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RE: Font Resizers (WAS RE: back to top)

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From: Patrick Lauke
Date: Jan 11, 2006 8:34AM


> Cheryl D Wise

> Because what is big enough varies?

1em, and leave it up to the user's particular OS/browser settings.

> Frankly, I find browsing
> on my father's
> computer painful the fonts are so large.

But is that *all* the fonts (including the OS, menus, etc) or just the size he has set for viewing web sites?

> yet when working on my computer

So, as mentioned before, it's a user settings issue. Your father's machine is set up for his needs, your machine is set up for yours. But it goes beyond mere web pages and to the entirety of the GUI, presumably?

> I tend to bump up the text size on close to half the sites I visit.

Because half the sites you visit have set their text size below your preferred (set) size (i.e. less than 1em).

> No one size fits all.

Provided that users set their environment to be right for them, yes...one size (filtered through the user preferences) *does* fit all. But again, not all users can make changes to the environment they're forced to use (as Penny's case demonstrates...locked down open access machines and machines shared by many users, but with a single username/password?) ... or, which brings us back to the crux of the argument, most users don't know how to set up their environment. In an ideal world, all our sites' body copy would be set to 1em, and people who find that too big would just set their environment to default to a smaller size *for them*, rather than getting web designers to make *their* site 0.7em or whatever). Also, in this fictitious world, the OS/browser would be a snap to adapt to different user needs (associated with a preferences/capabilities profile that users would be carrying around with them on a USB drive, so that wherever they were they'd just plug it in and have the current machine adapt to their settings). Oops...sorry, ended up in utopia there for a second...

P
________________________________
Patrick H. Lauke
Web Editor / University of Salford
http://www.salford.ac.uk
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Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
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