On 2009/07/05 11:21 (GMT+0100) Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis composed: > Felix Miata wrote:
> > On 2009/07/04 10:13 (GMT+0100) Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis composed: > >> Felix Miata wrote: > >>> Zoom, minimum text size and magnifiers are defense mechanisms. The > >>> basic problem is the pervasive offense - not respecting users' > >>> font size choices by incorporating them at 100% for the bulk of > >>> content. Thus, an even better way to address presbyopia is to design > >>> to make defenses unnecessary in the first place. > >> I'm dubious about the rhetoric here: > > That you call it rhetoric doesn't make it so. > > Too small text is #1 user complaint: > > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html > That's not quite what the article says. "Bad fonts" was the biggest > complaint from Nielsen's readers, but that category includes "frozen > font sizes" and "low contrast", not just "small font sizes". The entire text: "Bad fonts won the vote by a landslide, getting almost twice as many votes as the #2 mistake. About two-thirds of the voters complained about small font sizes or frozen font sizes; about one-third complained about low contrast between text and background." To suppose "Frozen" means anything other than frozen undersize would be a difficult supposition to support, as one need only peruse the web to see how rare frozen at or larger than default can be found. Thus, disrespectful (smaller than default) font sizes were and _are_ the #1 (foundational) problem, with other font issues lagging. > > W3 recommends 100%: http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/font-size > "Recommends" has a technical sense when it comes to W3C, and this isn't > a formal recommendation: > "While the tips are carefully reviewed by the participants of the > [Quality Assurance Interest] group, they should not be seen as anything > else than informative bits of wisdom, and especially, they are not > normative W3C technical specifications." Keyword: W I S D O M Designers who implement that wise advice are wise. > > As do others, e.g.: > > http://tobyinkster.co.uk/article/web-fonts/ > > http://www.xs4all.nl/~sbpoley/webmatters/fontsize.html > > http://informationarchitects.jp/100e2r/?v=4 > > http://fm.no-ip.com/auth/bigdefaults.html > http://www.cameratim.com/personal/soapbox/morons-in-webspace#hard-to-read-fonts > The claims I was trying to question were: > Claim 1: Browser defaults always represent "user choice". Actual choice, of course not always. Safest presumption of choice, very much yes. Any other presumption, which is what use of non-defaults makes, is a poor foundation on which to build in usability and/or accessibility. This "claim 1" is addressed by the major point of Inkster article. > Claim 2: Acceptance of publisher font size suggestions is not a valid > "user choice". If by "publisher" you mean browser and/or desktop environment vendor(s), it's a logical presumption to make, and a superior one to presuming that disrespecting defaults (non-100%) can improve the experience for more than degrade the experience. If by "publisher" you mean site designer, I'm not sure I understand your claim. If you assume an actual user setting is not a valid choice, whether made or not, actively or otherwise, you still have no basis to determine your disregard of or necessarily arbitrary adjustment to those settings can be better for the users than whatever was set by or for the users. IOW, there's no practical and legitimate way for any designer to logically come up with something different that is globally better. > Claim 3: Publisher font size suggestions are an "offence" against user > choice in some way that typeface and color suggestions are not. Trouble with the size, the foundation of legibility, usually overwhelms the impact of typeface and color, which is not the same thing as saying the latter have no impact at all. Generally the designer can reduce legibility by changing face/color, but not globally improve materially WRT legibility of the defaults. All the browsers by default use reasonably legible typefaces, and black on white. Black on white is presumptively best, like most quality books and most magazine pages use. A reduced contrast can help only for a subset of the universe, mostly those who have displays set to excessive brightness and/or contrast. Those with such displays should correct for themselves. OTOH, there are those who must use tired old displays, often with brightness and contrast _incapable_ of being restored upwards to near optimal. > Most of the authorities you cite agree with Claim 1 but none offer any > argument for Claims 1 or 2. As to 1, what's to argue? As to 2, maybe they wouldn't understand your point either? > Most contradict Claim 3. In Nielsen's survey of his readers, a third > complained about poor color contrast. Oliver Reichenstein discusses how > bad contrast can reduce legibility, and your own article says "to be > legible, text needs enough contrast". Toby Inkster and Stephen Poley > both discuss how typeface choice can render text hard-to-read. Tim > Seifert's excellent diatribe says "[d]aft colour schemes are a pain" and > "[s]etting a page to use particular fonts … can make a page difficult, > or impossible to read". > >> * Why should we treat browser default font size settings, which many users > >> seem not to realise that they can change, > > Whether individuals know how [snip] is irrelevant > Can you make a choice if you do not realize you have options? Most are personal computers. By definition they come with personalizability built in. The vendors have provided for the clueless, and everyone else, usable defaults. Authors should defer to the clueful, not the clueless. Doing otherwise is an affirmative designer choice for chaos outside their own microcosms. The clueless who are overwhelmed by their cluelessness can generally acquire clues. > Of the users who do realize they can force font size but choose not to, > why assume their choice is to use the default size with all designs > rather than supplying a default size when publisher suggestions are > absent? Why should anything at all be adjustable? Make all 4' 8" men and 6' 8" women use the same fixed in place car seats and steering wheels. Make only size 8 