Benedict Wyss wrote: > My idea is to have a basic font size to allow a reasonable amount of > content with less scrolling and then in an accessibility toolbar give > the visitor the oportunity to increase the font size in the main > content area. This to me seems like a decent compromise. I am open to > correction on that, but it seems fair though. > > So I will still need to place a text resizing mechanism to cover that > government standard for the site.
I'm not sure what you mean by "government standard" here. There is some debate about whether "text resizer" widgets are a good idea at all, and I don't think that there is any government standard that explicitly requires them. There are a variety of arguments about this, but a couple quick ones are: is the widget usable without JavaScript? (This is required for the site to meet W3C WCAG 1.0 Priority 1 Guidelines). Is it usable without cookies? How can you inform a visitor that the widget exists, and what it will do, if they cannot read the text on the site to begin with? What is usually required from a standards perspective, at minimum, is that a site use relative font sizes in a way that allows a visitor to increase the font size of the site using browser controls. Some very respectable sites provide a link to "increase text size" that offer simply an explanation of how to increase the text size in different browsers, rather than trying to change the size of the fonts being sent to the browser. > [...] I worked on > the assumption that lower that normal font sizes are unneccessary but > as a standard we are obliged to offer a larger text size alternative, > and one that differs from the cnrt+/- that applies to the whole site. I don't think you are obliged to offer "a larger text size alternative, and one that differs from the cnrt+/- that applies to the whole site." > On 6/21/07, Felix Miata wrote: > I think what you want is to reinvent the wheel and clutter your page > duplicating browser tools. One job of a modern web browser to provide > its user with whatever text size adjustment is required to > make a page comfortable and/or usable. > [....] All you need to do is > accommodate them all by leaving the base size as you found it and > setting only contextual sizes relative to the base size presumptively > chosen by each individual user. I'd have to agree with Felix on this one, particularly for a site whose target market includes large numbers of seniors. Seniors are more likely to be unfamiliar with how web browsers work than the younger population, and as a result, they will be less likely to know how to change the font size in their browsers, and they will also be less likely to understand the function of font resizing widgets on a page, no matter how you present them. And given that deteriorating vision is such a common issue for that population, the best approach for a site targeting that market would be to use a large enough default size that most users can use it. To do this, I would seriously consider following Felix's recommendation of leaving the base size as you found it. Phil. ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
