Last night, I was sit­ting back on the couch watch­ing TV in the dark with two sleep­ing kit­tens on my lap — exhausted after a rous­ing hour or so of devour­ing boiled chicken then run­ning around the couch jump­ing on any­thing that dared move or look like it might move. Umm, that was the kit­tens that were exhausted from doing that, not me…

Any­way, I had my TabletPC on the cof­fee table run­ning on bat­ter­ies and I could only just reach the mouse. I was try­ing to read my RSS feeds with­out dis­turb­ing the purring pile of fur, and as I jacked up the font-size to “mas­sive” so I could eas­ily read it an arms length away, it occurred to me that web design­ers who make sites with stuff set in tiny pixel fonts prob­a­bly had never tried to do what I was doing right then. Tiny text looks ok on your nice shiny big bright LCD screen when it’s 30 cen­ter­me­tres from your nose and you’re sit­ting right in front of it. It doesn’t look so hot on a device with a 10.4″ LCD with the bright­ness down to con­serve bat­tery life, 60 cen­ter­me­tres away on a cof­fee table in the dark.

I also had the thought that it was my own extreme geek­i­ness that was my main con­cern when design­ing for acces­si­bil­ity. I changed the lay­out on this very site so that it would com­fort­ably fit into 768x1024 res­o­lu­tion wihtout side­ways scrolling (my Tablet PC has this bass-ackwards res­o­lu­tion in por­trait or “slate mode”). I made the text what I con­sider a rea­son­able size, but which I know cer­tain design­ers would think was too big. If these mea­sures also make the site more acces­si­ble for peo­ple with visual impair­ments, that’s nice, but it’s not my main rea­son for doing it.

So there you have it folks. Rather than a community-minded respon­si­ble web devel­oper, I’m just a self-centered gad­get freak. But it has the same net result.