shoes. Make all fans single speed. Down with color displays, make all new ones grayscale only. Lock all ovens at 400F. Give all cameras fixed focal length lenses. People make choices to serve their interests. It's in everyone's best interest to respect others and their choices. It's my puter. I set the settings according to my needs. Web pages can accommodate and respect them. I can see no rational justification why they should not. Note that none of this is saying designers should implement build boring pages with no artistry or by applying no aesthetic talent. I'm not implying putting all the pieces together in a certain way with certain colors is not OK. What I'm saying is the designer should build the perspectives without a dependence on absolute size. Instead of dependence on absolute size, it should acclimate to the size given via default, and when particulars of the design impose what would otherwise be reductions to accessibility/usability, such as lower contrast via background images or colors, to _raise_ text size from default to compensate. > Why assume users are always trying to use that browser setting > to do something it doesn't claim to do? What do or don't they claim to do? > > You as designer aren't there, so you can't possibly know that what > > they have isn't acceptable or even perfect, much less improve their > > experience by deviating from the default. > Both users and designers operate from a position of ignorance. Many. Not all. Paternalizing the clueless undeservedly stomps on the clueful. > Users who > adjust their default font size don't know how their adjusted default > font size will work with different colors and typefaces; designers know > how common default font sizes will work with their suggested colors and > typefaces, but not how the user's adjusted size will work. The designers who don't know are incompetent and/or lazy designers. Adequate testing will show them enough to come up with reasonable results. > Because of > these areas of ignorance, it is possible for designers to happen to > suggest a more legible size. (The more users who don't adjust their > default font size, the more likely this is.) There remains no logical basis for assuming that which is set can be globally improved upon by the designer. Many moons ago, when desktop DPI both averaged and ranged low, there was an arguable case to be made for such an assumption, but that's ancient history. Now the range is wider, and the average higher, while the nominal presets have in most cases not been altered, providing a net real reduction in default sizes over the years. > > Personal computers are not made by morons, but by humans who have > > preselected defaults designed to make the majority of users happy with > > most things just as they found them, ready to use as received. To > > think that an eagle-eyed web page designer biased by her giant > > tax-deductible worktool display can impose some other size in order to > > make things better for the majority is a preposterous supposition. > I think the default styles used by popular browsers mainly aim at a mix of: > 1. Making websites look similar to how they look in other popular > browsers. > 2. Making website controls look similar to those in the desktop widgets. > They aren't designed from scratch to maximize usability by themselves or > to maintain usability when combined with publisher styles. Studies have shown that real users (as opposed to designers) prefer 12pt, with 10pt a close second, and smaller than 10pt barely registering in the preference data. On today's equipment, because DPI averages near the assumption of 96, the actual defaults are generally pretty close right out of the box to what real people want. IMO that makes it really hard to justify globally deviating from the defaults. > Maybe the original design decisions that underpinned these styles were > good ones. (I don't buy the notion that default font sizes for body text > are too big, at any rate.) It's certainly true that web designers often > make bad design decisions, but it doesn't follow that their design > decisions are invariably worse than the design decisions behind the > basic styles. Default styles represent years of collective wisdom from many, no small part of which is to provide reasonable expectations and minimal surprise. To presume they are bad at this point is just not reasonable. > These styles come as a package. As soon as web designers > start suggesting colors and typefaces, the legibility characteristics of > the browser default font size change. Generally, deviating from default typefaces & colors can serve only to reduce legibility. The problems caused by face and color deviation typically serve to compound already reduced (via sub-default size) legibility. > >> If users want to force a font size everywhere, they can and that is > >> indisputably a user choice. > > Users should not routinely need to force an override, > It would be better if browsers enforced a higher minimum font size by > default, but that might break too much existing content. Most browsers that offer a minimum default it to disabled. Minimum is a defense. Best results occur when design does not present need to defend. > > Defenses (e.g. forcing via minimum size) characteristically have > > drawbacks, which in these cases typically means overlapping or hidden > > text, and/or inappropriate line lengths, and/or horizontal scrolling. > This would come into the class of "the use of publisher styles that … > [p]revent user acceptance of publisher styles with reservations". But in > fact this problem is orthogonal to publishers or users setting or not > setting font size. > For example, if the user has a narrow viewport, and the publisher > suggests a container width in em, the user might have to scroll > horizontally to see the whole line. Narrow WRT what? I think it reasonable to assume users will maintain window sizes sufficient to support reasonably accommodating content. That is, those who need or prefer large text will maintain larger windows than those who prefer small, and narrow or wide will be with regard to how many characters fit in the available width. Horizontal scrolling should thus be needed only for exceptional mixes of window and font sizes. > Or, a publisher might attempt to translate content higher