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Increase Font Size vs. Zoom

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From: David Ashleydale
Date: Nov 8, 2012 3:30PM

Hi,

I generally try to ensure that web pages I work on are readable when
someone increases the font size, by using something like IE's View-Text
Size-Largest functionality. But now that modern browsers all let users zoom
the entire page, I'm wondering how much effort still needs to be put in to
ensuring that a page is readable when a user just increases the font size.

I talked to someone with low vision at the last CSUN that said that he
almost exclusively just increases the font size because zooming causes the
page's width to expand, thereby making him have to scroll left and right
continuously in order to read the page. It makes sense, but that's a
usability study of one. So I wanted to check with y'all and hear your
thoughts.

We would pretty much have to completely redesign most of our company's site
in order to get it to work with large fonts. HTML containers are not very
forgiving. In a lot of cases, the container stays the same size and the
text just flows out of it, either behind or on top of other text when the
font size is increased.

How important on a scale of 1 (not important) to 5 (very important) is this
issue nowadays? Is it just a nice to have because of the zooming workaround?

Looking forward to hearing your opinions.

Thanks!
David Ashleydale