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Re: Resize Text - rem with a px fallback

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From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Jun 25, 2014 8:59AM

It probably depends on what browsers you are needing to support for your site. If the site is only intended to work with IE9 and later, I don't think it would be a fail. If the site is intended to work with older browsers, then I think it would be a problem.

Tim


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Alistair Duggin
Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2014 5:27 AM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] Resize Text - rem with a px fallback

Hi,

I'm working on a responsive website and to set the size of the fonts we are using rem with a fallback in px.

This means that all modern browsers (including IE 9 and above) are able to resize the fonts (to more than 200%). However, users of Internet explorer 6, 7 and 8 will not be able to resize the fonts.

I'm wondering if text not being resizable in some legacy browsers would result in a WCAG 2 fail. Changing the fallback from px to em will involve a considerable amount of development time to fix due to the font size compounding issues with em - and will also result in a messy and harder to maintain codebase. Is using rem with a px fallback an acceptable/accessible implementation?

Here's an article with information about the approach we have taken:
http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/font-size-with-rem

This is the website I work on:
https://www.moneyadviceservice.org.uk/en?roptin=1

cheers,
Alistair Duggin