"flash"

I’ve recently been distracted from my flash ambitions back to the world xhtm/css design. One of the issue with the organisation concerned is that in print media they use what I think is a really nice font: ITC Century Light. Ideally this is what should be used for all h1 headers through this site. Obviously not many users are likely to have this font installed. The substitute font is Times New Roman which is not nearly as neat, or distinctive.

In the bad-old days we would have created GIFs for each heading and used them instead. The height of bad-practice in this new world of standards compliance and accessibility.

Prior to doing any research, I had expected use of Flash would fall foul of similar problems. Then I found sIFR. A combination of JavaScript, CSS and Flash, which at run-time replaces designated tags with a SWF containing the text rendered in your font of choice to the same dimensions. What’s better it ticks most of the accessibility boxes. I’m really pleased with how easy this was to set up, and how it gracefully degrades.

Ok I came to this late. But the current version (2.02 at time of writing) has been recently updated with bug fixes and changes relating to ELOAS. And there is a version 3 in development.

• Mike Davidson’s blog entry is a good read
• Here is Mike’s example of sIFR in action
  
• Official documentation
• A recent note on versions

This is a good piece of work by the developers, who are looking for funding. Certainly if my client goes with this recommendation, I’ll be sending a donation.