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Re: Increase Font Size vs. Zoom

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From: Bim Egan
Date: Nov 9, 2012 8:00AM

Hi David,

Text resizing is still important as the person you spoke to said, Zoom in IE
makes horizontal scrolling necessary. The problem is that the horizontal
slider is very small, so if you need larger text, finding and using the
scroll bar is almost impossible.

I like Jared's thresholds, and agree that anyone whose needs exceed these
will have had to invest in zooming software, (web pages aren't the only part
of their computer that they'll need enlarged).

If it comes down to numbers affected, please don't forget that the
baby-boomers are all reaching or have reached an age where larger text may
be more comfortable to read. That's a big wealthy target market.


HTH,

Bim



----- Original Message -----
From: "David Ashleydale" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Thursday, November 08, 2012 10:30 PM
Subject: [WebAIM] Increase Font Size vs. Zoom


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