Image Replacement with Accessibility and why Flash Replacement is Better

I've read so much about image replacement, and how bad it is for accessibility, over the last few months that I felt I really needed to throw my toys out of the pram and write something myself.

So what is image replacement?

Essentially image replacement uses JavaScript to search through a document's object model and replace certain tags with images... For example you might change "<h2>header</h2>" with "<h2><img src="headerNicelyStyled.gif"></h2>.

Why is this bad for accessibility?

The valid argument is that if I scale my text; images won't scale, so, it won't help users who need to use text resizing to view a page (or those who use Opera or similar re-rendering magnifiers will be presented with heavily pixelated images).

The solution?

Don't use it. sIFR is a new version of image replacement using Flash to render the font. If a user doesn't have Flash or JavaScript the tags will be left alone and presented with their css style aternative.

If they have both these technologies then they will be presented with flash file with the font embedded. Now the glory of this is that as long as you use relative sizing the flash movie can scale and the user can still benefit from magnification methods they are used to!

I've used it on several projects now and can't see any issue not to, but if you have a valid reason why this is bad for accessibility purposes, or indeed any other VALID reason, please do get in touch.

If this is all new to you please check out www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/.