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Re: accessibility for low vision!

for

From: Patrick H. Lauke
Date: Feb 3, 2017 2:51AM

On 03/02/2017 09:09, Karl Brown wrote:
> I've tried to push designers into using the browser default font-size,
> which is roughly 16px (for some reason all the browsers use that). It's a
> nicely legible size in almost all the fonts I've seen use it, while 12 is
> very small in some fonts.

Note that the thread starter talked about 12 *points*, which equates to
16 pixels.
(worth noting here that units of measure such as "points", "mm", "cm"
etc in CSS don't actually relate to their physical
counterparts...setting a sitze in these units does not in fact guarantee
that things will actually render to that physical size as measure on the
screen - all those units are still anchored on the pixel unit
https://drafts.csswg.org/css-values/#absolute-lengths)

> The only time I deviate from this is for mobile
> devices which are generally held closer to the face than a desktop screen,
> so the font will "appear" to be bigger.
>
> I also suggest designers use the rem, em and percentage units when doing
> everything that needs explicit sizes (borders, padding, margin, height,
> width, etc.) so when a user scales the text, the design stays consistent
> and text doesn't start spilling from one component to another.

Also worth noting that most modern browsers now default to providing
full-page zoom, and in many cases have removed the option to just resize
text in isolation. So even using px units for font size will results in
users being able to resize everything (both text and their containers
etc) without too many problems.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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