Getting started with practical web accessibility, section 2 Demonstration: an analysis of a page:

Rule 11: Reasonable width

Trying to view the page in a window that has half the width of a common 1280 pixels wide screen, we can see that the ends of text lines are cut off. They can be viewed by using horizontal scrolling, or by making the window somewhat wider. In a closer study, we can see that the window width needs to be almost 750 pixels to prevent horizontal scrolling.

This is not very accessible, but neither is it a particularly bad feature. There are web pages which much less reasonable width requirements. Changing this feature would probably require a major change to the page structure, which probably reflects the overall structure of the pages of the site. The width requirements stem from the use of a rather complicated layout table with many width attributes.

The page contains a link to “printable version.” In fact, this version is a “free-width” version except for the logo, which is (quite unnecessarily) 759 pixels wide! The version lacks most of the site navigation and most of the specific layout, so it could be more appropriately named “page content without navigation,” perhaps with the appended note “(suitable for printing)”.