[Edit 11 June 2008: this post is somewhat out of date as I've now stopped using sIFR on this site. I got rather fed up with its imperfections to be honest. ]

The typography of this site was looking a little dull, so I thought it might be nice to use sIFR to jazz things up a little. sIFR - which stands for the rather daunting-sounding Scalable Inman Flash Replacement - uses a some neat trickery, a combination of Flash, Javascript and CSS, to change fonts on a page dynamically when it is loaded. This means you can use heading fonts which are

without having the pain of creating substitute images for every item of text.

So, what does it take to get sIFR working with WordPress? (more…)

Improving Accessibility through Typography

 Among the many decisions you need to make when designing accessible web sites, typography seems to frequently be only shallowly addressed. Typography is rarely completely ignored — but it is greatly simplified, to a point that the issues raised don’t always complete the picture of accessible text. Accessible typography is commonly simplified to these three questions:

[via Accessites.org]

A nice summary of essential typography issues from Joe Dolson. (Perhaps one day browsers will give us greater control over online type; the multi-headed monster that is sIFR is sadly not the answer, at least not in its present flaky and unfriendly form.)