Making my site more accessible

Question

Hi — first off, this is not a question about font-size buttons! I find most people with low vision already have their defaults changed on their browsers and can enlarge the type themselves.
This is a question, instead, about ensuring that every line of text on my site shows up when a screen reader strips away the CSS and gives the low vision user just the text, where it can be easily read aloud by a speech synthesizer.
The problem in Muse is that if you create a second text box on the page, say a sidebar, that text does not come up. For instance, try this page:
http://www.thebigdivide.com
If you have a browser with a "Reader" or similar button, you will notice that only the main text is grabbed when you click it.
My understanding is that Muse was designed to be friendly to designers who have used InDesign (as I have, going back to PageMaker in 1985).  If that's the case, then why don't we have the ability to link text boxes on a page? That would solve this accessibility problem I'm describing, because the screen reader would pull up all the text on the page, even though it's sitting in different blocks.
If this is indeed a feature and I haven't discovered it, or someone can suggest a workaround, I'd appreciate it!

Answer 1

First you must establish the base font-size in your CSS like so:  This assumes 1em = 100% = 16px (standard browser default).
html {font-size: 100%}
body {font-size: 1em}
Then define your page layout and division widths in ems using the following formula:
1 divided by 16 = 0.0625
multiplied by the number of pixels required
= value in ems.
0.0625 X 900px = 56.25em
0.0625 X 300px = 18.75em
0.0625 X 150px = 9.375em
#wrapper { width: 56.25em}
#divName {width: 18.75em}
#divName img {width: 9.375em; height: 9.375em}
IMPORTANT!  If you don't wrap elastic images inside elastic containers, your page will fall apart when people increase text size in browser.
You can see a working DEMO of this method here:
http://alt-web.com/TEST/Resizable-ems-test.html
Good luck,
Nancy O.
Alt-Web Design & Publishing
Web | Graphics | Print | Media  Specialists
http://alt-web.com/
http://twitter.com/altweb