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Nicole -> Increasing Text-Size (11/18/2005 4:31:14)
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I guess I'm really not posing any questions, nor am I pointing out anything great, but surely the ability for text to be increased is the most basic of accessibility features, possibly alongside alt attribures for images.
I've been reviewing a lot of sites for a report recently and have noticed that "mostly" text can be increased. I think this is a pretty common finding as most sites generally don't go to the trouble of restricting the ability of viewers to resize text on purpose. Whether it remains readable when its resized is another thing entirely though.
One thing I've realised though, is that while text-size may be increased on many sites, those of them that use drop down menus either don't allow text-resizing within those menus, or if they do, the drop-down menu often becomes unreadable at the first increase in text-size.
Now I often increase text-size to unreasonable extremes when trying to prove to myself that a site is poorly designed, and about a year ago I launched into a 700 page site redesign for a client, a site i'm not at all happy with now and intend to go in and correct the obvious errors as soon as I can, now that I know so much more about web design and accessibility. But just now I decided to resize the text to extremes on this site.
The site uses the much maligned (in my opinion) Webstyle 4 drop-down menus, and to my surprise that menu, even at 800 x 600 screen resolution held it's proportion and readability upon resizing text not once, not twice, but three times in Firefox on my monitor, something I truly didn't expect.
So, I'm interested if others test text resizing when designing a site, at what level of increasing text-size you consider enough to be enough, surely people won't need to increase the text size that much, they'd be using 800 x 600 anyway, and those that use or have used accessible drop-down menus, to what level of increasing text-size do they hold their shape?
Nicole
p.s. that menu on that site was created with no knowledge of accessibility issues, the fact that it may work on my monitor after so much text-size increasing was a fluke.
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