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Autism isn’t something a person has, or a “shell” that a person is trapped inside. There’s no normal child hidden behind the autism. Autism is a way of being. It is pervasive; it colors every experience, every sensation, perception, thought, emotion, and encounter, every aspect of existence. It is not possible to separate the autism from the person—and if it were possible, the person you’d have left would not be the same person you started with.

http://www.autistics.org/library/dontmourn.html

So its not really a case of perceiving the person as a diagnosis but more about recognising that that autistics are autistic, they don’t have autism – just like women don’t have femaleness, they are female.

Thanks for explaining it, Kev. Being male or female is a significant characteristic. When referring to smaller groups, it’s generally good practice not to define people by those characteristics, but state that they have those characteristics. The distinction between the two is often what determines whether something is insulting, or just observational. For example: ‘He’s a ginger’ or ‘He has ginger hair’.

I do understand your reasoning though, and can see why you would want to avoid using the term ‘have’.

Note that Gez’s conditional width statement will fail if Javascript is disabled/unavailable.

Sorry. I meant to point that out, but rushed the response as I was at work. A solution to cater for IE’s inadequacies would be to revert to fixed-width for IE, overridden with a conditional expression (using scripting) for those with scripting enabled.

Can you clarify your reference to “rivers of white”? Does that mean that there should be large swathes of whitespace between distinct blocks of content, or that you should avoid rivers of white?

The term ‘rivers of white’ refers to the extra whitespace rendered when text is left and right justified, leaving patterns of whitespace in the text. Some people find the extra whitespace distracting, and some may find it impossible to read. Rivers of white should be avoided by not using fully-justified text.

I’m not sure about the dyslexia issue so I’ll try and clarify that one.

Can you clarify your reference to “rivers of white”? Does that mean that there should be large swathes of whitespace between distinct blocks of content, or that you should avoid rivers of white?

I’m sure I read somewhere that dyslexics have problems with web pages with lots of white space.

I was particularly interested in your obersvation that people don�t �have� Aspergers, but �are� Aspergers. I�ve always considered it to be important not to define people by any disabilities they may or may not have. Someone can have a disorder, but describing someone purely in terms of a disorder implies that there�s not much else worth noting about that person.

I know what you mean :o). When I say are Aspergers I’m trying to differentiate in terms those who are diagnosed with Aspergers appreciate themselves. There’s an ominous movement in the ASD field these days to ‘cure’ autism and to treat it as a disease. Autistic people themselves identify themselves first and foremost as autistics partly in order to discredit the idea that autism is an illness or disease – the phrase currently in vogue in the mainstream media is ‘autism epidemic’ which when one considers it is pretty insulting to autistics.

So its not really a case of perceiving the person as a diagnosis but more about recognising that that autistics are autistic, they don’t have autism – just like women don’t have femaleness, they are female.

I was particularly interested in your obersvation that people don’t ‘have’ Aspergers, but ‘are’ Aspergers. I’ve always considered it to be important not to define people by any disabilities they may or may not have. Someone can have a disorder, but describing someone purely in terms of a disorder implies that there’s not much else worth noting about that person. My thinking stems back to my schooling, 1970’s, so things have probably changed quite a lot since then. “See the person first” was drummed into us; otherwise you may hit someone else by mistake :-)

Firstly it seems we can apply a lot of the rules of good design backed up with both WCAG (although AAA may not be possible bearing the desire for smaller line length and hence a probable fixed width) and standards compliant markup.

Using relative units is a priority 2 checkpoint, so specifing fixed-width layouts would also fail AA. The easiest solution for line length is to specify a max-length property in ems. Of course, IE doesn’t understand max-length, but it can be achieved using a conditional expression:

* html body
{

width: expression((this.parentNode.clientWidth<750)? "90%": "40em");
}

IE’s conditional statements could be used to include a style sheet with the above rule so that it only gets sent to IE, and prevent serving non-standard content to decent browsers.