in the page > than it is in the source by relatively positioning upwards a given > number of em, not realizing that at a different default font size or > with a fallback font, the line count of prior content (and thus the > number of "em" required) changes, so that the positioned content ends up > overlapping other content. Absolute positioning just doesn't work in the context of user defenses, while "the fold" is known to be a non-absolute position. A publisher who cannot or will not remain cognizant of these, and test accordingly, is doomed to disappointment. > >> * Why should we characterize user acceptance with reservations of > >> publisher styles for the page, the web, or their entire system as a > >> "defensive" measure? > [snip] > > Do you not know that web browsers did not always have minimum size > > or zoom functions? It's true! These features were requested of UA > > suppliers by users, as defensive measures, because web site authors, > > who were given CSS with which to totally disregard visitor preferences > > (px, pt), and more power to shrink the preferences (unlimited em& % > > instead of just size=-2& size=-1), used the power of CSS to transform > > most of the web into imitation magazine pages full of hard to read > > (undersized WRT defaults) text. As long as designers insist that > > defaults are wrong by applying sub-100% sizing to body or primary > > content containers, users will need to battle (defend against) to undo > > designer imposition (offense). > Or, to use different language, browsers improved their featureset for > partnering user viewing choices with publisher suggestions. Web browsers are user agents, not publisher agents. Users shun tools that cannot meet their needs. > >> Would you describe publisher typeface and color suggestions as an > >> "offence" against user choice? If no, then why not? > [snip] > > The relatively recent trend of #333 or lighter text on a white or less > > contrasty background is no small problem, but it pales in comparison > > to the basic issue of text size. > I don't think "pales in comparison" is supported by the evidence: > Nielsen (2005, my emphasis): > "I asked readers of my newsletter to nominate the usability problems > they found the most irritating. … Bad fonts won the vote by a landslide, > getting almost twice as many votes as the #2 mistake. About two-thirds > of the voters complained about small font sizes or frozen font sizes; > /about one-third complained about low contrast between text and > background/." I guess the meaning you give to pales by comparison is different from mine. What I see is about a 2:1 relationship, twice as many complaining about size as about other problems. Size is foundational, while legibility can be reduced via poor face and/or color "suggestions". > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/designmistakes.html > > > I don't consider typeface such a big deal. There are very few > > universally installed fonts. > Doesn't stop web designers suggesting fonts with a smaller install base, > and won't stop them offering them for download. Designers almost universally do so much suggesting that users rarely see their personal preference. Any list shorter than arial, helvetica, sans-serif is rather rare, and much longer is hardly uncommon. Meanwhile according to user preference sampling, Arial & Helvetica have proven to be among the most legible of commonly available fonts. > > Sure they vary in apparent size, but generally as long as those > > selected are used at the user's selected size, reasonable legibility > > is a given. > I asked why you wouldn't "describe publisher typeface and color > suggestions as an 'offence' against user choice". I find it difficult to > follow your answer, but it seems to be that they more rarely cause > illegibility than font size suggestions? If I've got that right, this > answer isn't very satisfying. Why is an instance of suggesting font size > that does not produce illegibility for a particular user an offence > against the user's choice when an instance of suggesting a color or > typeface that does produce illegibility is not? I'm not saying face & color are irrelevant WRT legibility. What I am saying is size is foundational, and that starting on a poor foundation you just don't have much power to get good results, particularly since changing color so rarely results in better legibility, and since changing face generally has little power to globally improve legibility. > I think "user choice" is a flawed way to frame an argument against the > all-too common practice of publishers suggesting tiny font-size values > for body text. I don't. I see only three philosophical paths: 1-presume user settings, whether actively "chosen" or not, are the best basis (100%; respectful) 2-presume some arbitrary modification of user settings is better for the majority of users (some em or % other than 100%; non-respectful) 3-disregard user settings (set all sizes in px, pt, cm, etc; non-respectful) 3 has been losing ground for some time. 2 implies designer can somehow know better than the user what's best for user. 1 politely accepts and respects. > Once you start down the road of saying a given publisher > style suggestion is an offence against user choice, it's hard not to > conclude that the only legitimate role for publisher styles would be > layout hints for semantics that don't exist in (X)HTML (for example, > alignment for table columns with different data types). I don't see that as a necessary result. > Publishers and > end-users have too much investment in the web as a varied aesthetic > experience for that idea to win wide acceptance. If they could understand that they can have desired results by limiting design to contextual perspective while accommodating the given starting point, they should have no problem accepting. Except for the pothole of background image sizing, this is what em sizing offers. Unfortunately few understand, much less use or recommend it. > A better way to frame the argument IMO is to say that tiny font-size > values are too small for most people to read, so they're a stupid > publisher suggestion. http://www.dev-archive.net/articles/font-analogy.html -- No Jesus - No peace , Know Jesus - Know Peace Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************
