But then what is the most accessible, most practical solution for allowing the user to change the font size of your site?
Options include:
- writing accessible, standards friendly code that can easily be either magnified or increased in size by the browser
- providing a button on your pages to increase text size
- having a preferences page available on your pages where they can select several different presentation options. (such as stopdesign, http://stopdesign.com/about/prefs/)
- providing a (possibly unwieldy) large pair of buttons on every page, saying "MAKE THIS TEXT BIGGER" and "make this text smaller".
I suppose, like many 'how far do we take this' accessibility concepts, it is a case by case, audience by audience basis.
For most of my sites, i would probably settle for the first option i listed.
If i was writing a site where i knew my audience would have a large number of vision impaired readers, and i have no assumed knowledge on their part, i would probably go for a little slider option:
[little]A[/little]-|----[big]A[/big]
...so that the further you move to the bigger 'A', the bigger the site's text is. Of course this wouldn't cater to other possible customisations like high contrast, single column, or anything else.
--a--
On 11/10/05, Andreas Boehmer [Addictive Media] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
From my experience there are a lot of people who have got a vision
impairment, yet do not use Magnifiers or don't know how to manually change
the browser font size. If you think about it - a "vision impairment" could
be just caused by old age or even tiredness. Just because somebody has got
slight difficulties reading small font doesn't mean they go off and buy
themselves a Screen Magnifier. And in particular older people might not know
how modify their browsers to increase the font size.
Having said that - the stylesheet swapping links on websites (such as on the
Sydney Morning Herald) are very often so user-unfriendly, they end up being
completely useless. I mean: how many people will guess that a small "A" will
decrease the font size on your browser, a larger "A" will increase it? In
particular for people who do have a vision impairment, that's not the
easiest functionality to detect and use. If you introduce such features,
make them obvious. And if possible, write them in BIG FONT. :)
That's my two cents.
Cheers,
Andreas.
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]]
On Behalf Of David McKinnon
Sent: Thursday, 10 November 2005 12:49 PM
To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org
Subject: [WSG] Font resizing
I was just wondering what everyone's opinion of font resizing using
stylesheet swapping?
I'm wondering if it's still useful given that it's useless to people using
screen readers, people with vision impairment will probably be more likely
to us a screen magnifier, and others can use their browser's own font sizing
-- command-+ and so on.
I notice that the Sydney Morning Herald's new design font resizing, but
offers just two font sizes: normal and bigger and only for some pages.
Any thoughts?
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