to the Internet now? How are YOU connecting to the Internet? Adelphia gives us 5 free email accounts with our internet connection - could you get her one through YOUR ISP?

Or like I said…try other free Web-based email solutions.

5

From an HTML/CSS point of view, in my experience browsers can handle this kind of text resizing only if font sizes are specified using absolute keywords (xx-small, x-small, small, medium, large, x-large, xx-large), relative keywords (larger, smaller), or percentages. If an element specifies a font size as a length (cm, mm, in, pt, pc, em, ex, or px), or it inherits from such an element, the browser treats it as an unbreakable instruction and won’t resize it.

What does this mean to you? Well, I reckon Hotmail is specifying a font size using a length unit somewhere near the root of the document, thus disabling browser-based resizes. If you really want to use Hotmail, it may be possible to track down the offending style and override it with your own style sheet.

However, I believe the best option is switching to GMail. I have just confirmed that it does allow browser-based resizing of all its text using IE6. Also, IMHO, GMail has a much, much, much cleaner user interface than Hotmail, and I find it far easier to use in general.

If any web designers/developers out there are reading this, please take this kind of usability into account and avoid length-based font size units.[/soapbox]

6

OK, just discovered something else that might help. In IE6, go to Tools|Internet Options, click Accessibility (under the General tab), and tick “Ignore font sizes specified on Web pages”. This makes your browser ignore those ugly length-based font sizes, making all text resizeable.

Unfortunately, it also makes you lose all font size styles in every website (including those that would be resizeable anyway). Furthermore, I just tried it on Hotmail’s login screen, and it looks like Hotmail’s interface depends on the font sizes it specifies. Overriding them causes the Sign-In box to float over some text, making it impossible to read. I didn’t try signing in (I’ve long abandoned my last Hotmail account), but I suspect it would be unusable.

I reckon every web developer should look at Hotmail as a perfect example of how not to create a usable site.