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Re: Increase Font Size vs. Zoom

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Nov 8, 2012 3:43PM

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 3:30 PM, David Ashleydale wrote:
> 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 wouldn't overly worry about supporting very large text. Users that
require very large text should be using zoom or a screen magnifier.
But some some users with mild low vision need slightly enlarged text
and may increase just the text size in their browser, so it's a good
idea to support their needs.

We generally recommend supporting zoom to 200% and text sizing to
around 150%. The zoom requirement meets the WCAG 2.0 requirements,
though this is pretty much impossible to fail for HTML content. The
150% text sizing requirement adequately meets the needs of users that
may scale just text within a page.

> We would pretty much have to completely redesign most of our company's site
> in order to get it to work with large fonts.

Some of our clients have found that conducting entire site overhauls
to support WCAG's 200% text sizing requirement would cost more than
all other compliance requirements (captioning, etc.) put together.
This is partially why we recommend a more reasonable ~150%.

Jared Smith
WebAIM.org