WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: SPAM-LOW: Increase Font Size vs. Zoom

for

From: Dawn Budge
Date: Nov 13, 2012 10:58AM

Your dev says it is impossible to do, is that with the assumption that the
page has to look pixel perfect or continue to flow in the same way when you
scale up just the text? WCAG specifies something has to be perceivable, not
identical.

There's a number of strategies you can adopt to make the page still
accessible when just text is scaled up, such as setting heights in ems or
using min-height instead of height, preferring display inline-block or
floats to position relative or absolute so that stuff doesn't overlap,
setting background colours on text where it might end up sitting over a
similarly coloured background, avoiding overflow hidden unless it is really
necessary.

Also, what happens if the content changes so that it wraps onto 2 lines?
Same problems?

----------------------------------------
From: "David Ashleydale" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2012 5:33 PM
To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: SPAM-LOW: Re: [WebAIM] Increase Font Size vs. Zoom

Jared, it sounds like from those numbers that we should at least support
IE's "Text Size - Largest", since you list it as 132%.

Do you think it would be valuable to tell our development and design teams
that among their testing tools, they should always try IE's Text Size -
Largest and ensure that the page doesn't break? That is, ensure that all
of
the text is still readable and not obscured by other page elements?

I ran this by one developer already and he said he thinks it's almost
impossible to do. He pointed to a page that has a restricted container
size
that is based on the size of the image it's next to. He said that if
someone increases the font size only, the only way for the text to be
readable is if its container also grows, but it can't grow without
wrecking
the entire page.

We can, of course, go back to the drawing board and actually plan for how
we want the pages to look and behave when someone increases the text size,
but, man, that's a lot of work.

I might put this in everyone's back pockets as something to think about
for
future pages, and to think about for the next redesign. Zooming the entire
page is probably good enough as a workaround until a redesign is done with
this in mind. I know it's annoying to have to scroll right and left (I
have
to do it on my iPhone all the time), but this would cost a lot of time and
money to fix.

Thanks for everyone's thoughts!
David

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Jared Smith < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 3:50 PM, David Ashleydale wrote:
> > Thanks, Jared. Do you happen to know what percentage IE's View - Text
> Size
> > - Largest is equivalent to?
>
> Here's what I found in some quick testing...
>
> IE9 (View... Text size):
> Larger = 115%
> Largest = 132%
>
> Firefox (using CTL + or Command + to Zoom Text Only):
> 1 increase = 110%
> 2 increases = 120%
> 3 increases = 133%
> 4 increases = 150%
> 5 increases = 170%
> 6 increases = 200%
>
> Safari:
> 1 increase = 119%
> 2 increases = 144%
> 3 increases = 175%
> 4 increases = 206%
>
> Chrome (Settings... Show advanced settings... Font size):
> Large = 125%
> Very Large = 150%
>
> You'll find that even 150% can be very difficult on some sites. A
> lower value may be more reasonable in many cases.
>
> Jared
> > > >