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Re: accessibility for low vision!

for

From: Oscar DeLong
Date: Feb 3, 2017 6:13AM

I actually just came across a website that had the container set to a specified width and when it went full screen the text was tiny and the whole thing was forced to the side of the screen. I had to open it in its own window, shrink the window to the size of the container, and zoom in on that window to get the text readable for me. I would guess the code was set to a rigid value and I am not familiar with all the ways to override those so I had to work around it, but at least I knew how. Not everyone does. If we make the code more flexible it helps. Others have provided suggestions of how to do that but I usually don't specify a specific size and let the default take over. Then I would use the values such as 'small,- 'medium,- or 'large,- or to specify size. Also, 'larger- or 'smaller- or use % to change the size. That way the user controls more of the sizing.

Oscar

From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > on behalf of "Patrick H. Lauke" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Reply-To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Date: Friday, February 3, 2017 at 4:51 AM
To: " <EMAIL REMOVED> " < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] accessibility for low vision!

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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