Internet Explorer 8 Checkbox Issues

I think Internet Explorer 8 has improved upon Internet Explorer 7 in pretty much every way, everything runs smoother on it and it supports things that Internet Explorer 7 wasn’t great at.  It also helped to renew the importance of getting rid of Internet Explorer 6 and perhaps helped to drive a nail into the Internet Explorer 6 coffin.

However there is one thing that it has really taken a step back on and that is how checkboxes scale whenever you use the zoom tool in IE8.  I say ‘how they scale’ but the issue is actually that they don’t.

I have to admit this is something I normally wouldn’t be that worried about, I mean the scaling works grand in pretty much every other browser, and what users really scale sites anyway?

Visually impaired users, that’s who!  And it was whilst working on a site specifically aimed at people with a visual impairment that this issue cropped up.  All of the input fields scaled fine using a variety of in built and third party tools expect for checkboxes and radio buttons in Internet Explorer 8.

It was actually Dave Arthur from the Royal London Society for the Blind who came up with the solution.

The fix is to use CSS sprites with an image that has checkbox and radio button images on it, then you can apply these images to the offending elements, whenever the page scales now, the image scales up normally and no functionality is lost.