Does anyone have any advice on SIFR in particular just how accessible this technology is?  We are striving for Level II accessibility this year in BP and feel that this technology may set us back.  The approach (advised by a third party) is to allow one of our consumer businesses to use a branded font onscreen without the need for images and that can still be read by a screen reader etc.  It is not expected that we will use SIFR for link text.

Any advice around this emerging technology and its impact on Search and Accessibility would be very helpful.

Thanks for the reply.  We plan only to replace homepage headers with a specific brand font. No more.  The font in question is non standard (bespoke for a brand) and so my understanding is that this cannot be done via CSS, although open to suggestion.  Do you know of any Level II sites that are using SIFR?  My main concern is that this technology will limit us in reaching this standard, I also hope we dont go backward and fail to meet Level I - which has been achieved already.

On 16:09:49 7 February 2006 dzambonini wrote:

Well, the use (or not) of sIFR is a contentious issue, and I think if we start attempting to list all of the pros and cons, it could take quite a while...

What I would say is that my personal feeling (we've produced numerous accessibility-award winning sites) is that - ignoring whether or not sIFR is good or not - using the standard 'server side dynamic images' approach isn't that bad.  Although the text isn't 'scalable' in the traditional sense, anyone using screen magnifiers will be able to 'magnify' the text (there is little evidence to suggest that the blocky, magnified text of gifs is particularly hard to read), there are no plug-ins required, screen readers can access the alt-text easily enough, and all (visually-able) users will view the text in the correct font (whereas with sIFR, if they don't get the flash version, they usually get the standard font).

With regards to meeting the W3C WCAG standards, that's a bit trickier.  Although alt text will satisfy checkpoint 1.1, neither sIFR or dynamic images are particularly suitable for 3.1: "When an appropriate markup language exists, use markup rather than images to convey information", "avoid using images to represent text -- use text and style sheets instead".  Although sIFR probably has the edge on this particularly ambiguous checkpoint, the second that the flash replaces the original text, it's possible to argue that this checkpoint is no longer met.

Can you definitely not achieve the effect required with CSS?  How much sIFR are you intending on using?  (i.e. how much of the text will be replaced, per page).  I've seen sIFR look fine for a single heading, but when used for multiple sub-headings, the page can look a bit 'jumpy'.

I shouldn't think search engines will be a problem with either method (although you may be able to get more semantic information with sIFR; e.g. replace a <h1>Heading</h1> with flash - where the search engine would see the original heading mark-up.  With images, you'd tend just to get the <img> tag without the heading tags, which could have an impact on search terms.)

On 10:51:24 6 February 2006 matthewclarke wrote:

Does anyone have any advice on SIFR in particular just how accessible this technology is?  We are striving for Level II accessibility this year in BP and feel that this technology may set us back.  The approach (advised by a third party) is to allow one of our consumer businesses to use a branded font onscreen without the need for images and that can still be read by a screen reader etc.  It is not expected that we will use SIFR for link text.

Any advice around this emerging technology and its impact on Search and Accessibility would be very helpful.